09.22.10
Posted in News Roundup at 7:14 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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According to Bollingh’s experience, users have a hard time switching to a Linux desktop: “They are used to a certain way of working, and it is really hard to get them to change their habits.”
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Fog Computing
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So, today, Amazon is increasingly competing with the open-source vendors who sell support for a variety of open-source components of its Amazon Web Services offering. In the future, I expect we’ll see Amazon building out its AWS product portfolio in ways that make just about everyone in the traditional software market uncomfortable. Very uncomfortable.
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The problem occurs when everyone tries to use their compute resources fully with an overbooked provider, just like everyone trying to get their money out of a bank. The provider is unable to meet its obligations and partially collapses. The likely effect will be compute units being vastly below their specification or some units which have been sold are thrown off the service to make up for the shortfall (i.e. customers are bumped).
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Ballnux
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Samsung’s much hyped Galaxy Tab hasn’t even been released yet and people are already speculating on the future of the device. Many are reporting that the next update for the current Tab or the next model will be sporting Chrome OS instead of Android 2.2. It all depends on what Google has in store for Android 3.0 (Gingerbread) if it’s more tablet friendly then it would be the next update. However, if it is still not built with a tablet in mind, like Google has stated was the case for 2.2, then Samsung may consider Chrome OS.
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Amazon UK’s updated their listing for the Samsung Galaxy Tab to include a lower price and a hard date. According to their new listing, the device will definitely be released November 1st and will be offered for £599. That’s down from £799 we’ve all seen before. It’s still quite the investment, but at least it’ll be a bit easier to swallow for those of you who were going to be picking this one up anyway. This will be the version with both WiFi and HSDPA support for connectivity.
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Kernel Space
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Greg Kroah-Hartman has released three stable kernel updates: 2.6.27.54, 2.6.32.22 and 2.6.35.5.
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2.6.36 offers VFS optimisations, has returned to integrating Ext3 file systems with “data=ordered” by default and can store data from shared Windows or Samba disks in local cache to improve performance. Numerous new and improved drivers enhance the kernel’s storage and network hardware support.
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The Linux 2.6.36-rc5 kernel is now available after Linus Torvalds has got back on track with the weekly release candidates after being at LinuxCon in Brazil. Of course, this later release candidate just targets correcting bugs and other issues, including a fix for a 14 year old kernel bug.
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Graphics Stack
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Applications
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Radio Tray is an online radio streaming player that runs on a Linux system tray. Its goal is to have the minimum interface possible, making it very straightforward to use.
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Development No, it’s isn’t an Ubuntu flavour for computer-aided drafting. It’s a fork of a well-known community edition of QCAD. And thus the month of CAD on Linux continues 
It’s hardly news that open source version of QCad long ceased to update, with proprietary version not being financially successful. The CADuntu project is a little over a month old, and the name of the project was picked just for fun and has nothing to do with Ubuntu per se.
The point of this project is in updatiing source code to use QT4, much newer version of QT — a crossplatform development kit, and to improve the actual application.
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When it comes to music players, Linux evolved heavily during the last three or four years, and new players are announced on a regular basis. I remember that in 2006, when I was starting up with Linux, there were only a few applications to choose from, like Amarok, Rhythmbox, Listen or XMMS, and a few more less popular and not so full-featured. But times have changed and now the Linux platform benefits from players of all kinds: there are replacements for XMMS for both GNOME and KDE (Audacious and Qmmp), collection-oriented players like Amarok, Banshee, Exaile or Rhythmbox. There are less-known players like Quod Libet, Guayadeque or Jajuk, or the client-server oriented ones like MPD. And the ones I just listed are only the ones which came to my mind at the moment. Some would say having so many players for a single task is a bad thing, but I say it’s not. Having enough options to choose from is a great advantage. If you don’t like one style, try the next player, if you don’t like its approach either, try the next one, and so on.
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I always do my presentations in PDF because it’s a common format. Sometimes however I want to add in a slide or remove a slide when I find out I messed something up but don’t have time to go edit the presentation and re export it.
For Maverick’s Featured Apps we now have PDFMod, for quick an easy manipulation of PDFs.
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Instructionals/Technical
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We’ve added another installment to our free training series on The Linux Foundation’s Training site: An Introduction to Git, the version control system built by Linus Torvalds. Kernel maintainer and Linux Foundation board member James Bottomley does a great job describing the history of Git and how the kernel community now uses it for all kernel development. He also includes a demo.
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Life’s no beach for users of ATI Radeon video (especially my Mobility Radeon HD 4200 chip) in Linux these days, with kernel modesetting harshing my proverbial mellow and making things blurry and out of sync.fedora-logo.png
Sometimes turning off kernel modesetting in the bootline (radeon.modeset=0 or nomodeset) helps. Sometimes not.
And I’m a new Fedora users, not exactly well-versed in the ways of Yum and PackageKit.
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Wine
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It’s a pity Luca Barbieri or any Mesa / Gallium3D developers are not at Oktoberfest as they are deserving of more than a few Maß of Augustiner. In fact, today a new Gallium3D state tracker was pushed into Mesa and it’s perhaps the most interesting state tracker for this open-source graphics driver architecture yet. It’s a state tracker that exposes Microsoft’s DirectX 10/11 API on Linux! And it’s already working and can be hooked into Wine!
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Games
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During the summer we were giving away free beta keys for Heroes of Newerth, a game developed by S2 Games that had a native Linux client. During that time we gave away more than 1,000 keys, but since then the retail version of the game was launched to much excitement for both Linux and Windows gamers. This week we learned from S2 Games about how they view their Linux port.
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Desktop Environments
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Qt/K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Last week in Toulouse I learned just how much interest Intel has in Wayland and the active role they are playing in its development. Wayland and related work to bring it up is not limited to just Kristian Høgsberg, who switched from being a Red Hat employee to Intel during Wayland’s development, but Jesse Barnes and other Intel OSTC X developers are also contributing to different areas. Jesse Barnes has been working on the Qt support within Wayland and that’s hit a new milestone.
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After many months of designing, coding, reviewing, testing and documenting, Qt 4.7.0 is finally ready for the big time!
Although it’s a little more than nine months since Qt’s last feature release (4.6.0 on December 1st, 2009), the seeds of some of the new stuff in 4.7 were sown much earlier. Indeed, many of the ideas behind the biggest new feature in Qt 4.7.0, QtQuick, were born more than two years ago, not long after Qt 4.4 was released. We hope you’ll benefit from the effort and care that went into bringing the implementation of those ideas to maturity.
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GNOME Desktop
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One of the main objective of the GNOME.Asia Committee, and the summits we’ve organized every year since 2008, has been to build a stronger GNOME community in Asia. Thanks to the COSCUP / GNOME.Asia 2010 event in Taiwan this year, we’ve moved a step closer to our goals and recruited five more members from various Asian countries to join our Committee.
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For those looking for OS perfect for higher education environment, UberStudent – a Ubuntu-based Linux distro should be the first choice. It has Ubuntu-like functions but has been modified for Students and contains student-friendly tools helping in research and writing, studying and self-management.
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Security
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It actually means that with the availability of source code and the resulting increase in the chances for more and more people to check out the source code, bugs can be easily identified and quashed. The very availability of source code ensures that the bugs are noticed very fast and it gets patched almost immediately. However, proprietary vendors and people whose thinking are fine tuned by proprietary mindset, get easily excited by such spotting of bugs and resort to FUD.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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Fedora 14 Beta RC3 is now available [1]. Please refer to the following pages for download links and testing instructions.
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Debian Family
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This is indeed the 4th time we had the privilege of participating in the Google Summer of Code and each year has been a little different.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Are you an application developer who would like to see your application appear in the Ubuntu Software Center and available by millions of Ubuntu users? Today we are announcing a new process we are trialing which is easier and more accessible for application authors to get their apps in Ubuntu.
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Ubuntu has this wicked content delivery system built into the operating system, something that Apple and Microsoft don’t have on their desktops. It’s obvious that having a lot of fresh applications constantly landing is a boon for platforms, and this would be the perfect area for Ubuntu to whip out a feature that its competitors lack. So what do Canonical do? Make it as hard as possible for developers to get content into the system, of course.
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While browsing Ubuntu Software Center, have you ever wondered:
* how it displays screenshots?
* who uploads the screenshots?
* why some of the screenshots are totally outdated?
Ubuntu Software Center pulls these screenshots from screenshots.debian.net. Anyone can upload screenshots to this site.
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In my personal opinion, it would be better for developers to implement their free software in the Universe repository. Universe has a good and working Stable Release Update policy and process. There are problems with actually getting new packages in to Universe because the package review system, called REVU often doesn’t have enough people paying attention to it and reviewing packages. However, it’s still possible to get packages into Universe without much trouble.
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In yet another attempt at making it big with Ubuntu Software Center, Canonical announces new Ubuntu application review process. Canonical claims that the new process will make it easier and more accessible for application authors to get their apps in Ubuntu.
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At the moment, Ubuntu is venturing into unknown ground. Never before has an open source operating system attempted to win over the hearts of the mainstream. In fact, with the exception of a few medium sized projects such as Firefox, Moodle, GIMP, Drupal, WordPress et. al., we haven’t really tested how the mainstream would react to open source projects as large as Ubuntu.
As we grow, there will be more people contributing, more people adding comments to bug reports, more people getting annoyed at changes and voicing their opinion. In proprietary software, companies generally develop behind closed doors and then release a product. Consumers either like it or they don’t – in open source, they can have a say during the development of a product.
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Although I am not a fan of copying an entire OS look (even though Ubuntu does some of it by default), I’m sure some of you want to get the entire Mac OSX look in Ubuntu. For that, you can use a script called Macbuntu which is very easy to use and can make your Ubuntu desktop look like Mac OSX in seconds.
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In This Issue
* Welcome New Ubuntu Members
* Welcome New Ubuntu Developers
* Ubuntu Open Week, request for instructors
* Ubuntu App Developer Week
* Archive frozen for preparation of Ubuntu 10.10
* Fixing Community Processes
* Reflections on Ubuntu, Canonical and the march to free software adoption
* Alternative UDS Accomodation
* Ubuntu Cowntdown 10.10
* Ubuntu Stats
* LoCo News
* Launchpad News
* Ubuntu Forums News
* My role in Ubuntu
* Helping improve Ruby on Debian and Ubuntu
* Ubuntu Server Guide Retrospective
* This week in design – 17 September 2010
* In The Press
* In The Blogosphere
* Canonical announces provisional Ubuntu Developer Summit tracks
* A Canonical Controversy
* Why Red Hat should fear Amazon Linux
* Bazaar team: want to work on Bazaar?
* Canonical ISD: Ubuntu Pay is open for translations
* Ubuntu Hardware Summit in Taipei 11 days away
* Featured Podcasts
* Weekly Ubuntu Development Team Meetings
* Upcoming Meetings and Events
* Updates and Security
* UWN Sneak Peek
* And much much more
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Flavours and Variants
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In this Screencast I show you how to create a photo collage easily with shape collage.
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I haven’t been involved with Edubuntu development for a year now. While I miss the work and especially the great people, I’ve come to see that the project is in great hands (better than mine for sure). Edubuntu made some really important strides in 10.04 with the enhancements made to the DVD installer and live system. One of the neat things that has happened a little more recently was a complete revamping of the edubuntu.org website. The work was done by Edubuntu community members Jonathan Carter and Stéphane Graber.
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Phones
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Android
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That security hole that no one got fidgety over has been patched up by Adobe today. You can find the now-should-be-more-secure version in the Android market as version 10.1.95.1. There’s really no changelog to be had as this is only a quick fix for that critical flaw. Some other bit of news might have squeaked out of Adobe’s camp, however, and it concerns AIR for Android. According to a tip by one of AC’s forum members, Adobe AIR will be out October 8th in the Android market for users to download.
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Orange UK has outed its latest Android smartphone, the somewhat bizarrely named San Francisco, and they’re targeting the budget-minded masses this time. The Orange San Francisco will cost £99 on the carrier’s “Dolphin” pay-as-you-go plan, which gets you a 3.2-megapixel camera, capacitive touchscreen and Android 2.1 Eclair.
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Tablets
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Back in July I wrote about an Android tablet computer that I picked up on Amazon for £85. This is a really interesting device and seemed to do quite a lot. A couple of things really let it down though, its speed and the fact that you could not use Android Market with it, making obtaining most Android applications quite difficult. Fortunately a group of enthusiasts have formed a community around this device, the Eken M001, and similar devices over at Slatedroid.com. A couple of people there have put together a new firmware image which is still in beta but I’ve been trying it out and I am impressed so far! The tablet now has a working Market and feels much more responsive.
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The 802.1X authentication protocol plays a major role in Wi-Fi security of business networks. It enables the Enterprise flavor of Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA and WPA2) encryption for wireless networks, and can also provide authentication on the wired side. Here are six open source projects that deal with 802.1X authentication…
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Events
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Debian Ubuntu Community Conference – Italy
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Web Browsers
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SaaS
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Last week, a team of Yahoo researchers creating a long version of pi set a new record in the field of mathematics using the Yahoo cloud. According to Engadget’s report, “The team, led by Nicholas Sze of Yahoo!, used the company’s Hadoop cloud computing tech to break the previous record by more than double, creating the longest Pi yet.”
The researchers leveraged Hadoop for this project. The widely distributed nature of Hadoop brought clear advantages by taking a divide-and-conquer approach. It cut up the problem into smaller pieces, then set different parts of the computer to work on different sections of the project.
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Databases
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Facebook has open sourced a new MySQL utility that lets the social networking colossus update its database indexes and juice query times without staging the changes on test servers. With the tool – known as Online Schema Change for MySQL, or OSC – it can update indexes on live servers.
In the past, according Facebook MySQL guru Mark Callaghan, the company needed a good six months to roll index updates across its sea of MySQL servers. Now, it needs no more than a few days. “This lets us make schema changes much, much faster,” Callaghan tells The Register. “And the benefit from the changes is that database queries will be faster.”
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Oracle
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While Java founder James Gosling has campaigned for Oracle to place Java under the jurisdiction of an independent foundation, Oracle is declining to comment at all on the notion.
Asked about Gosling’s efforts during a press question-and-answer session at the Oracle OpenWorld conference Tuesday in San Francisco, Oracle’s Thomas Kurian, executive vice president of product development, simply declined to comment.
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CMS
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For pre-alpha software Diaspora is surprisingly functional and feature-rich.
At the moment Diaspora allows adding and organising friends into what it calls “aspects,” posting and receiving messages and uploading photos.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Perhaps one of the most important political interventions made by hackers is through the production of Free and Open Source Software (such as the web browser Firefox and the GNU/Linux Operating System). We start with the intellectual progenitor of Free Software, uber-hacker Richard Stallman. We read the “GNU Manifesto” published in 1985 where he proposes his philosophical and practical vision for Free Software. To get students up to speed about the fraught three hundred year history of intellectual property law, we read Carla Hesse’s magnificent “The Rise of Intellectual Property, 700 B.C – A.D. 2000: an Idea in Balance” — a gem for its ability to convey so much in such economical terms. Finally, we rely heavily on Chris Kelty’s excellent account: Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software.
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Project Releases
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The Totem Arte.tv plugin project is still alive. After Arte changed their video streaming platform we had to switch from WMV to RTMP streams. RTMP support is finally available in the latest (version 0.10.20) gstreamer-plugins-bad release. Nicolas Delvaux added many additional features like GNOME proxy support and asynchronous thumbnail downloading.
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Openness/Sharing
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7. Q: What advice would you give companies who want to apply Wikipedia’s cultural principles when working within communities both inside and outside of company walls?
A: I conclude the book by writing I don’t believe there is any such thing as “wiki pixie dust.” Wikis do permit asynchronous, incremental, and non-brittle contributions (i.e., it is easy to revert a mistake), but using them is not a guarantee of success. Similarly, there is much to learn from Wikipedia’s collaborative culture, but one shouldn’t approach this as a simple cultural graft or transplantation. The idea of Neutral Point of View doesn’t necessarily make sense for businesses, or even other wikis. Ward Cunningham’s original wiki was not neutral: it advocated for software patterns. However, I do think that there is a general lesson: we should look for ways to facilitate fast and flexible collaboration that is forgiving with respect to what the technology enables and in our attitudes towards our peers. For example, we might conceive of process as being less about reactive strictures and more as a sharing of best practices among collaborators.
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At some point in the future, many more everyday objects will have tiny embedded chips that can communicate with networks. But just as we’re debating net neutrality and the value of the open web vs closed client applications, we will have to decide who will control the internet of things, too.
Lines are already beginning to be drawn. Ashlee Vance, writing for the New York Times’ Bits blog, profiles chipmaker ARM’s efforts to bring the internet of things to the masses with its mbed project.
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Open Data
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Chiao said HarassMap offers victims “a practical way of responding, something to fight back with; as someone who has experienced sexual harassment personally on the streets of Cairo, I know that the most frustrating part of it was feeling like there was nothing I could do.”
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The problem is, this isn’t actually open data. As I argue in the three laws of open data (and the good folks at Berkman seem to share my sense of humour) crime data for cities that contract with Public Engines Inc isn’t open. You can look at the data, but you can’t touch it. Worst still… don’t even think about playing with it (unless you are doing so ON crimereports.com website, in a way that their license lets you – its all quite constraining stuff).
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Open Access/Content
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MIT OpenCourseWare and OpenStudy are are teaming up to help OCW users connect and study together. MIT has been publishing the core academic materials—including syllabi, lecture notes, assignments and exams—from the Institute’s courses since 2002, but since inception, the site has been a static presentation of MIT materials with no opportunity to interact with the MIT community or other users of the site.
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Open Hardware
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My name is Cody and I’m a hardware hacker. It started at the age of five, taking apart a toy computer to figure out how it worked. I live for that thrill of discovery and rush of power that I feel when I figure out what makes something tick, then figure out how to bend it to my will. This has led to me hacking everything from game consoles to phones.
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Standards/Consortia
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Today the European Parliament plenary adopted a report on completing the internal market for e-commerce prepared by Spanish rapporteur Pablo Arias Echeverría (EPP). The reports highlights the importance of an open document exchange format for electronic business interoperation and calls on the European Commission to take concrete steps to support its emergence and spread.
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An Internet standards group has approved an electronic crimes reporting format, which may eventually give security researchers a cohesive, broad set of data to gauge online crime.
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If you’re read this far, you’re probably sold on the value of SCAP. There are a few ways to get involved, and move this standard forward.
First, check out NIST’s SCAP website. There’s a lot of great content there, and there are a bunch of mailing lists you can join.
Next, the OpenSCAP project would welcome your help. It’s a low-level library that handles some of the rude mechanics of the SCAP protocol. There’s a wonderland of opportunity for folks who want to create a GUI, a web interface, or otherwise build on the excellent work that’s already been done. The secstate project is a good place to start.
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Near the southeastern edge of Cambridge, where this idyllic university town gives way to fields of green, sits the headquarters of ARM Holdings. Neither the modest three-building campus nor its surroundings evoke notions of a thriving hotbed of computing.
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“Our customers sell about 4 billion chips a year,” said Warren East, the chief executive of ARM, during a recent interview.
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Last year, I wrote about some issues I had with the way Scribd tried to avoid liability by suggesting that public domain documents couldn’t be hosted on the site or that fair use was not allowed. To the company’s credit, it responded quickly and fixed the situation, but soon after that I switched to (mostly) using Docstoc to host documents. Doctstoc has its own problems as well, but for the most part has worked well for me. Still, in my experience Scribd is still quite popular among folks — especially for uploading and hosting legal documents. Apparently, the company recently made some quiet changes and it’s seriously pissed off law professor Eric Goldman, who has relied on the site for quite some time.
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“When I departed the bus, he asked if I took his picture while he was driving,” the passenger who recorded the video told local news channel KGW.com. “I said I had, and he responded that I was not allowed to take his photo while he was driving.”
A lawyer for the bus driver told KGW that although he had the device on the dashboard, he “would not be reading such a thing while engaged in traffic”.
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Science
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The European Commission today helped to increase the internet capacity available to researchers in the Central Asia region (Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan). With the Commission’s €5 million contribution to the Central Asia Research and Education Network (CAREN), the ancient Silk Road has been upgraded to a 21st century high-speed internet highway for research and education. Researchers, academics and students in the region now have access to high-capacity internet connections, offering them unrivalled opportunities to play a major role on the international research scene. With Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan also candidate countries to join the network, CAREN will link over half a million users at more than 500 universities and research centres
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Workers building a substation in California have discovered 1,500 bone fragments from about 1.4 million years ago.
The fossil haul includes remains from an ancestor of the sabre-toothed tiger, large ground sloths, deer, horses, camels and numerous small rodents.
Plant matter found at the site in the arid San Timoteo Canyon, 85 miles (137km) south-east of Los Angeles, showed it was once much greener.
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Security/Aggression
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Tell a friend. Your less tech-savvy friends need to understand what spam is (and is not) and how to deal with it, much the way they deal with blood-sucking telemarketers drinking up their cellular minutes. They need to deal with it themselves, not depend upon you, because their actions can help starve or feed a spammer.
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The original discovery of the weakness, known as a “cross-site scripting” (XSS) hack, seems to have been made by a Japanese developer called Masato Kinugawa. He says that he reported an XSS vulnerability to Twitter on August 14 – and then discovered that the “new” Twitter, launched on Tuesday 14 September, had the same problem.
At about 10am BST (the afternoon in Japan, where he is based) he set up a Twitter account called “Rainbow Twtr”, which showed how the XSS weakness could be used to make tweets turn into different colours.
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According to his lawyer, Trever denied copying, printing or altering any medical records. He is due to be sentenced next month.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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And it’s worth remembering that, when the Montreal Protocol (the international agreement that phased out ozone-depleting chemicals) was being debated, conservative extremists and industry spokespeople in the U.S. and U.K. said first that there was no need for it, then that it could never work with so many nations involved, and finally that it would destroy the economy if ratified. You might note that these are the same arguments made against climate action in these nations.
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Forty years after the passage of the Clean Air Act, it is extraordinary to look at the numbers.
Numbers like 200,000 — which is the count of premature deaths the Clean Air Act prevented in its first 20 years. Over the same period, the Act prevented 672,000 cases of chronic bronchitis and 21,000 cases of heart disease. It avoided 843,000 asthma attacks and 18 million child respiratory illnesses.
1.7 million is the number of tons of toxic emissions removed from our air every year since 1990. In the last two decades, emissions of six common pollutants dropped 41 percent. Lead in our air is down by 92 percent since 1980.
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The world’s greatest migration spectacle – the annual charge of nearly 2 million wildebeest, zebra and other mammals across the Serengeti national park in east Africa – is under threat from plans to build a road across their route.
Twenty-seven conservation experts from around the world have signed an article in the journal Nature condemning the plan, adding to growing international concern that includes thousands of signatures on petitions opposing the Tanzanian government project.
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Europe’s biofuels policy could cause unwanted side-effects equal to as much as 1.5 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases – roughly the annual emissions of Russia or India, official reports warn.
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The point I try to make in the essay is that the financial system requires economic growth, but oil supply seems to be flat, or even declining in the not too distant future. Because of the many benefits oil provides, this loss can be expected to constrain economic growth. If the economic system cannot grow, there are likely to be widespread debt defaults and other problems similar to the 2008 crisis. These problems can be expected to affect all types of financial institutions, including insurance companies.
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Finance
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In a letter to President Barack Obama seven months ago, 10 Republican senators led by Utah’s Orrin Hatch urged him to use tax relief to bolster the U.S. economy and create jobs.
Top on their list: extend and improve a research and development tax credit for businesses. “We urge you to help us enact a strong research incentive to keep us first in the world,” the senators wrote.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Whoops. Turns out Netflix isn’t actually cool with libraries using the service and doesn’t want early adopting librarians to be encouraging others to do so. Netflix doesn’t offer institutional subscriptions and expects its services to be limited to personal consumption.
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Senator Patrick Leahy yesterday introduced the “Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act” (COICA). This flawed bill would allow the Attorney General and the Department of Justice to break the Internet one domain at a time — by requiring domain registrars/registries, ISPs, DNS providers, and others to block Internet users from reaching certain websites. The bill would also create two Internet blacklists. The first is a list of all the websites hit with a censorship court order from the Attorney General. The second, more worrying, blacklist is a list of domain names that the Department of Justice determines — without judicial review — are “dedicated to infringing activities.” The bill only requires blocking for domains in the first list, but strongly suggests that domains on the second list should be blocked as well by providing legal immunity for Internet intermediaries and DNS operators who decide to block domains on the second blacklist as well. (It’s easy to predict that there will be tremendous pressure for Internet intermediaries of all stripes to block these “deemed infringing” sites on the second blacklist.)
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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The Globe story makes an additional point of pointing a finger at WindMobile, the Egyptian financed cell phone service provider for not being Canadian enough.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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This week the controversial French three-strikes anti-piracy law Hadopi went live. Copyright holders are currently in the process of sending out tens of thousands of IP-addresses of alleged infringers to Internet service providers, and this will increase to over a million in a few weeks. The ISPs have to hand over the identities of the associated accounts to the authorities within a week, or face a fine of 1500 euros per unidentified IP-address.
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Copyrights
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Government 2.0 Taskforce member Bryan Fitzgerald today credited the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) for setting the stage for an open government.
In an overcrowded room at the World Computer Congress in Brisbane, Fitzgerald described Australian efforts to license public sector data under the Creative Commons license.
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A group of senators want to hand the U.S. Department of Justice the power to shut down Web sites dedicated to the illegal sharing online of film, music, software, and other intellectual property.
“The Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act will give the Department of Justice an expedited process for cracking down on these rogue Web sites regardless of whether the Web site’s owner is located inside or outside of the United States,” according to a statement from Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and committee member Sen. Orin Hatch (R-Utah).
Under the proposed legislation, the Justice Department would file a civil action against accused pirate domain names. If the domain name resides in the U.S., the attorney general could then request that the court issue an order finding that the domain name in question is dedicated to infringing activities. The Justice Department would have the authority to serve the accused site’s U.S.-based registrar with an order to shut down the site.
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But there’s worse: the US wants to arrogate these powers to itself even if the Web sites are outside its territory. Since much of the Internet’s infrastructure is run from the US, that’s a real threat. It’s also the strongest argument so far why we need to decentralise the Internet further, and remove it from the influence of any one country – including the US.
There’s another important aspect, too. One of the constant refrains during the ACTA negotiations is that the latter won’t force the US, say, to introduce new laws. It looks like that will be true – because the US is introducing them anyway. But make no mistake, this kind of censorship lies at the hart of ACTA.
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Receivers of these letters who have claimed innocence and subsequently had the matter dropped may want to look towards a civil case themselves. Receiving a letter like this can be extremely upsetting for some. Unlike the Police force who by way of their job have the powers in law to arrest/interview people under suspicion, that is not the case for ACS:Law. They are a business which is effectively in my view, interviewing you without caution (if you respond to these letters) and even worse than that you are then signing up to an agreement for future conduct which you may not have control over. The letters state you should seek legal advice, but how many people would look at that as an extra expense if they are already worried about a possible court case.
They are an admittion of guilt and from reports many people have signed them out of fear of going through and expensive court case, not out of guilt.
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After all-out assaults on the web presences of the MPAA, RIAA and later the BPI, last night a new company was targeted in a new 4chan DDoS attack. Anti-piracy lawyers ACS:Law, one of the most despised and complained about law firms in Britain, had their website taken offline last night and it remains down “Account Suspended” this morning. TorrentFreak has spoken to one of the key figures in Operation Payback for the lowdown.
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To celebrate the great collection of Creative Commons tracks on SoundCloud, we’re holding a remix contest… CC style! So in the spirit of “some rights reserved”, upload your best CC samples and loops and then get remixing them into brand new pieces.
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The US Supreme Court is weighing in on the first RIAA file sharing case to reach its docket, requesting that the music labels’ litigation arm respond to a case testing the so-called “innocent infringer” defense to copyright infringement.
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Some time back, I planned to post a short review of Bobbi Kwall’s recent book, The Soul of Creativity. The book summarizes a lot of recent thinking (including her own) about the law of moral rights and copyright and offers a new framework for adapting US copyright to international moral rights norms. But Jacqui Lipton beat me to it, and I’ve had to wait for an opportunity to post something distinctive about the book — and about what bothered me about it, despite its abundant strengths.
The opportunity recently presented itself: a pair of outstanding recent papers by Chris Sprigman (University of Virginia) and Chris Buccafusco (Chicago-Kent). One is “Valuing Intellectual Property” ; the other is “The Creativity Effect.” Both are studies in experimental economics. The question that the authors explore, via cleverly designed games, is how “creators” identify and value the “works” that they create. In different respects, both papers suggest that “creators” tend to value their “creations” more than purchasers or third parties do. That finding has important implications for the design of an IP rights system, at least if that design is premised on creating conditions for efficient transactions in IP rights.
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There are two or more threads at the Google Book Search Help forum on the topic of making more books “full view” accessible.
Full View is only available for books that are “out of copyright, or if the publisher or author has asked to make the book fully viewable.” The Full View allows you to view any page from the book, and if the book is in the public domain, you can download, save and print a PDF version to read at your own pace.
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Following a lengthy public consultation, a consortium of academics, educators, and musical and digital cultural organizations, known as the Network for Copyright Law Reform in Brazil, recently put forward a list of proposals on domestic copyright reform in Brazil. The most exciting of the 15 contributions proposed to “make sharing legal” (“Compartilhamento legal!”) by collecting a small levy from all Internet subscribers in exchange for legalizing noncommercial file-sharing.
The global access-to-knowledge movement has often looked to Brazil as an ally in intellectual property reform. Back in 2004, Brazil launched one of the first country-specific Creative Commons licenses. That launch received the high-level endorsement of the then Culture Minister, Gilberto Gil, a man who since his appointment in 2003 has successfully married the Brazilian national ideal of “cultural cannibalism” (which he himself embodies as a forerunner of the Tropicalia sound), with the “remix” message of American intellectual property reformers like Lawrence Lessig.
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ACTA
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Submissions from 2010 2010
ACTA: Risks of Intermediary Liability for Access to Medicines, Brook K. Baker
WIPO and the ACTA Threat, Sara Bannerman
ACTA and the Specter of Graduated Response, Annemarie Bridy
Flouting the Elmo Necessity and Denying the Local Roots of Interpretation: “Anthropology’s” Quarrel with ACTA and Authoritarian IP Regimes, Alexander S. Dent
Public Interest Representation in Global IP Policy Institutions, Jeremy Malcolm
ACTA and Public Health, Peter Maybarduk
ACTA, Fool: Explaining the Irrational Support for a New Institution, Gabriel Michael
Navigating the ACTA Shoals to a Future Safe Harbor: Library and Hotspot Internet Access Liability in a Post-ACTA Universe, Michael R. Morris
Collateral Damage: The Impact of ACTA and the Enforcement Agenda on the World’s Poorest People, Andrew Rens
Welfare Implications of Intellectual Property Enforcement Measures, Xavier Seuba, Joan Rovira, and Sophie Bloemen
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I have written a lot about ACTA mostly in my other blogs. But this little film distills it’s into an easily digestible morsel which beautifully explains what the fuss is all about.
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It is hard to conclude other than that the negotiators of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, with the Obama Administration in the lead, do not want meaningful civil society input into the negotiation of the agreement.
The latest evidence broke late yesterday afternoon when the USTR announced that the Tokyo round of ACTA negotiations is starting this Thursday September 23, not on September 27 as most had thought. This morning, the Japanese Embassy stated in a personal phone call to me (I don’t know who else they are calling) that there will be a civil society meeting on Friday Sept. 24 in Tokyo at noon to 1pm.
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Gallo
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A resolution of the European Parliament calling for more repression of file sharing will be voted upon on Wednesday. European conservatives, led by a pro-sarkozy rapporteur and helped by a diversion from the liberal group, are pushing for the adoption of the Gallo report. If they succeed, blind repression and private copyright police of the Net will become the official position of the European Parliament. Our fundamental freedoms are at stake. In just 5 minutes, you can help rejecting it.
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Tomorrow, the European Parliament will vote on the Gallo report that deals with the enforcement of intellectual property. Drafted by a partner of the French President Nicolas Sarkozy, the report paves the way for draconian anti-piracy measures to be introduced across Europe, potentially affecting the lives of millions of Internet users.
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One of the slightly depressing aspects of fighting intellectual monopolists is that they have lots of money. This means that they can fund their lobbyists around the world in multiple forums and at multiple levels. So, for example, we have the global Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), which is being negotiated behind closed doors by the representatives of rich and powerful nations. But we also have a threat at the European level that must be fought just as doggedly.
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On Wednesday you are going to vote on the report on enforcement of intellectual property rights in the internal market by Marielle Gallo, the so called Gallo report.
It has come to our attention that the authors of the petition supporting the Gallo report, Eurocinema, uses fake signatures to support it. They want to give the impression that copyright holders are united to enforce more repressive legislation, that will affect our lives and communications in the future. However, their support is rather empty, and what is left is nothing more than yet another industry smokescreen to convince you to support ideas that jeopardize the fundamental rights of EU citizens as well as the open and neutral character of the Internet.
Intel Core i5 Penguin Commercial
Credit: TinyOgg
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09.20.10
Posted in News Roundup at 6:26 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Who doesn’t like quotes especially if it’s about Linux and Microsoft. Here are some fascinating, funny, intriguing and totally awesome quotes on technology, Linux and Microsoft.
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The presidency of Linux Australia fell his way recently in rather unusual circumstances when the man holding the job, James Turnbull, decided to accept a billet in the United States.
Ferlito was not next in line, Lindsay Holmswood, the vice-president was. But he opted out due to the impending arrival of an addition to his family. Ferlito put up his hand, and the rest, as they say, is history.
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Desktop
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t’s good to see that ZaReason and System 76 are now offering many more models than they did before and prices seem lower. They must be doing well…
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Server
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PEER 1 Hosting in the UK has launched a supercomputing cloud service based on the Nvidia Tesla S1070 and M2050 GPU computing systems. We’re talking serious computing power here; the S1070 is a 1U rack mount that contains 960 processor cores and four teraflops of computing power.
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Considering a switch to a virtualized infrastructure strikes fear into the hearts of even the most educated among today’s CIOs. Technology confusion and vendor choices aside, the physical-to-virtual transition dread stems from security concerns, performance uncertainty and scalability questions. Red Hat’s Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) attempts to answer those trepidations positively.
KVM is Red Hat’s commercial competition for Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware ESX/vSphere. Like the others, KVM is a full virtualization technology. Full virtualization means that virtual machines (VMs) built with KVM fully abstract computer hardware, so the operating systems that run inside the VMs “think” they’re running on physical hardware. Memory, CPU, disk, peripherals, NICs and graphics adapters compose VMs using full virtualization technology.
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Ballnux
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It looks like that Taiwanese component maker that previously ran their mouth about the HTC tablet coming in Q1 had a few more details to get off their chest. The folks over at DigiTimes – the previous rumor source – are now reporting that their source inside Pegatron Technology has now revealed some specs of this HTC tablet rumored to be launching in Q1.
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Kernel Space
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Oracle today announced the availability of Oracle’s Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel, a fast, modern, reliable Linux kernel that is optimized for Oracle software and hardware.
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Oracle has developed its own Linux kernel software and will offer customers both the new Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel as well as the Red Hat Linux-compatible kernel Oracle has provided for several years.
The move could result in more fragmentation of the Linux industry.
Oracle debuted its own version of Linux four years ago, basing the operating system on Red Hat Linux and maintaining compatibility with that OS ever since.
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Graphics Stack
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The X.Org Developers’ Summit in Toulouse finished up over the weekend. It is now time for PhoronixFest at Oktoberfest in Munich, but here is a recap of what was discussed at this French X.Org event along with some photos.
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The last talk of the 2010 X.Org Developers’ Summit was regarding X.Org Server 1.10. The good news is that nearly every X.Org graphics driver will not be merged back into the xorg-server repository.
The release schedule for X.Org Server 1.10 was talked about, which has the final release set to arrive in February. Some of the features for this next major X.Org Server release include libxkb, RandR 1.4, input clean-ups, threaded input events, and other clean-ups. “It’s pretty much our job right now to remove system-level code out of the server and into a share-able environment.” Such work also directly benefits the Wayland Display Server, like the XKB common library that was talked about.
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Applications
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I’ve been testing and using Ardour since its 0.xx releases. I know that other Linux DAWs are also excellent programs, but for some reason I’m drawn to Ardour as my first-choice for serious recording. Perhaps it’s the support for my Frontier Tranzport or maybe the excellent synchronization capabilities, but whatever the reason, I’m a die-hard Ardourista. You can check out some of my Music Made with Ardour for some examples of Ardour’s use here at Studio Dave, or you can check out the announcements of new music on the Ardour forums. The addition of OS X as a supported platform has brought many new musicians into the Ardour camp, and as far as I’m converned it’s all for the better. As this little article explains, there’s a lot going on in the world of Ardour. I hope my readers are inspired to check it out for themselves.
Yet one word more: Big thanks to Thorsten Wilms for the use of his fine logo seen at the top of this article. Thorsten has designed a variety of similar logos for Ardour, but this one’s my favorite.
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As wide in scope as the Elementary project has stretched in the last few years it is still one canon short of an arsenal – it lacks a dedicated Elementary-styled media player.
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I bet at one point or another you felt you missed the system tray integration feature in some application, be it xterm, an audio player, a file manager or any other program. Well, KDocker is just the thing which comes to help: a simple, yet practical docking application built for KDE4 (older KDE3 version can be found here), but not only. Let me tell you how to use this program in a productive and useful manner.
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Shell In A Box is project that includes a web server, Javascript files and CSS templates to setup web-based terminal access to your system. You might remember that Shell In A Box was part of last week’s TurnKey Linux project. It is a fascinating project of its own and it deserves some focused attention.
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PeaZip 3.3 is released, this release brings various fixes and an improved user interface focused in better integration with web search (optionally on multiple search engines at once) and in launching favorite applications, scripts or websites/web services from PeaZip.
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Instructionals/Technical
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For an embedded/thin client project without GNOME, KDE, or even full XFCE I needed a small daemon to automount USB sticks. Using the full gvfs/gdu/nautilus or Thunar stack is too heavyweight for my purposes, but a simple udev rule just doesn’t cut it — I need to mount these USB sticks for a particular user (permissions), and also want to do an action like pop up a window with the contents.
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Games
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Almost nine years ago, I played Return to Castle Wolfenstein, a classic 3D shoot-em-up with Nazis and supernatural horrors and completed it. I also played the multi-player online. Particularly memorable were the flame thrower and the big climactic battle against the resurrected Knight.
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Ri-Li is an arcade game meant for children aged 3 years and up. In this game, the you control a wooden toy train and you have to collect all the coaches spread across the tracks to complete each level.
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Frictional Games, developers of the new game Amnesia: The Dark Descent, have posted an analysis for the title’s sales a week after the survival horror game’s release…
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Making the game available
This was the first time that we have had a game that would be simultaneously released for six different stores on the same day, so we were a bit nervous on how that would go. To make sure that all stores had enough time we sent out the game more than a week before release. This seems to have worked and all the stores had the game available in time for release.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Previous wallpapers were just posted as previews here on the blog, but since this was not requested by the distro-art-managers of Arch, but only users, it will probably not end up as a part of the distro.
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Well, now I’m on the other side (so to speak) I’m painfully aware of the following: KDE.News relies on you, that is KDE promo contributors and the wider community, for its existence.
Being a Dot editor is a busy job. We have to receive your articles, make them nice (or worse, depending on whether you like our edits), upload them into Drupal and add html tags, adjust pictures and often source them too. Complex articles can take an hour of work and a few days of emails – that’s just the stuff we do, after the article is written.
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Most KDE users use Kopete for their IM needs. There’s a reason why it’s the default IM client in Linux Mint KDE as well as nearly every other KDE-based distro out there. It works, it’s stable, supports plug-ins, and incorporates just about every major protocol out there. I’ve used it for years, and still do.
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As I am sure you can tell, this is simply a very high level introduction to Digikam. I consider it an impressive application with loads of features and very much encourage that you give it a try. Having said so, there is already news about the soon to come Digikam 2.0, the next production version of this high quality photograph manager.
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The Amarok Team is happy to announce the release of Amarok 2.3.2.
This release brings with it much requested bugfixes for some long-standing bugs. Specifically, Dynamic Collection has received fixes and should now work better with hard drives and USB mass storage devices (Collection directories on these media will need to be rescanned for the changes to take effect). The Collection Browser now refreshes properly after a full rescan, fixing a bug where it would show incorrectly cached entries until Amarok was restarted.
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After a summer hiatus with lots of… well, not Amarok hacking… we are back with a fresh release. I won’t list all of the changes here in my blog, as you might as well head over to the official release notes.
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GNOME Desktop
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GNOME Shell is a window manager designed specifically for the upcoming GNOME 3 desktop, with the intention of offering a rather different way of interacting with the desktop, providing a workspace which hardly resembles the classic desktops.
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It must be the season for recycled anti-Linux whinges, because in the past few weeks I have had the pleasure of wading through a flurry of stories about Linux has too many choices, Linux is not ready for prime time, Linux is too expensive just like proprietary software, and FOSS is amateur hour and all insecure. We’ve heard it all before.
The one that is worth a bit of discussion is “Linux has too many choices.” I rather like that the Linux/FOSS ecosystem is huge, messy, and highly productive. I understand that standing before such a vast colorful feast can be overwhelming. But there is one key point that has not been addressed: how could any kind of simplification be achieved? Think about it– how would this work? All I can think of is some kind of central clearinghouse run by an iron-fisted tyrant who approves or disapproves everything. It’s absurd. FOSS is a giant wonderful cat herd. There is no single turtlenecked dictator. By design it is decentralized and distributed. Anyone can play, and the only entry requirements are ability and desire to learn.
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Across all three tests Chakra scored the highest (With PCLinuxOS and Sabayon in close second and third). Ubuntu 10.04 was at the very bottom (over 10% behind Chakra). While I think Ubuntu is a great distro it appears that if you are a Linux Gamer, you are better off using a non-Ubuntu distro.
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Security
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Canonical has released updated kernels for Ubuntu versions 10.04 LTS, 9.10, 9.04, 8.04 LTS and 6.06 LTS to close the recently discovered holes in the Linux kernel. The updates are also for the equivalent versions of Kubuntu, Edubuntu and Xubuntu and should be available through Ubuntu’s Software Update system.
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Red Hat have evaluated their Enterprise Linux offerings and say only RHEL5 is vulnerable to CVE-2010-3081; RHEL4 and Red Hat Enterprise MRG have similar validation issues but lack the “compat_mc_sockopt()” function used by the exploit. The company plans an update to RHEL5 as soon as the fixes have passed testing and will address issues in RHEL4 and Enterprise MRG in a later update. The company says that no version of RHEL is vulnerable to CVE-2010-3301.
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PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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PCLinuxOS is a community driven distribution of GNU/Linux, which began in 2003 with the objective of creating a Linux that was radically simple, “worked out of the box, looked fabulous and didn’t require a technical degree from college to get it working.”
At the time, the idea of a live CD – a version of Linux that ran from RAM and didn’t need to be installed on the hard disk – was still a novelty. Klaus Knopper’s Knoppix had been around since 2000, but the better-known Linux distributions had yet to pick up on the idea.
The inspiration behind PcLinuxOS, also known as PCLOS, is Bill Reynolds, who is known to fans of PCLinuxOS as Texstar. PCLinuxOS began as an offshoot of Mandrake/Mandriva, to which Texstar had been a long time contributor of third-party packages.
The objective was to build a fast, reliable distribution of Linux, that was both a Live distribution on the model of Knoppix and a fully installable and flexible Linux desktop, driven by Reynolds’ passion to make the perfect software package.
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Apparently they want development be governed by a non-profit organisation or developer cooperative. A main concern of them seems to be the past business decisions of the Mandriva management. The business model looks unclear.
Consider that Mandriva currently competes with a Russian consortium on a Russian National Operating system contract.
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Last Friday the newspaper Vedomosti reported that a Russian firm, NGI, has purchased a controlling interest in Mandriva. The Quintura blog published a short English language summary of the article today. NGI had previously purchased a 5% stake in Mandriva in July for an undisclosed sum as part of the €3 million financial rescue of the company according to the Vedomosti article. NGI and Ceychas Fund are investing an additional €2 million to acquire controlling interest, including purchasing shares currently held by two other investors.
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I usually view these developments with caution, but this one I am actually happy about. Here are my reasons:
* Mandriva’s management has done a very lousy job with the resources they have. It is pretty appalling. Mandriva was supposed to be to the desktop space what Red Hat is to the server market. But no, the company got stuck somewhere between 1998 and 2005. There were no new ideas. They could have done what Steve Jobs did with Apple, if only they had the vision and a good understanding of the technology and community they had at their disposal.
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The Mandriva Community will be autonomous and governance structures will be created to ensure freedom. The Mandriva enterprise is just an element of this independent community.
A community manager will be hired by Mandriva to help the community to implement these plans.
The next version of the Mandriva community distribution will be available in spring 2011.
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Gentoo Family
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I’ve been using the minimal “server” profile on my Gentoo servers for a few years now. (Ever since I first found out that hardened didn’t support the glibc version that the stage tarballs used.) This profile has been excellent for the minimal needs of a headless server but it constantly reminded me that I should be using hardened; so, I finally decided to take the plunge and moved all my Gentoo servers to the hardened profile. The migration was mostly painless (with the errors being my own fault as usual).
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat’s heady growth has led it to explore out-of-state options for a whopping 300,000 square feet of office space.
Officials with the Raleigh-based Linux software business recently looked at office space about that size in Atlanta and Austin, Texas.
The amount of space is substantially more than the 188,000 square feet the company occupies at its headquarters on N.C. State University’s Centennial Campus, sparking speculation about whether the company is considering a relocation of its headquarters.
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Fedora
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Debian Family
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Debian is one of the oldest and most popular distributions among the Linux users. There are probably hundreds of distributions which are based on Debian, or others which are based on distributions which in turn are based on Debian. Although I’m not a Debian developer, I use it for over two years or so, and slowly got to love this OS.
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All in all, there are definitely some changes in the beta version of Ubuntu 10.10, but for some reason I’m not as impressed with it as I thought I would be. However, I think that Ubuntu is heading in the right direction by polishing up the interface before jumping into large changes. Additionally, it is my understanding that the GUI-based installer has been significantly improved in Ubuntu 10.10, however I have yet to experience this myself because I use the “alternate” text-based installer.
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I have loaded Mint Debian on my three main laptop/netbooks so far – Fujitsu Lifebook S6510 (Intel Core2 Duo), HP Pavillion dv2-1010ez (AMD Athlon Neo) and Samsung N150 Plus (Intel Atom), and it loads and runs very nicely, and it looks and feels exactly like the Ubuntu-based Mint 9 (Isadora) distribution.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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I am amazed at the high quality artwork produced by Canonical for Ubuntu which permits Ubuntu to complete against other commercial products such as OSX and Windows. The problem is these products are created and release with little if any community involvement.
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Well that was quick. The “Sent from Ubuntu” default email signature for Evolution in Ubuntu 10.10 has been removed – as you can see in the latest Evolution package changelog.
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Ecolo is switching to Ubuntu desktops.
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To me, that sounds like it means Moovida will not be entirely open-source. This fact may complicate its status for Ubuntu users, ruling it out as a replacement for Rhythmbox/Totem and driving ideologically minded users away.
On the other hand, the flexible nature of the plugin licensing could prove beneficial to Linux users by making it easier for proprietary developers to reach them. Commercial programmers have a tendency to stay away from open-source applications because the viral nature of the GPL often makes it difficult to bring proprietary code anywhere near open-source programs. Moovida might make that barrier a little easier to overcome.
For the time being, though, we can only wait and see what develops, since there’s been little word on when we can expect an official Linux release (the Moovida website promises an OS/X release in summer 2010, but the summer is just about officially over and the Mac build has yet to appear, so development may be running behind schedule).
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If you’re not already aware of Ubuntu 10.10’s new netbook interface, called ‘Unity’, then I would sincerely ask you to point to the rock under which you have been living.
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Also, the Ubuntu Software Centre should start charging for open source software and help out the hard working programmers that bring us great apps for the GNU/Linux desktop. This would enable the programmers and the many great open source projects to earn a revenue from the software they produce. Advanced games would be more plentiful and complex software would be available as well. The Ubuntu Software Centre has a lot of potential to create a great market for excellent GNU/Linux software and a great stream of revenue for open source programmers that are struggling to turn a profit. I hope that the next few versions of Ubuntu will have these great features implemented. The Software Centre can spur a new class of great applications for the GNU/Linux platform and bring more users to use Linux as their primary operating system.
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Mark Shuttleworth interview about Ubuntu and Dell Tie Up
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Flavours and Variants
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There are a lot of things I like about the Linux Mint distribution. One is that they aren’t reinventing the wheel. Linux Mint is less an independent from-the-ground-up distro and has been more of the icing on the Ubuntu cake. It’s changing (I think improving) the Ubuntu experience without starting over from scratch. Essentially this means that the Mint team is able to introduce new ideas and features to the user without wasting resources on the underlying base. Another point in its favour is that I can easily slap an install on a new computer in twenty minutes and have all the basics right there with no configuring, no tweaking and no adding extra repositories. It’s really the pizza delivery to your door in under thirty minutes distro.
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Sub-notebooks
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They have just released a new netbook running Android and it promptly sold out. This puts the lie to the revisionist history some recount of the netbook as released in 2007 by ASUS. These things will sell and in the USA. There is always a market for smaller and cheaper computers.
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Even as the economy slouches its way toward another bout of recession, the software industry has been in comparatively rude health. Earnings across the board have been impressive and, as a recent SIIA and OPEXEngine study (warning: PDF) shows, software companies are returning to robust profitability after years of red ink.
In other words, when the economy has boomed proprietary software companies have also boomed. When it went bust, so did they, to varying degrees.
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We can blame the baby boomers for proprietary software. (We can also blame them for C++ and Java, and I write two chapters detailing why they have been a total disaster for the industry. I recommend everyone use Python today.) We can also blame boomers for outlawing nuclear power, never drilling in ANWR despite decades of discussion, never fixing Social Security, destroying the K-12 education system, and numerous of the other long-term problems that have existed in this country for decades, that they did not fix, and the ones they created. Linus Torvalds is a Generation X-er, having been born in 1969. It is this generation that is coming into its own now that will invent the future, as we incorporate more free software, cooperation, and free markets into society.
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So without further ado, here are 58 open source replacements for popular commercial communications software…
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Firefox Home, a free app that syncs your Firefox browsing history, bookmarks and open tabs to your iPhone or iPod touch, is now available in 15 languages worldwide. Get Firefox Home in your language now!
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Firefox 4 won’t have the menu it has on Windows – according to THIS bug report, but it does have the other new features.
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Mozilla has released a JavaScript engine strictly for testing purposes to allow web developers to gain deeper access to – and better understanding of – the code underpinning its browser.
The Narcissus engine and Zaphod script look-up tool have been added to Mozilla Labs to help the open source outfit develop new ideas for the JavaScript language.
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The free Firefox add-on Pixel Grabber makes it dead easy to take screenshots in the browser. How does it work? Simply right-click on a page, or click on the status bar icon to grab a screenshot of the whole page, custom or visible area.
The first and last option display a selection menu to download the screenshot to the local computer, copy it to the clipboard, share it with the image hosting service imm.io or send it to an online editor for immediate image editing.
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Firefox 4 shutdown is already almost instant, but Mozilla has had their sights set on faster start-up times for quite a while. Over the summer, a pair of Mozilla interns looked at simple tweaks which would make Firefox appear faster. It now looks as if at least one of the suggested changes will make its way in to Firefox 4.
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… at least if we believe Mozilla. Mozilla has published new benchmark results that aim to prove that IE9 is not quite as fast as Microsoft claims. In fact, Firefox has gained the edge again.
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Databases
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PostgreSQL 9.0 is here! The PostgreSQL Global Development Group announces the availability of our most eagerly awaited release. PostgreSQL 9.0 includes built-in, binary replication, and over a dozen other major features which will appeal to everyone from web developers to database hackers.
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While Oracle trumpets its open source MySQL database management system this week at the company’s OpenWorld conference, the creators behind MySQL’s rival, PostgreSQL, have released a major new version of their rival database software.
The newly released version 9 of PostgreSQL includes a number of new features that are potentially appealing to enterprise users. It includes the ability to do streaming replication, the upgrade process has been made considerably easier, and for the first time, it can run natively on clients running the 64-bit version of Microsoft Windows.
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Clearly, the new owner has left its mark in the new default for the database engine. The transaction-capable InnoDB is used, instead of the old MyISAM engine. Oracle says it is much faster than the previous version, thanks partly to multiple roll-back segments and the use of asynchronous I/O under Linux. In particular, MySQL does not come to a standstill as often when there are simultaneous connections on multi-core machines. The developers have changed the threading that the server uses, for example, by using dedicated locks for individual tasks instead of the former global lock.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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FLOSSK has invited me to talk about Sugar in the upcoming Software Freedom Kosova 2010 Conference that will take place next weekend (25th-26th September) in Prishtina.
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I’ve just tested Gnash 0.8.8 in a recent firefox beta and it works very well with youtube here. Other famous video (e.g. vimeo) sites, checked some pr0n sites as well, don’t work (properly) though. Now the Gnash developers pointed out on their blog that a) many people, especially debian users, use way too old versions or don’t follow the informations given on setup and therefore don’t remove their youtube cookies, so they get a blank screen and b) many people seem to be barely interested in a free flash player, so they quickly install adobe flash, when gnash does not work or they simply don’t see any reasons to open that technology up. Now since both Google and Apple have turned away from Adobe flash player, Google by actually supporting them, but by breaking their main monopoly with patent-free html 5 video and powerful javascript runtimes and Apple by also focusing on open Webstandards and Html 5 video, flash’s days seem to be counted.
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Project Releases
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Government
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Europe is leading in the development and adoption of open source, according to a report by Cenatic, Spain’s national competence centre on this type of software, published yesterday at an IT conference in Palma de Mallorca. “Government support is key for the adoption of open source.”
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Examples of open source in the U.S. government abound. The Smithsonian and Search.USA.gov use Solr/Lucene open source enterprise search. The White House re-launched whitehouse.gov using Drupal. The DoD and the Intelligence Community have proposed an Open Technology Development roadmap “to increase technical efficiency and reduce software lifecycle costs within DoD,” and the DoD has developed forge.mil to “enable continuous collaboration among all stakeholders including project managers, developers, testers, certifiers, operators, and users.” In fact, my own company, Lucid Imagination, is funded in part by In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA, further evidence that open source and government are going hand in hand.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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The first line was, “A new player entered the field of open online education last week: NIXTY, a Web site that allows any user to take and create courses for free.”
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He said he worked in Microsoft’s Valley office and at some point in the conversation told me that you couldn’t jump either way between, specifically, Microsoft and Apple; that if you were talking to a recruiter from the one, they’d drop you if you came from the other. He said “They do that to keep people from going back and forth to get raises.”
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They democratically elected a president to stand up to the rich and multinational corporations – so our governments have him kidnapped
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Should you get Windows 7 over a Linux distro? It really and truly depends on your needs. In terms what what you get for price, Linux is amazing. You get tons of programs for free. Your drivers are mostly all already installed. It runs faster on an SSD drive. This version of Windows cost me $99 for an OEM license. I bought it because I like to play computer games and because I want to run Adobe Photoshop Lightroom at maximum efficiency (not via Wine or VirtualBox). Although my wife still has bits here and there where she wishes she had Windows XP instead of Ubuntu, it’s usually because something is different, not because it’s lacking. So she’d be giving most of the same complaints if I had moved her to Windows 7. And, I use my Linux, Fedora-based computer for EVERYTHING that isn’t photography or video games. Sometimes I go for days without booting up my Windows computer.
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Science
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What happens in our brain when the mind is considering itself? Until now, it has been unclear what happens during a navel-gazing session. Now a team of neuroscientists has shed light on the process by identifying an area of the brain that is larger in more introspective individuals.
Introspection is the act of assessing or thinking about one’s own thoughts, decisions and feelings. Stephen Fleming from University College London and his colleagues were interested in how the act of introspection – thought to be a crucial component of consciousness – links to the physiology of the brain.
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Unearthed during a construction dig at the San Diego Zoo in California last Thursday: The fossilized remains of a 24-foot-long baleen whale that lived 3 million years ago.
The age of the find is remarkable, but what makes this even more rare is the fact that the entire skeleton appears to be more or less intact: head, vertebrae, flippers, and all.
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Health/Nutrition
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Before, Fudia would have been taken to the hospital in the midst of labor, and when complications arose, the medical care would have stopped. Someone would have called Alex saying he needed to get to the hospital to pay for a C-section delivery before the operation could take place. The operation would cost between $200 and $500. Alex would have turned to me and asked for help. I would have searched around for someone to deliver the money to the hospital. All that time would have passed before a doctor and nurses could deliver the baby. All that time was endangering the Fudia’s life, and the unborn baby’s.
Now, because of free health care, a team at the hospital delivered their baby boy. The only phone call Alex received was to tell him that mother and child are healthy. This is one example among many. We are saving the lives of mothers and their children. That is something to celebrate not only in Sierra Leone, but around the world.
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Security/Aggression
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With each revelation, or court decision, on US torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and Gitmo—or the airing this month of The Tillman Story and Lawrence Wright’s My Trip to Al-Qaeda—I am reminded of the chilling story of Alyssa Peterson, who died seven years ago this week. Appalled when ordered to take part in interrogations that, no doubt, involved what most would call torture, she refused, then killed herself a few days later, on September 15, 2003.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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In 1929, Russian botanist Nikolai Vavilov traveled to Central Asia on one of the many seed-collecting expeditions that took him to five continents over more than two decades. In what is now present-day Kazakhstan, Vavilov — the father of modern seed banks — found forests of wild fruits and numerous cultivated varieties. Around the city of Alma Ata, he was astonished by the profusion of apple trees, writing in his journal that he believed he had “stumbled upon the center of origin for the apple, where wild apples were difficult to even distinguish from those which were being cultivated.”
[...]
The fate of the station is now in limbo as, after an intense lobbying campaign by botanists and conservation groups around the world, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev has announced that the government is investigating the effort to uproot one of the most valuable botanical collections on Earth.
The priceless nature of the Pavlosk station can be traced directly back to Vavilov and his painstaking efforts to collect seeds from what he viewed as hot spots of plant diversity around the world, now known as Vavilov Centers. His insights into the importance of preserving botanical genetic diversity, particularly among food crops, are highly relevant today as that diversity faces unparalleled threats from industrial agriculture dominated by monoculture crops, destruction of wild habitats, and climate change.
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Rosen wrote a terrific comment for my August 29 post, “What’s the difference between climate science and climate journalism? The former is self-correcting, the latter has become self-destructive.” Since it was #52, I suspect many missed it, so I’ll repost it below.
First, though, here are a couple of choice excerpts from Rosen’s Economist interview that readers identified:
I do not think journalists should “join the team”. They bridle at that, for good reason. Power-seeking and truth-seeking are different behaviours, and this is how we distinguish politics from journalism. I think it does take a certain detachment from your own preferences and assumptions to be a good reporter. The difficulty is that neutrality has its limits. Taken too far, it undermines the very project in which a serious journalist is engaged.Suppose the forces that want to convince Americans that Barack Obama is a Muslim or wasn’t born in the United States start winning, and more and more people believe it. This is a defeat for journalism—in fact, for verification itself. Neutrality and objectivity carry no instructions for how to react to something like that. They aren’t “wrong”, they’re just limited. The American press does not know what to do when neutrality, objectivity, balance and “report both sides” reach their natural limits. And so journalists tend to deny that there are such limits. But with this denial they’ve violated the code of the truth-teller because these limits are real. See the problem?
… When journalists get attacked from the left and the right, they take it as confirmation that they’re doing something right, when they could be doing everything wrong. There’s a certain laziness that creeps up too, which you can hear in phrases from the commentariat like “extremists on both sides”. No attempt to actually examine centre and margin and compare them across parties; instead, this sorry act of positioning, in which the political centre is associated with truth, common sense and realism. This is a very common prejudice in political journalism.
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Peru is said to be the 56th richest country in the world, with 28 of the world’s 35 climates and more than 70% of the tropical glaciers on earth. Most are in rapid retreat, leaving behind devastated farmers and communities short of water.
Julio invited us to his home, but we are in the hands of Oxfam and heading for another region far from the retreating glaciers but where climate change is impacting communities hard.
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A council has launched a landmark legal case against the supermarket giant Sainsbury’s for using too much packaging on a fresh joint of beef.
Lincolnshire council’s trading standards claim “excessive” wrapping around the meat is damaging to the environment. The case is believed to be the first time a major supermarket has been prosecuted for failing to stay within acceptable levels of packaging.
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The Obama administration is facing two new charges of suppressing information about the BP oil spill.
Independent scientists, environmental organisations and local groups in the Gulf have repeatedly accused government agencies of helping BP to under-estimate the amount of oil that spewed out of its well and play down its effects on marine life.
The emergency phase of the spill may now be all but over: administration officials say the well could be permanently sealed by Sunday. But the Obama administration still faces a big trust gap over its handling of the spill, with environmentalists and scientists growing more vocal about their suspicions that the US public is being spun.
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Plans by the energy giant BP to sink an oil well off the Libyan coast could have disastrous consequences for the region’s rich heritage of coastal ancient city sites and shipwrecks – already under threat from oil tankers, coastal erosion and tourist developments – archaeologists from around the world have warned.
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If the world has been reminded of anything through the tragedy of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, it is that biodiversity and the health of ecosystems is neither an abstract scientific concept nor the pet project of a green elite. Biodiversity and healthy ecosystems are the vital underpinnings of human society.
Food and energy production on land and from the sea; medicine; tourism, and real estate: these industries and many others have been shown to be starkly vulnerable to the destruction of marine and terrestrial ecosystems. And yet, while the link between biodiversity and human well-being is better understood now than ever before, the news from the frontlines of the global effort to preserve the world’s biodiversity is bleak. The web of life that we all rely on for our very survival is being torn apart at an increasingly alarming rate and action to address this global crisis is still distressingly lacking and slow.
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Finance
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From PBS comes this video which reviews how Goldman Sachs takes great pleasure in making money in whatever way presents itself while at the same time ignoring the sufferings of those from whom they obtain their money.
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Anger is sweeping America. True, this white-hot rage is a minority phenomenon, not something that characterizes most of our fellow citizens. But the angry minority is angry indeed, consisting of people who feel that things to which they are entitled are being taken away. And they’re out for revenge.
[...]
For one thing, craziness has gone mainstream. It’s one thing when a billionaire rants at a dinner event. It’s another when Forbes magazine runs a cover story alleging that the president of the United States is deliberately trying to bring America down as part of his Kenyan, “anticolonialist” agenda, that “the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s.” When it comes to defending the interests of the rich, it seems, the normal rules of civilized (and rational) discourse no longer apply.
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Building the Big Banks
So, let’s start with me. I have a checking account at a Wells Fargo Wachovia bank and I regularly make deposits, withdrawals and debit purchases with it. A few months ago, Wachovia settled a case with the Department of Justice for $160 million on the charge of laundering potentially billions of dollars for Mexican drug cartels. High-level Wachovia executives would have us believe they had no prior knowledge of this serious criminal activity which helped keep their company afloat (at least for a little while), but evidence suggests there were numerous red flags they were made aware of and chose to ignore. At the very least they had been extremely negligent in establishing and maintaining money laundering “detection systems”, and why wouldn’t they be when due diligence may cost them millions in bonuses. [2]. Thousands of innocent Mexican and American citizens die every year at the hands of Mexican drug cartels and violence associated with their activities. The drug trade also contributes greatly to socioeconomic ills in both societies, such as the social costs resulting from habitual drug abuse and economic costs from medical treatment and prosecuting the “war on drugs”. [3]. I feel an acute sense of guilt for depositing my money at Wachovia banks, supporting their business activities and aiding them in growing to the extent that their managers can get away with financing murder, even though the amount in my checking account alone is negligible to their overall worth. There are obviously millions of other people in this country who also support Wachovia and other major financial institutions like it, and all that cash adds up to serious capital.
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The Securities and Exchange Commission unanimously approved on Friday a proposal to reinstate a requirement that publicly traded companies disclose more information about their short-term borrowings.
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I look forward at the beginning of each month to getting Gary’s latest letter. I often print it out and walk away from my desk to spend some quality time reading his thoughts. He is one of my “must-read” analysts. I always learn something quite useful and insightful. I am grateful that he has let me share this with you.
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A gold trading company has no plans to end its high-profile sponsorship of conservative commentators despite coming under congressional scrutiny.
Scott Carter, executive vice president of Goldline International, Inc., told The Hill that the firm is “very pleased” with its advertising relationship with Glenn Beck and other radio and television pundits that are popular among conservatives.
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“We’re all freaking doomed.”, says Alan Greenspan.
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The overall poverty rate climbed to 14.3 percent, or 43.6 million people, the Census Bureau said Thursday in its annual report on the economic well-being of U.S. households. The report covers 2009, President Barack Obama’s first year in office.
The poverty rate increased from 13.2 percent, or 39.8 million people, in 2008.
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IN TODAY’S AMERICA, the poor are apparently getting poorer.
Then again, so is the middle class. And just like in the days leading up to the Great Depression, the rich are getting even richer.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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The gifted artist is alive and well, thankfully. But on the insistence of top security specialists at the FBI, she is, as they put it, “going ghost”: moving, changing her name, and essentially wiping away her identity. She will no longer be publishing cartoons in our paper or in City Arts magazine, where she has been a regular contributor. She is, in effect, being put into a witness-protection program—except, as she notes, without the government picking up the tab. It’s all because of the appalling fatwa issued against her this summer, following her infamous “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” cartoon.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Europe has proposed an Internet Treaty to protect the net from political interference which threatens to break it up.
The draft international law has been compared to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which sought to prevent space exploration being pursued for anything less than the benefit of all human kind. The Internet Treaty would similarly seek to preserve the Internet as a global system of free communication that transcends national borders.
An early draft of the Treaty has come into our possession as governments around the world pile pressure on the United Nations to bring the Internet under political control. Their various hare-brained schemes threaten to make communication on the Internet conditional on criteria set by narrow political interests.
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The entertainment industry’s favorite two Senators, Patrick Leahy (who keeps proposing stronger copyright laws) and Orin Hatch (who once proposed automatically destroying the computers of anyone caught file sharing) have now proposed a new law that would give the Justice Department the power to shut down websites that are declared as being “dedicated to illegal file sharing.” Other Senators signed on to sponsor the bill are: Sens. Herb Kohl, Arlen Specter, Charles Schumer, Dick Durbin, Sheldon Whitehouse, Amy Klobuchar, Evan Bayh and George Voinovich. Perhaps these Senators should brush up on their history.
They do realize, of course, that Hollywood (who is pushing them for this law) was established originally as a “pirate” venture to get away from Thomas Edison and his patents, right? Things change over time. Remember, that YouTube, which is now considered by Hollywood to be mostly “legit,” had been derided as a “site dedicated” to “piracy” in the past. It’s no surprise that the Justice Department — with a bunch of former RIAA/MPAA lawyers on staff — would love to have such powers, but it’s difficult to see how such a law would be Constitutional, let alone reasonable.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Wednesday next week the European Parliament will be voting on the Gallo report on intellectual property enforcement.
Unfortunately, there is a major risk that the parliament will adopt the report, which would be bad news for the Internet community. I am one of the signatories on an alternative resolution submitted by the Green, Social Democrat and Left groups, but it is doubtful if we will be able to get a majority for it. But we will keep on trying until the final vote.
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Copyrights
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The Swedish Pirate Party has failed to replicate last year’s massive victory in the European elections. The Party, which promised it would host Wikileaks and The Pirate Bay inside the Swedish Parliament if it was voted in, lost the majority of last year’s support and won’t reach the threshold that would allow it to enter Parliament.
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Since its inception in 2003, Abstract Logix has consistently positioned itself at the cutting edge of every element of music–sales, production, and distribution. In addition to traditional record label functions, Abstract Logix has fostered a vital community of musicians and fans via its online portal, constantly taking advantage of the ever-expanding possibilities of the digital revolution. Yet, we understand that nothing can replace the exhilaration of master musicians performing in concert. Thus the idea behind The New Universe Music Festival. Our artists will connect with the fans at the festival. The artists will be approachable and will be interested in trading ideas with their fans.
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Members of the notorious 4chan image board have launched a coordinated a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack against mpaa.org, the website of the Motion Picture Association of America. The attack began at 9:00 PM EST and is still ongoing. It only took eight minutes for the MPAA website to go down. According to an announcement posted on the Internet, 4chan members consider this a retaliation against film studios who paid an Indian company called Aiplex Software to attack torrent websites in a similar manner.Last week, Aiplex’s managing director boasted in the media that when websites refuse to respond to DMCA takedown notices sent by his company, on behalf of local and international film studios, his team resorts to DDoS.
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Fox News’ decision to sue a Democratic candidate over her campaign’s use of footage first aired on the network in an ad is an apparent escalation of such fair use battles — bringing disputes between media companies and campaigns from YouTube to the courtroom.
The suit the network filed against the campaign of Robin Carnahan, a Democrat challenging Rep. Roy Blunt (R) for a Senate seat in Missouri, appears to be the first time such a fair use fight between a media company and a political campaign has been taken to court. It is much more common for media companies to flag the videos to YouTube and assert their copyright.
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Kids (of all ages) around the world revel in a whole day in which they can “Talk Like A Pirate”. Arrr. Be a pirate. Sing and play pirate songs like the Arrogant Worms classic pirate tune Last Saskatchewan Pirate. Dress up in pirate gear. There is even an online Pirate Translator for assistance with pirate talking. It is nothing to do with politics, or copyright. The point of “Talk Like A Pirate Day” is fun. Yo ho ho.
This year, not so much.
The MPAA has been unsuccessfully trying to convince people that sharing is a bad thing by spending vast sums of money on ‘anti-piracy’ advertising. Of course it doesn’t help that they what they call piracy is not just commercial bootlegging, but includes personal use sharing and any number of things that users feel justified in doing. (Some copyright “reformers” say that we need to purchase copies of the same book for every member of the family.) Or format shifting. (Some copyright “reformers” say we should purchase copies of the same song for every device we would play it on.)
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Happy International Talk Like a Pirate Day everyone!
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Digital Economy (UK)
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With a new Government telling us massive spending cuts are inevitable, and an old Government that forced through a shoddy piece of legislation called the digital Economy Act before it shuffled off, it hasn’t been looking good for broadband.
However, each new intake of MPs brings with it new and younger blood, which hopefully has a better handle on the desperate need to keep this country’s broadband infrastructure up to date – or at least close – with our neighbours.
One of those MPs is Cambridge’s Liberal Democrat MP Julian Huppert. A tech savvy newcomer to Parliament with a PhD in Biological Chemistry, he’s just the kind of character we need to ensure the voice of gadget loving consumers and tech reliant businesses is heard.
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09.19.10
Posted in News Roundup at 6:57 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Ballnux
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LG Electronics today launched two new member for the Optimus smartphone series – but only one is coming to the UK.
Marketed for first-time smartphone users, the LG Optimus One and Optimus Chic use Froyo, the latest Android 2.2 platform, to enable faster browsing and smoother multitasking.
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This week’s unveiling of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab stoked the already formidable fire lit around tablet devices by Apple’s iPad. And with several other contenders coming to market in the coming months, tablets should be a common sight in the coming year, particularly in the workplace, thanks to their unique combination of power, simplicity, and portability. But will Microsoft, long prized for its business-centric offerings, manage to get in on the action?
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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A few days back I reported on the first operating system where you may see the Wayland Display Server used rather than an X.Org Server after talking with Kristian Høgsberg while in Toulouse. At the X.Org Developer Summit’ he talked to everyone about EGL in Mesa, which also plays an important role with Wayland.
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While the open-source Radeon DRM/KMS (along with the closed-source Catalyst) drivers have had support for audio over HDMI / DisplayPort, patches are finally moving along by Intel’s Zhenyu Wang for bringing up audio on Intel chipsets over these newest display interfaces.
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Applications
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Today I found another Linux CAD software that will be out soon, I’m talking about DraftSight. While not available yet in Linux version it’s a free alternative to other programs in 2d drawing. According to the manufacturer “Mac OS and Linux support will be available later this year”.
A very important feature related to Draftsight is the name of developer – Dassault Systemes – Don’t you know them? And if I mention the name SolidWorks? And Catia? Well, we are talking about a major cad dealer. Can this mean that we have competition on CAD software on Linux?
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Minitube 1.2 beta was just released, bringing a much requested feature: Gnome multimedia keys support as well as YouTube video downloads.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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A case is being made for a ‘Sent from Ubuntu’ signature to be appended to all mail sent from Ubuntu’s desktop e-mail application ‘Evolution’.
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While Ubuntu 10.10 installer revamp has caught everyone’s attention, Edubuntu on the other hand, is also having a complete installer overhaul. And it looks pretty neat too.
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Let’s elaborate. A “bug” was filed asking to add a “Sent using Ubuntu” signature by default to Evolution. How did this happen and who decided it was a bug? Judging by the way it was so quickly responded to, it seems like a decision made in Canonical behind closed doors and filed on Launchpad as a mere formality, with no input from users. The “bug” was then “fixed” by making Evolution copy the behavior of proprietary email interfaces like Microsoft Hotmail or Windows Live Foo or whatever its latest rebranding is called.
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The default Ambiance theme in Ubuntu 10.10 – and its lighter sibling Radiance – have received lots of due love and attention since Lucid and thusly many third-party browser “themes” have also been pepped up in anticipation.
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ITWire sat down with Tom Tom Australia marketing manager Nick Saisanas to go through the current range of navigation devices and touch on services for the future of the Sat Nav market.
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Phones
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Android
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Sharp has announced two phones for Chinese market; these smartphones will run on Tapas OS, which is based on Android. Tapas was announced a week back only by x-Google China president Kai-Fu Lee.
First of these two Tapas based phones, Sharp SH828U comes with a 3.5” WVGA screen, a 5MP Camera with AF and flash, Bluetooth, WiFi, microSD slot, and powered by a 600MHz Qualcomm MSM7227 processor.
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Alcatel has introduced its first Android phone – OT-980. Featuring a slide-out QWERTY keyboard and 2.8 inch touchscreen display, Alcatel OT-980 will ship with Android 2.1. Among other specifications, there is Wi-Fi, HSPA, E-Compass, Multi IM client an MP3 player and a 2MP camera.
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Android, Symbian to Vie for Dominance as Microsoft Phone Series Flounders
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Tablets
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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WEB BROWSER DEVELOPER Mozilla has released a benchmarketing tool that it says provides a more realistic representation of browser performance.
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Databases
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While we have yet to see any official release announcement, if you browse the PostgreSQL FTP server you can now find the final packages for PostgreSQL 9.0.0. This major update to PostgreSQL brings easy-to-use replication, mass permission-changing, anonymous code blocks, enhanced stored procedure support, exclusion constraints, deferrable unique constraints, and a variety of other enhancements.
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Oracle
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Oracle has delivered an updated version of its Secure Global Desktop that offers more browser flexibility, enhanced availability and seamless integration with VDI platforms.
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OpenOffice.org just finished their annual conference in Budapest, Hungary. One of the outcomes of the conference announced today is the need for developers to spend more time together to properly fix problems.
In light of this, OpenOffice.org decided to have a HackFest specifically targeted at developers. The idea here is for the developers to spend more time face to face working on the code. The OpenOfice.org HackFest is scheduled for November 5-7, 2010 in Hamburg. The location can be seen on Google Maps and Open Street Maps.
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However, when I got my hands on this book, OpenOffice.org Spreadsheet Macro Programming, I was curious and hoped to find I was wrong, that this would open up new opportunities for clients and organizations that want to get away from Microsoft Office, clients who are already using OpenOffice, so I was really interested to see the level of capability that Calc had in its macro programming.
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Instead you can download an alternative. Rather than add Open Office formats to the Open window, there are options available for opening and saving with the ODF format added to the File menu.
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Fullerton India saved crores of rupees by moving the bulk of its users onto the open source office suite.
[...]
Fullerton India Credit Co. Ltd. wanted to convert the bulk of its users from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice. It would turn out to be quite a complex project involving macro migration, some hardware upgrades and educating users at numerous locations. At that point of time, the company had 850 branches (6,000 PCs, 15,000 users). Currently, after consolidating and downsizing, it has 400 locations (4,000 PCs, 9,000 users).
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Hacking
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Ironically we started a little later as planned due to unforeseen traffic-jams for Yeri and Christophe. Nevertheless we did a great job and I want to start off by thanking all the participants and of course the hackerspace of Ghent.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Free software and open standards advocates are encouraging web users to put pressure on governments not to ‘advertise’ proprietary Adobe software as a tool for reading documents created in PDF format.
Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) is asking users to conduct a month-long ‘hunt’ for examples of what it says is the promotion of proprietary PDF readers.
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On Saturday, September 18, Melbourne will mark Software Freedom Day, a day observed worldwide to spread the message of free and open source software.
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“CERN is a leading partner of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) that provides the distributed computing infrastructure for scientists working on the LHC experiments. This infrastructure links more than 300 computer centers and provides access to 260,000 CPUs on which users run about 20 million jobs every month. These machines are operated under several GNU/Linux variants.
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We created a list of the things we still need for using the Hurd for in our day-to-day activities (work or hobby).
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Project Releases
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Version 3.5.5, which was released on Tuesday, fixes the underlying buffer overrun in functions used to generate a credential known as a Windows Security ID. It can be exploited by sending a booby-trapped ID that overflows the stack variable and injects malicious code into memory.
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Government
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Across Europe, several policy initiatives to implement rules that favour the adoption of Free Software and Open Standards in competitive tenders to public administration have been proposed or implemented. Many reasons have been posited to support such the favouring of such solutions, not least the evidence that proprietary software – through various mechanisms – is unjustly given preferential treatment in many tenders.2
Italy is no exception. The main national law that rules on software procurement of the Public Administration3 is agnostic, and does not go farther than to say that a Public Administration shall always choose between various options – one of which is procuring “open source” software – and that the choice should be made according to a technical and commercial comparison.4 In the national law one cannot find guidance as to how to evaluate the characteristics of the competing offers. This means that any public administration can decide by following the general principles of public procurement.
The Piedmont law was intended to take advantage of the limited but decisive role regional laws have in skewing the situation one way or the other. However, the national government objected to this approach, and the Constitutional Court found that it is constitutionally permissible for a regional law to try to alter the rules of the game of public procurement in order to favour one type of software offer over another, provided that certain conditions are met.
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Standards/Consortia
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Afghans headed to the polls today for parliamentary elections in a tense but hopeful atmosphere. If the Internet has a role to play this year in helping Afghanistan develop a peaceful civil society, it will probably turn on two key developments: cheap GPRS Internet delivered over mobile phones, and strong relationships with neighboring states to provide Internet transit.
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In-house lawyers at companies being investigated for competition law offences do not enjoy the same privacy rights for communications with their companies as lawyers from external firms, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has said.
The ECJ has ruled that in-house lawyers are in danger of suffering a conflict of interest because they have a duty to their permanent employer as well as to the law. They cannot be allowed the same legal professional privilege (LPP) as external lawyers because they are not independent, the Court said.
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Apple, Adobe Systems, Google, Intel, Intuit, and Pixar are reportedly looking to settle the allegations to avoid a courtroom face-off with the Justice Department. The companies have been trying to persuade the government that nonpoaching agreements are not anticompetitive because they help ensure that employees can work on projects with other firms without fear of being stolen away.
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Several of the U.S.’s largest technology companies are in advanced talks with the Justice Department to avoid a court battle over whether they colluded to hold down wages by agreeing not to poach each other’s employees.
The companies, which include Google Inc., Apple Inc., Intel Corp., Adobe Systems Inc., Intuit Inc. and Walt Disney Co. unit Pixar Animation, are in the final stages of negotiations with the government, according to people familiar with the matter.
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2015 is far too early, says the Consumer Expert Group in its report for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport today entitled Digital Radio Switchover: what is in it for consumers? to start the switchover process. The Group advises that any switchover should only occur when analog radio listening has fallen to 30 per cent of total listening – the current trigger is 50 per cent of “digital” – and says there is far more to do than the radio industry or current policy appreciates.
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WE REPORTED back in March that former IBM senior executive Robert Moffat, who was once lined up as a candidate for chief executive, collected his pink slip and did not pass go when he pleaded guilty to insider trading. He was the 11th person to do so in the Galleon hedge fund probe – the biggest insider trading scandal the US has seen for some time.
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Authorities say profits from illegal trades topped $50 million, though Moffat’s tips resulted in no profits and he received no money, lawyers on both sides agreed.
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A researcher has calculated the 2,000,000,000,000,000th digit of the mathematical constant pi – and a few digits either side of it.
Nicholas Sze, of tech firm Yahoo, said that when pi is expressed in binary, the two quadrillionth digit is 0.
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A federal inmate who once dubbed himself the “lawsuit Zeus” is so litigious that prosecutors are trying to put an end to the frivolous filings.
Jonathan Lee Riches has filed more than 3,800 lawsuits, targeting defendants ranging from the planet Pluto to former president George W. Bush, the Associated Press reports. The Bush suit claimed the president and his brother had snuck into prison to clone his brain. A motion in another case, chronicled by Above the Law, claimed Riches became addicted to video games, causing him to lose touch with reality and his mind to become a living video game.
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At a town hall-style meeting in L.A., Stephen G. Breyer says that the few times the court has acted under the sway of politics, the results have been disastrous.
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Edison2, a company based in Lynchburg, Va., won the $5 million top prize with its Edison2 Very Light Car. The competition was broken up into two classes: Mainstream, which was for four-seat vehicles, and Alternative, which had two divisions: two-seats side-by-side and two seats in a tandem, fighter-jet configuration.
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Hardware
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The new cards are no bigger than the one in your wallet, and is actually slightly more flexible. It can display information at the press of a button, and can become several different cards by rewriting its own magnetic strip.
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Intel’s latest business-model takes a page out of Hollywood’s playbook: they’re selling processors that have had some of their capabilities crippled (some of the cache and the hyperthreading support are switched off). For $50, they’ll sell you a code that will unlock these capabilities. Conceptually, this is similar to the DRM notion that I can sell you a movie that you can watch on one screen for $5 today, and if you want to unlock your receiver’s wireless output so you can watch it upstairs, it’ll be another $5.
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BRITISH CHIP DESIGN OUTFIT ARM is not flustered by Intel’s recent acquisitions and has been planning its assault on the laptop market for some time.
That’s the message coming from the UK firm, hot on the heels of Chinese chip outfit Nufront demonstrating its dual core 2GHz system-on-chip (SoC) based on ARM’s Cortex A9 architecture. Speculation has been rife that Intel’s round of big money acquisitions means that Chipzilla is gunning for the plucky British company in the mobile space, but Nufront’s announcement has repositioned ARM as being on the offensive.
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IN HIS KEYNOTE SPEECH at IDF 2010, Intel CEO Paul Otellini all but ruled out any more big acquisitions by the chipmaker within the next few years.
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STORAGE AND DISPLAY VENDOR Lacie is extending its RAID drive and external hard drive portfolios with a USB 3.0 external RAID hard drive.
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Health/Nutrition
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The food crisis of 2008 never really ended, it was ignored and forgotten. The rich and powerful are well fed; they had no food crisis, no shortage, so in the West, it was little more than a short lived sound bite, tragic but forgettable. To the poor in the developing world, whose ability to afford food is no better now than in 2008, the hunger continues.
Hunger can have many contributing factors; natural disaster, discrimination, war, poor infrastructure. So why, regardless of the situation, is high tech agriculture always assumed to be the only the solution? This premise is put forward and supported by those who would benefit financially if their “solution” were implemented. Corporations peddle their high technology genetically engineered seed and chemical packages, their genetically altered animals, always with the “promise” of feeding the world.
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The FDA is poised to approve sale of the first GMO animal for human consumption, a fast-growing Frankenfish that hasn’t been fully assessed for food safety or environmental hazards, and that has little benefit outside of corporate profits.
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As the Food and Drug Administration considers whether to approve genetically modified salmon, one thing seems certain: Shoppers staring at fillets in the seafood department will find it tough to pick out the conventional fish from the one created with genes from another species.
Despite a growing public demand for more information about how food is produced, that won’t happen with the salmon because of idiosyncracies embedded in federal regulations.
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The American Society for Microbiology and the American Cleaning Institute wanted to see how often people wash their hands in public restrooms. (It’s flu and cold season again!) And, they found the “dirt” on people’s hand-washing habits.
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Security/Aggression
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Paul Chambers, the Twitter joker victim, has been sacked from a second job a week before his appeal against a widely criticised conviction for sending a “threatening” message to to blow Doncaster airport “sky high”.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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The Czech data protection authority has confirmed that Google does not have the proper licence to continue collecting images for its Street View service.
The issue is not just about Wi-Fi data, as reported yesterday, but also images taken by its fleet of Street View cars which have already covered much of Prague, Český Krumlov and some major roads.
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A US APPEALS COURT has reversed itself on the idea of computer privacy that it had previously upheld.
Last year the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals issued a landmark data privacy ruling that curtailed the US government’s computer search and seizure powers. The ruling was made in the case of 104 US baseball players who had their hard drives ransacked by feds looking for evidence of drug use.
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A letter apparently from the Mozambique communications authority asked mobile networks to block text messages during food riots in the southern African country earlier this month.
Hundreds of people were arrested over the protests and 13 killed, after the government put up the price of bread by a third. Petrol and electricity also went up sharply. The riots were encouraged by round-robin text messages.
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The war between the video games industry and critics who think that playing violent games are harmful to children moves to the US Supreme Court in November.
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A mobile-marketing company claimed Friday it would go out of business unless a federal judge orders T-Mobile to stop blocking its text-messaging service, the first case testing whether wireless providers can block text messages they don’t like.
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Earlier today, EZ Texting, a mobile marketing company, filed suit in U.S. District Court in New York City against T-Mobile for unilaterally blocking its customers from exchanging text messages with EZ Texting’s customers, which the company said could put it out of business. The parts of the suit are here and here. The declaration of Shane Neman, CEO of EZ Texting, is here.
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You don’t have to assert something as a fundamental human right to believe that it provides a social good of deep, deep of value. So, I remain an Internet exceptionalist and fanatic. I am all in favor of providing Internet access to the world, preferably for free. (Of course, I’d first want to make sure everyone can read and write, and has electricity, has a full belly, and has access to medical care, so that they can use the Net in the first place. Also, so they can live.) Access to an open Internet is an incredible social good. We who have such access should cherish it, use it, spread it, share it, and fight to keep it open. Nevertheless, calling Net access a human right blurs the line between social goods and demandable human rights. That does not bring the Net to the world any faster, and diminishes the effect of claims of genuine human rights.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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The Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for business ISP Timico UK, Trefor Davies, has pitted two several homing pigeons – Rory and Tref – carrying a microSD card with 200MB of HD video data, against a fairly typical rural broadband connection to see which is faster.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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If voted in the European Parliament, the Gallo report will promote a dogmatic, repressive vision of Copyright for the future of EU policymaking, calling for instance for more repression of not-for-profit online filesharing. A recently tabled proposal for a resolution by the ALDE group contains the same inaccuracies and biased approach; it is almost as bad.
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Copyrights
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While most filmmakers shy away from anything remotely related to BitTorrent, Swedish director Stina Bergman has partnered with The Pirate Bay for the release of her latest movie. Today the film, titled “Die Beauty”, debuts in Swedish theaters as well as on The Pirate Bay.
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A failed three-year police investigation of a filesharing website, run in cooperation with the music industry, cost taxpayers at least £29,000, and probably much more.
Figures released by Cleveland Police detail some costs of Operation Ark Royal, a raid on invitation-only BitTorrent site OiNK.cd.
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The Nevada agency that regulates attorneys is looking into a grievance filed against the chief executive officer of Righthaven LLC, the Las Vegas copyright enforcement company that has sued at least 124 individuals and companies in North America since March over unauthorized online postings of Las Vegas Review-Journal stories.
The nature of the grievance hasn’t been disclosed except that someone filed it with the State Bar of Nevada against Righthaven CEO Steven Gibson, a Las Vegas attorney, and that it is related to Righthaven.
The State Bar calls complaints filed against attorneys by citizens or clients “grievances” so they’re not confused with “complaints” the State Bar may file against lawyers.
The grievance under investigation could relate to any number of allegations defense attorneys have made against Righthaven and its procedures — which are unusual for the newspaper industry — of detecting online infringements of Review-Journal material, obtaining copyrights to the infringed material and then suing over the retroactive infringements.
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Professor Richard Dawkins is one of the best known evolutionary biologists today. Affiliated with the University of Oxford and Berkeley, he is famous for his fierce and outspoken critique on religious institutions through his publications and documentaries. In common with many scientists, he wants his work to be read and seen by the public, even if that means ignoring copyright by going to The Pirate Bay.
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Over the last 36 hours or so, the ‘Anonymous’ masses and many unaffiliated sympathizers joined forces to attack the MPAA’s website. Continuing with ‘Operation Payback’, today an attack will be launched on the RIAA. The ultimate in decentralized protests will go ahead and there’s not a lawyer or police force in the world who can do anything about it. Is this the protest of the future?
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09.18.10
Posted in News Roundup at 8:14 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Want a finished product not requiring installation? Why not buy a PC with GNU/Linux installed for presents. Recipients will remember your generosity for years of trouble-free use and top performance.
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Desktop
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Late last year I did a posting detailing how Windows 7 crushed Ubuntu 9.10 in the area of 3D performance. Nine months later I am happy to say:
Linux out performs Windows 7 in OpenGL benchmarks!
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Dell, in China, has no qualms about putting Ubuntu before consumers. On their site they do “recommend that other OS” according to Google Translate but the Mini-10 comes in two models, one with Ubuntu and one with that other OS. That other OS is RM100 higher price. They even have N series with FreeDOS or “Linux Ubuntu 9.10“. Isn’t the outside of the USA a different world?
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Ballnux
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In it, a man and a woman are both lounging by the pool trying to read. But the man is having trouble reading on his iPad (which starts at $499) in the sunlight. He leans over to ask the woman how she is able to keep reading “in this light.”
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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The X.Org Developers’ Summit in Toulouse, France just ended and it’s time in the morning to head to Oktoberfest to meet with many Phoronix readers at this annual outing. XDS 2010 turned out to be a wonderful event and more organized than some X.Org events in the past. Thanks to the wonderful organization by Matthieu Herrb, the venue itself was nice, the social event last night was terrific, the Internet and power at the event was plenty, etc. Stay tuned for Phoronix notes and some audio/video recordings to be published in the coming days, beyond what has already been reported. At XDS 2010 it was also brought up where to host XDS 2011.
It was brought up whether to host the 2011 X.Org Developers’ Summit in Brazil, simply on the basis of the X.Org events usually being in the United States or Europe, even though that’s where a vast majority of the X.Org developers are located. No real reasons in favor of an XDS Brazil event were provided and there isn’t even any X.Org developers presently living in Brazil that could organize such an event. There were plenty of concerns though regarding the cost of transportation, the time needed to fly to Brazil for both Americans and Europeans, and just the overall location being inconvenient for everyone.
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The last talk of the 2010 X.Org Developers’ Summit was regarding X.Org Server 1.10. The good news is that nearly every X.Org graphics driver will not be merged back into the xorg-server repository.
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Applications
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Wine
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The Wine development release 1.3.3 is now available.
What’s new in this release (see below for details):
– Improved support for right-to-left text.
– Support for CMYK JPEG images.
– Beginnings of a Game Explorer implementation.
– Improved 64-bit support in MSI.
– Stub inetcpl control panel applet.
– A number of fixes to crypto support.
– Translation updates.
– Various bug fixes.
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PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Most employees working on the distribution were laid off when Edge-IT was liquidated. We do not trust the plans of Mandriva SA anymore and we don’t think the company (or any company) is a safe host for such a project.
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The Mandriva Linux distribution has been forked by a number of Mandriva contributors with the fate of this distribution formerly known as Mandrake being unknown due to financial troubles and layoffs facing Mandriva’s parent company. This new forked version of Mandriva is being called Mageia.
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Red Hat Family
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UBS strategist Thomas Doerflinger says in the note that the forces driving M&A activity include the economic slowdown and low interest rates. Also, the potential buyers have strong balance sheets and ample cash.
Red Hat’s market cap is close to $7.3 billion. The company employs about 2,800 worldwide.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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I’m not talking about valid criticism or difference in philosophy either, I’m talking about people who personally attack rms and/or simply lie about the FSF (ala recent attempts to suggest the FSF supports software patents to attack non-GPL software [1][2]).
I’m not sure how the Self-Loathing Free Software User gained traction in Ubuntu (or in any community for that matter), but it seems at odds with the messaging coming from Mr. Shuttleworth.
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These forecasts not only predict a growing number of devices being used by consumers, but also a growing amount of online content to feed those devices. Taken together, these projections create an optimistic short-term picture for the ereader market.
Turning to this week’s news: we’ve got announcements from Elonex, Ectaco, and Velocity Micro, as well as an update on the Samsung Galaxy Tab.
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Earlier in the year Linux Australia approved a grant for the production of a research note on the Trade Practices Implications of Infringing Copies of Open Source Software. The note has been completed and reviewed by the Linux Australia committee and is now ready for open release.
The main finding of the research is that a vendor selling an infringing copy of open source software is likely to be in breach of at least one section of Part V the Trade Practices Act 1974 (Cth) relating to misleading or deceptive statements or conduct, and likely more than one. There are many cases in which such breaches have been found in relation to infringing copies of software. Even where a vendor only offers to sell (as opposed to actually selling) an infringing copy they are still likely to be in breach of the Act.
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Netcraft reports that Apache has 66% share of the servers on the million busiest sites, 57% of all sites (up 1% which Apache stole from M$ last month), Since this demonstrates FLOSS works, it’s hard to see whence all the doom and gloom for GNU/Linux on the desktop comes.
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Databases
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“NoSQL” is a label which encompasses a wave of innovation now happening in the database space. The NoSQL movement has sparked a whirlwind of discussion, debate, and excitement in the technical community. Why is NoSQL generating so much buzz? What does it mean for you, the application developer? And what place does NoSQL have for apps running on the Heroku platform?
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CMS
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Education
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We have all read articles with 5 or 10 reasons to love/hate some facet of IT. I thought I would go for 50. It is not hard. What is hard is putting them in order of importance/preference. The first few are easy. The last few are a coin-flip, but there are many reasons to love GNU/Linux in education.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Other things that encourage both my use and support of free software are the heavy handed application of Digital Rights Management (DRM) and Technical Protection Measures (TPM). These are methods employed in hardware and software to force your tech stuff to be subservient to the manufacturer. In many if not most cases DRM/TPM result in degrading the hardware or software, sometimes making it difficult to use, sometimes just crippling it so that things that should work don’t, and sometimes breaking it so that it doesn’t work at all. It used to be inadvertent “bugs” were the biggest problem in running software. Today it’s deliberate DRM. I suppose you could put DRM on free software but people would know what it was and correct it out. As far as I’m concerned, DRM is as much malware as spyware or viruses. If it is going to be allowed at all, it needs to be clearly labelled. The fact that it is not and consumers only know about it after they’ve purchased it is a huge government #fail
The biggest thing free software has done to change my outlook is that it has changed my way of thinking. Because the principals behind free software can be applied in many more things. For me, it’s made me rethink the idea of copyright, and then rethink it again. It has in fact encouraged me to join what Cory Doctorow calls the copyfight. As a writer, I’m embracing the concept of self publishing, and I will be releasing my debut novel under a Creative Commons License.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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Information generated and collected by public sector bodies represents a veritable gold mine: optimal access to and reuse of this public sector information (PSI) has a positive impact on market services improvements, but also on the democratic involvement of citizens in governmental decisions.
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This initially looked very promising: Mars, along with a number of collaborators (USDA, IBM, Clemson University Genomics Institute; Public Intellectual Property Resource for Agriculture at the University of California-Davis; National Center for Genome Resources; Center for Genomics and Bioinformatics at Indiana University; HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology; and Washington State University), have sequenced the cacao genome and released it “Open Access” and “public domain” for the benefit of all, at a site called the Cacao Genome Project…
[...]
Clearly, this data set has not been released as Open Access and certainly not released into the public domain.
Instead of Open Access or public domain, they have a restrictive license, which allows gated access for a restricted set of uses.
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As with top-posting, not trimming your replies is lazy, and again, it’s rude. Some people don’t have the hard drive space you might, or the bandwidth to pull down such a noisy message. Cutting out the cruft, leaving the relevant pieces in, is considerate, polite and logically sound. Do you, and everyone else a favor, and trim your replies.
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Michael Jackson’s family has sued AEG Live claiming the event production company is responsible for Jackson’s death.
Here’s the complaint, filed today in Los Angeles Superior Court by Katherine Jackson on behalf of the family. The lawsuit claims AEG, president and CEO Tim Leiweke, Anschutz Entertainment and others are responsible for Jackson’s death because his contract with AEG for the planned “This Is It” tour created a legal duty to keep him healthy.
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It is both striking and important to recognize how relatively little the pre-modern state actually knew about the society over which it presided. State officials had only the most tenuous idea of the population under their jurisdiction, its movements, its real property, wealth, crop yields, and so forth. Their degree of ignorance was directly proportional to the fragmentation of their sources of information. Local currencies and local measures of capacity (e.g., the bushel) and length (the ell, the rod, the toise) were likely to vary from place to place and with the nature of the transacting parties. The opacity of local society was, of course, actively maintained by local elites as one effective means of resistance to intrusions from above.
Having little synoptic, aggregate intelligence about the manpower and resources available to it, officials were apt either to overreach in their exactions, touching off flight or revolt, or to fail to mobilize the resources that were, in fact, available. To follow the process of state-making, then, is to follow the conquest of illegibility. The account of this conquest — an achievement won against stiff resistance — could take many forms, for example: the creation of the cadastral survey and uniform property registers, the invention and imposition of the meter, national censuses and currencies, and the development of uniform legal codes.
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Health/Nutrition
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The US Corn Refiners Association has petitioned the FDA for permission to change the name “High Fructose Corn Syrup” to the much more innocuous-sounding “Corn Sugars.” This comes as 58% of Americans say they are concerned about HFCS’s impact on their health. HFCS is a heavily subsidized industrial byproduct of the corn industry, and is ubiquitous in American processed food — everything from Rice Krispies to “healthy” granola bars.
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Obesity costs the US economy at least 215 billion dollars a year in direct and indirect impacts including medical expenses and lost productivity, a new study showed Tuesday.
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Security/Aggression
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This week will see the appeal by Paul Chambers of his conviction under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003.
He was convicted – and so given a criminal record – for what was, and what was intended to be, a joke contained in a tweet.
[...]
They send several anti-terrorist officers around to Paul’s workplace.
(Unsurprisingly, Paul loses his job very soon after.)
The police arrest Paul and keep him in custody for a number of hours.
However, it appears that even the police do not think this is a serious matter.
But again “process” means it needs to be taken further. And so the case is referred to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).
The CPS realise quickly that there is no evidence for Paul to be prosecuted under the bomb hoax legislation.
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NY jury convicts body-armor company founder of running $190 million stock scheme
The founder of America’s leading supplier of body armor to the U.S. military was convicted Tuesday of charges that he ran a $190 million stock scheme.
David H. Brooks, founder and former chief executive of DHB Industries Inc., was convicted of 17 counts, including securities fraud and conspiracy. Prosecutors said he used the company treasury for personal luxuries, with more than $6 million in unauthorized expenditures.
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Usually the Pentagon expends time and technological effort to protect information. But now the far-out researchers at Darpa are looking for a few good futurists to help the Obama administration declassify reams of national security documents.
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Whistleblower website WikiLeaks is teaming up with news outlets to release a “massive cache” of classified US military field reports on the conflict in Iraq, Newsweek magazine reported recently.
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Assange, 39, has said the allegations against him are part of a “smear campaign” aimed at discrediting his website, which is locked in a row with the Pentagon over the release of secret US documents about the war in Afghanistan.
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Also on list: Royal Caribbean, Deutsche Bank, Chevron
Almost three years ago exactly — Sept. 17, 2007 — a cadre of guards from the security firm then known as Blackwater shot and killed 17 Iraqis at a public plaza in Baghdad.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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But the idea of learning from the success of the Dutch is not far-fetched. The Netherlands resembles the United States as a prosperous, technologically advanced nation where a huge share of the population owns automobiles. They simply don’t drive them each and every time they leave home, thanks to common sense transportation policies where biking and transit are promoted as an attractive alternative to the car. Indeed, millions of Dutch commuters combine bike and train trips, which offers the point-to-point convenience of the automobile and the speed of transit.
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It’s an effort that has the support of top national leadership: in fact Chiyoda, home of the nation’s Imperial Palace and the Prime Minister’s Office, is one of the Eco-Cities. It has a population of 45,000 at night but swells with 800,000 government and business day tripper commuters. By 2050, the city portends a reduction in its volume of auto commuters: Chiyoda aims to reduce its greenhouse gases 50% from 1990 levels by that date.
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This is how all energy industry events should begin. The World Energy Congress kicks off today in Montreal and as delegates arrived at the conference venue, hundreds of demonstrators were there to tell them that the industry needs to go beyond oil, and that dirty and risky fuels weren’t welcome here.
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In the North, in Haparanda, Greenpeace activists marked and sealed off the potato fields that were recently discovered to be contaminated with the illegal, unauthorised genetically engineered potato, named Amadea. Simultaneously, activists protested outside the Swedish Board of Agriculture office building in Jönköping, calling for the authority to order a full destruction of the contaminated fields in order to prevent further spread.
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I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised. After all, this is the energy industry talking to itself. But the reality is – as I said to the Congress yesterday – that the industry and governments that regulate it are accountable to us, the citizenry. And comforting words don’t do much good for those people still cleaning up in the Gulf of Mexico after the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster, those people who have had their waterways and their air polluted by dirty energy or those who are suffering at the hands of greenhouse pollution-driven climate change.
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After five months, the oil well that had spewed millions of gallons into the Gulf of Mexico is on the verge of being plugged once and for all.
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SEVEN FOREIGNERS working for French companies were kidnapped in a uranium mining region of Niger yesterday.
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BP and its partners in the blown-out Gulf well said on Monday that thousands of fishermen, seafood processors, restaurants, hotel owners and others may not yet have the right to sue over the spill, according to court papers.
BP and its partners such as Transocean Ltd and Halliburton Co said the majority of alleged victims who have brought about 400 lawsuits must first take their claims to a $20 billion fund established by BP.
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Finance
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In China, whose economy this year officially surpassed Japan’s as the world’s second largest, the number living below the international poverty line fell from 60.2 percent in 1990 to 15.9 percent in 2005. By 2015, it is forecast to be 5 percent.
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The new small business legislation intended to support startups is based entirely on debt — getting banks to lend money to small companies. But the only kind of debt that most tech startups know is credit card debt. Little tech companies grow by selling equity, not borrowing money. Short-term debt goes on plastic at 18 or 23 percent because no bank has — or will — lend to real tech startups in any significant amount.
They’ll finance new Burger King franchises, but lend money for electric cars or new kinds of data storage or — shudder — software? Forget about it.
Presidents Obama and Bush didn’t know this, Fed chairman Bernanke doesn’t know it, nor does Treasury secretary Geithner. None of these men have a minute’s experience with tech startups, yet our economy is almost entirely dependent on those startups for real recovery.
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In conclusion I suspect that is the way they want it. After all, as far as I can tell, Basel is a set of self-imposed rules by the banking system and their regulators and they are primarily concerned with their own survival, not the well being of the economy from a monetary standpoint. It should be no surprise that they avoid the larger question of systemic stability by monetary self-regulation. Beware of the invisible hand, it may be robbing your back pocket!
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A Commissioner of Cuyahoga County in Ohio was arrested by FBI agents early Wednesday morning as part of a larger federal probe into corruption in the county.
Seven other Cuyahoga County officials, labor leaders, and business people have also been arrested.
Commissioner Jimmy Dimora, age 55, is accused of using his public office to obtain free home improvements, prostitutes, and trips.
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In all, banks repossessed 95,364 properties last month, up 3 percent from July and an increase of 25 percent from August 2009, RealtyTrac said.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The latest documents come from a court case brought against Wyeth by around 14,000 patients who developed breast cancer while taking Prempro, the hormone replacement therapy (HRT).
The open access journal PLoS Medicine, acting with the New York Times, argued successfully in court that 1,500 documents which detailed the ghostwriting should be placed in the public domain, because they represent information on a potential threat to public health.
Now, PLoS has published the first academic analysis of these documents, which is free to access online.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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AN EXERCISE is currently underway to enter every resident in India on a database. In a few years, the unique identification (UID) is intended to become a ubiquitous number, to be used in many operations: enrolling in a school, maintaining a bank account, ticketing for travel, seeking treatment in a hospital and having one’s death recorded in a mortuary register.
The sales pitch for the UID is, like most advertisements, intended to mislead. Enrolment is said to be voluntary. But, and as is now acknowledged, other agencies may refuse to provide a service if an individual is not enrolled, making it compulsory. The Working Paper of the UID Authority of India (UIDAI), which has been the basis of many discussions, starts with a claim that the UID will bring down barriers that prevent the poor from accessing services; but quickly adds: “UID will only guarantee identity, not rights, benefits and entitlements.”
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Participants from throughout the world are gathered in Vilnius, Lithuania, this week for the fifth-annual Internet Governance Forum.
The IGF is an annual United Nations-sponsored event where representatives from governments, nonprofits, academic institutions, and businesses worldwide discuss a broad range of policy issues including online safety, privacy, rights of children, equality issues and other topics pertaining to the way the Internet is affecting every country.
The goal of IGF is “to foster the sustainability, robustness, security, stability and development of the Internet.”
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The protester who burned pages from the Koran outside a planned mosque near Ground Zero has been fired from NJTransit, sources and authorities said Tuesday.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Why do we suspect that cable operators see online video as a threat and may try to use “managed services” exceptions to Net Neutrality rules to crush it? How about deals like this.
Time Warner Cable has decided not to do any deals with the premium movie channel Epix, home to movies from studios like Viacom, Lions Gate, and MGM. Why? Because Epix decided to cut a deal with Netflix for streaming access to its movies.
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I started the wiki because I think we need it. Just over the past few weeks we’ve been treated to news coverage of a joint proposal from Google and Verizon, which I found muddled in ways that show why we need a finer understanding of the many topics involved. The FCC has released a request for comments that shows they’re trying to hone in on the distinctions. And a recent article where I made an initial stab at dissecting the arguments was well received and summarized in Forbes online.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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She even goes so far as to post a list of websites “illegally” using her name, as well as a copy of the cease and desist letter (pdf) her lawyers will send you. Now, it may very well be that some of the sites in question are, in fact, violating her trademark (and at least one of the pages I’ve found does appear pretty questionable from a trademark standpoint) but the blanket claim that “it is illegal to use the name on any website without prior written permission” is simply false. That’s not how trademark law works. Dr Ann De Wees Allen does, in fact, have a trademark on her name, used in commerce related to dietary supplements, but just because you have a trademark, it does not mean you have complete control of the mark.
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Copyrights
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Emmanuel Nimley, 22, yesterday received a 6-month sentence for filming movies with his iPhone at The Vue cinema in Harrow and uploading them to silverscreen.com. His motive: self-glory. The Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) say this is the first-ever UK prison sentence for ‘camming’.
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Following a call to arms yesterday, the masses inhabiting the anonymous 4chan boards have carried out a huge assault on a pair of anti-piracy enemies. The website of Aiplex Software, the anti-piracy outfit which has been DDoSing torrent sites recently, is currently down having been DDoS’d. They are joined in the Internet wasteland by the MPAA’s website, also currently under huge and sustained attack.
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Lately, I’ve been playing around with various music locker services, just to get a better understanding of how they work and to be able to access my (legally purchased) music collection on various machines and devices. So far, they’re all a bit limited, but it shouldn’t be long until they get better. However, the industry has always hated music locker services, and insisted that they somehow violate their copyright, even when the lockers simply allow individuals to place shift their own legal music. There’s an ongoing lawsuit over Michael Robertson’s MP3Tunes for which a decision is expected shortly. At the same time, Apple has been trying to quietly enter the market without disturbing the record labels.
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So how much did this entertainment-industry driven mess cost UK taxpayers? Well, police refused to release that information for a while, claiming that it “could undermine any ongoing and future investigations and cause potential damage to the criminal justice process.” Uh, right. About the only way it would do that is when people realized how much money was being wasted on bogus investigations. Eventually, however, it came out that the investigation itself cost about £29,000 — including £7,800 on overtime (OiNK after dark?) and £4,300 on “travel and subsistence.” Of course that doesn’t even get into what the actual trial cost taxpayers, which I’m sure is many times greater than that.
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In the most unique screening experiment we’ve heard of in a while (sorry, Jonah Hill), Magnolia Pictures and the Green Film Company will offer a pay-what-you-want preview of Freakonomics: The Movie on Sept. 22 for audiences in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington D.C., Chicago, Boston, Dallas, Philadelphia, Denver, and Seattle. The adaptation of Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt’s best-selling book applies economics-based thinking to everyday human behavior, using a “dream team” of documentary filmmakers like Seth Gordon (The King Of Kong), Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me), and Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room) to examine everything from Sumo wrestling to baby names to students who are paid to study harder, and by participating in this screening—which requires filling out a short questionnaire—you’ll actually become part of a Freakonomics study yourself, in keeping with the book’s examination of how people interact with a pay-what-you-want bagel service.
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But, really, the bigger issue, is that in suing and sending takedowns over this video, all Fox has done is draw significantly more attention to the story itself and the negative impression of Blunt. If I had to guess, I’d say that Carnahan has never been so happy to be sued. It’s tons of free advertising on an attack ad on her opponent.
And, of course, if the video is found to be fair use — as I would bet it would be — we’ll have yet another example of how the DMCA’s takedown process is a clear violation of free speech. Even if the video is eventually allowed back online due to a counter-notice, copyright law was being used to silence political speech in the middle of a campaign.
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ACTA
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The European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS) is an international non-profit association that endeavours to promote a favourable environment for interoperable ICT solutions. Its members include both large and small companies in the ICT sector such as IBM, Nokia, Oracle, Opera, and Red Hat.
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A representative from Internet Society (ISOC) proposed to extend the open and global multi-stakeholder approach of the IGF, its unique and sucessful governance model, to other processes such as the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement negotiations. The ACTA addresses Internet Governance issues along Camembert and is negotiated by a small coalition of supportive trade administrations.
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Stallman receiving Torvalds award at LinuxWorld conf 1999
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in News Roundup at 8:33 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Server
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Now that Oracle has largely ended support for OpenSolaris, many Solaris users and customers that continued to be on the fence about the OS will finally be making their decision to either stay with Solaris or move over to Linux. Unix migration to Linux has always been a mainstay for enterprise Linux adoption, and while the low-hanging fruit is becoming more sparse, there is still plenty of Unix migration to Linux to come. We have seen cases in Linux communities where the most significant Unix in their world is OpenSolaris, and while we hear similar things regarding Solaris and its continued market presence, there is no question OpenSolaris — a fully open source OS with available binaries — was a much better fit for the growing ranks of Linux-savvy developers and administrators.
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The purpose of this post is to make you aware that beginning in September, Cloud Servers customers will be billed for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) instances on a monthly rather than hourly basis. Due to changes in our subscription arrangements with Red Hat, we can no longer offer Cloud customers hourly billing for RHEL licenses. Rackspace will begin charging our customers a monthly licensing fee, starting in September. This license fee will not be prorated.
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Moving over to the GP-GPU world, the NVidia GPU Conference is next week, I was going to attend, but I had a scheduling conflict come up. Look for some good stuff to come out of this event. Since I won’t be on the west coast next week, I will probably attend the one day HPC Financial Markets event in New York City. This show used to be called “High Performance on Wall Street,” which has a small, but free exhibit.
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Reviewing HPC hardware is not easy. You usually need to travel to a data center and look at a rack of servers while someone tells you where they landed on the Top500 list. One could review a server, but basically they are all pretty much the same inside. They are running Linux and use either AMD or Intel processors. In addition, testing a cluster takes time because running meaningful programs that exercise the whole system must be done carefully. And finally, clusters are not sitting on the “shelf” as they vary by customer due to possible packaging, interconnect, processor, and storage choices.
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IBM
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When I look back upon my long career, one of the major factors shaping my views of business, strategy and innovation is the creative destruction that I saw buffeting the IT industry over most of that time. In particular, having lived through IBM’s own near-death experience, respect – if not fear – for the hurricane-power forces of disruptive change is edged deep down in my psyche.
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Ballnux
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Today in New York, Samsung announced the launch of the Samsung Media Hub. The service, which features Next-Day TV Shows, Movies, and sharing (for up to 5 media hub enabled devices), will be available for Samsung Galaxy Tab and Galaxy S devices.
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The Galaxy Tab is the first in a number of Android tablets that have been announced or rumored for release either in late 2010 or early 2011. At 7″, Galaxy Tab may well be the new stocking stuffer for Android fans, but for now, customers will have to wait to find out when they can buy it and for how much.
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Kernel Space
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Our two prior articles have detailed the performance results from a new patch, bcache, that uses SSDs to cache hard drives. We’ve looked at the throughput and IOPS performance of bcache and — while it is still very new and under heavy development — have found that in some cases it can help performance. This article examines the metadata performance of bcache hoping to also find areas where it can further boost performance.
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Graphics Stack
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Nothing too exciting was learned during this time about Wayland, but there was a brief demonstration of this lightweight display server that leverages kernel mode-setting, Mesa EGL, and other technologies.
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Applications
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What this means is that if I resize an image, shrinking it from whatever large size to 600 pixels wide, gThumb remembers this, and the next time I resize a picture, 600px is the default value, and all I need to do is click a box and I’m done. Since I’m often (or usually) resizing everything to the same size, this is a feature that’s saving me tremendous amounts of time.
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Guayadeque is built using the wxWidgets toolkit, a popular C++ library designed for writing graphical applications, and is included in the Ubuntu Maverick repositories. Let me list some of the major features Guayadeque offers:
- 10-band equalizer, including presets
- sortable playlists with column attributes which can be added or removed
- music library, which show artists, albums with covers and labels
- static and dynamic playlists
- support for online radios
- Last.fm integration and song submission
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PeaZip 3.3 is released, this release brings various fixes and an improved user interface focused in better integration with web search (optionally on multiple search engines at once) and in launching favorite applications, scripts or websites/web services from PeaZip.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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We also refreshed Bordeaux for BSD and Linux five times this year, and added support for Mozilla FireFox, Apple Safari, Google SketchUp, VLC Multimedia player and updated to the latest IrfanView release. Bundled Wine 1.2.0, added support for Pulse Audio, updated and cleaned up our custom winetricks script and we also fixed a number of bugs and tweaked the install scripts for cleaner installs.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical and Ubuntu, has penned an interesting post about their involvement and contribution to the open source/free software community. He is responding to some criticism that Canonical is not giving enough back. Mark makes an excellent point that there are many ways to give back and Canonical and Ubuntu have focus on making Linux more accessible to a wider audience. To me this makes perfect sense and Canonical should be applauded for their contributions to the community.
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Up next, let’s pull from the Planet Gnome FAQ, “It generally helps to write a few words about you and your contributions to GNOME, or why you think your blog should appear on Planet GNOME”. Looking at the bug that was filed we find no explanation as to why it should be added other than “I contribute via Canonical”. This phrase is going to be flogged by those people that were/are irked with Canonicals level of contributions upstream.
Lastly, since Mark is the CEO of a company, does this mean Gnome supports his company more than say…CEO of Red Hat or Novell since those CEO’s are not added on Planet Gnome? Does this constitute a conflict of interest? Does it signal favoritism? If one person believes it to be this way, everyone loses…because there will be a debate about it and it WILL divide people and not unite them.
To be honest, I can’t believe Mark even asked to be on Planet Gnome as the CEO of Canonical. He should know right out of the gate that it would look bad if he was added in…if it were me, I’d remove myself immediately.
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Here at Ubuntu we love to give training sessions over IRC. Since Developer and App Developer Week cover the more advanced end of the spectrum we have something for normal users — Ubuntu Open Week: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuOpenWeek
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Phones
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Nokia/MeeGo
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With a resigned CEO and the head of the smartphone division, all is not well with Nokia. What I am actually wondering is, how impossible is it to manufacture Android based devices? Yes Symbian is great, but it looks more like a dying breed to me. Is it at all possible that the two platforms could be marketed side by side to the myriad of markets that Nokia is found in?
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While Android is all poised to become the most popular mobile phone OS by 2014, what about the other open source, *truly* Linux, mobile OS platform, MeeGo? Well, MeeGo might just become the most popular open source In-Vehicle Infotainment platform!
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Android
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Today finds another leak that basically confirms all the Android devices we saw listed. TmoNews has obtained a pair of internal T-Mobile accessory listing that makes reference to multiple phones, some by their project names. If you weren’t already doing it, start looking forward to Motorola Begonia, Motorola Jordan, LG Optimus T, and myTouch HD.
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Sub-notebooks
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If you need to do some serious typing (or run out of the battery of both the tablet and phone-core), you can dock the tablet into a stand with a keyboard which makes the device a proper netbook/laptop and gives you an extra 12000 (!!!) mAh battery capacity. When this happens, you may switch the computing core to a full Ubuntu Linux from the Android you used on the MID. This is done with a dedicated hardware button (called the AI button).
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Sonar is a Stable and well-mantained code, with an high mark in Maturity (3.5 years old) and Stability. Sonar is becoming increasingly popular among developers, unfortunately there are not available books yet.
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- Doug Cutting, Chairman
- Jim Jagielski, President
- Greg Stein, Vice Chairman
- Noirin Shirley, Executive Vice President
- Geir Magnusson, Jr., Treasurer
- Craig Russell, Secretary
- Sam Ruby, Assistant Secretary
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Events
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New Delhi, Delhi, India, Saturday, September 18, 2010 — (Business Wire India)
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Web Browsers
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SaaS
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Speaking to ZDNet Asia in an interview Monday, Raghu Ramakrishnan, chief scientist of audience and cloud computing research at Yahoo, noted that the Internet company has not been involved in “many cloud conversations” today as these revolve around “low-level cloud services”, but it is still very much in the game.
Elaborating, he said that many of today’s cloud services such as those provided by Amazon Web Services and Salesforce.com, are basically infrastructure products with “baked-in” apps that can be used straight out from the box.
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One of our key deliverables in keeping with this commitment was to publish a Governance process shortly after the establishment of the community, and to ensure that the process outlined contained active involvement and representation from the community.
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Databases
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Business
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Opsview, the open source network and application monitoring vendor, today announced it has teamed up with Canonical, the Ubuntu service provider, to help drive the enterprise adoption of Opsview Enterprise with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Server Edition. Opsview has grown rapidly within the managed service provider and financial services space; key strategic verticals for Canonical.
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Semi-Open Source
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Having become the dominant supplier of enterprise services for both the Alfresco open source content management system and the Lucene/Solr open source enterprise search platform, this acquisition will broaden Ixxus’ technology and open source portfolio, giving them a new strong foothold in the financial services industry.
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Funding
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Sonatype was founded by Jason Van Zyl, the original author of the Apache Maven build and project management software, and the creator of Maven Central, the primary cloud-based repository for software distribution in the open source world.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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We are proud to announce that the Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT (AITI-KACE) in collaboration with the FLOSSInclude Project will again be hosting a special event on Saturday, September 18th under the theme “Knowing the alternative software solutions”. The venue for this year’s celebrations is the AITI-KACE premises and the time is 9:30 – 15:00. This is the biggest international celebration and outreach event for Software Freedom globally involving hundreds of teams from all around the world.
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Government
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Directgov Innovate strongly advocates the use of open source software and we want your views on the best ways to licence government and public projects.
Which licence do you think would best suit our projects? While copyright would remain with the Crown, we could choose either a very permissive licence, perhaps MIT or BSD. These would allow the code to be used again in closed or open software. Alternatively we could require that the code is kept open, by using a licence like the GNU GPL. You can find a list of approved licences at the The Open Source Initiative website.
The first project we are looking to release is Spark, a platform designed to share and showcase innovation from all areas of public and civil society. With limited exceptions the technology underpinning Spark is open source, including PHP, MySQL and the Symfony Framework. We host Spark on a Linux webserver.
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Openness/Sharing
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While it got less attention, Google also opened up a bit more by allowing all OSI-approved open source licenses, including the AGPL on its Google Code, a move that was also met with cheers from some. This comes as a welcome change from Google, which had previously resisted the AGPL.
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The following is an investigation into the difficulties of extending the open-source collaboration model from coding to its next logical step: interface design. While we’ll dive deep into the practical difference between these two professional fields, the article might also serve as a note of caution to think before rushing to declare the rise of “open-source architecture,” “open-source university,” “open-source democracy” and so on.
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Programming
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Standards/Consortia
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The QNX Momentics tool suite offers a comprehensive Eclipse-based IDE with innovative profiling tools to help developers gain maximum insight into system behaviour. Version 6.5 of the suite introduces support for the Eclipse platform 3.5.2, Eclipse CDT 6.0 and GNU compiler (GCC) 4.4.2. The compiler offers optimised dynamic linking, including lazy linking and GNU hashing.
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Science
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You’ve probably heard of hand-held 3D scanners before, but CreaForm produces units specifically designed for “body capture”. No, they’re not ensnaring people in nets, but rather they take a 3D digital picture in the form of a 3D model. (Actually any of these formats: .OBJ, .FBX, .DXF, .STL, .VRML, .LWO, .MAYA, .HRC, .3DS). The awkwardly named “MegaCapturor 3D Body Digitizer” has an amazing sub-millimetre resolution even at a distance of over a metre.
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A new fuel cell is putting a twist on alternative energy from biofuels: The implanted device draws power from chemicals in living animals.
Dubbed a glucose biofuel cell, the implant gets its juice from glucose—aka blood sugar—and oxygen, both of which are naturally present in the fluids between a body’s cells.
In a recent study, researchers created a test version of their glucose biofuel cell and implanted it in a white lab rat named Ricky. The rat sported the device successfully for 11 days and suffered no ill effects.
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DOCTORS and nurses take note – rubbing your hands together in a hand dryer leaves them coated with more bacteria than just after you washed them. Even normal skin bacteria may be bad news for sick people.
“When you rub your hands, you bring a lot of bacteria to the surface from the pores of your skin,” says Anna Snelling of the University of Bradford, UK. She asked 14 volunteers to dry their hands for 15 seconds using three different types of air dryer, sometimes rubbing their hands together and sometimes not.
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Security/Aggression
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The point here, though, is that in 2010 we are still looking for a method to connect to systems without having to register with all of them. And with all our current solutions, we still have not quite got that problem solved. And if someone mentions web of trust I might scream. Because, after all, that is the root of the problem, or at least one of them.
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Finance
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1) someone at Goldman got his or her panties in a twist when their “shitty deal,” email went viral, and is now insisting that Partners, VPs, Managing Directors – everyone at Goldman – waste their time, stop their train of thought, and fart it up with nicer words that feel unnatural and nobody really uses, and 2) that is ridiculous (much like the upcoming slideshow) and 3) the senate would have been just as furious if instead of “shitty deal,” “this is not a good deal” had been written, we’ve created a slideshow of swearing by “role models” like Gary Cohn and Jamie Dimon on Wall Street.
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Last month I suggested that the little hook downward in California employment, reported for July, was a troubling sign. Today, fresh data was released from the State of California, and the downward move has continued. Whereas employment levels had just managed to hang on above the 16 million person level in July–in August they slipped back below, to 15.968 million. | see: California Employment in Millions 2000-2010.
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President Obama picked a woman Wall Street loathes to crack down on unscrupulous behavior in the financial industry.
Harvard Law School Prof. Elizabeth Warren will launch the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, answering directly to Obama and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the President announced Friday.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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One said Toxic Sludge is Good for You was “one of the top five most important books in my lifetime.” CMD’s founder, John Stauber conceived of the book, and this watchdog group, while fighting PR spin and intimidation efforts from Monsanto. Increasing corporate influence and ever-stealthier lobbying and propaganda techniques make this book more relevant than ever.
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Two national watchdog groups have filed separate complaints against the U.S. Chamber of Commerce requesting criminal investigations for tax fraud, money laundering, and campaign finance violations. The first, filed with the Washington, DC FBI Field Office by StopTheChamber.com, was predicated on a letter sent to the organization´s attorney, Kevin Zeese, from an insider at the Chamber who alleged in significant detail that the Chamber and its CEO Tom Donohue are engaged in a massive scam to support Mr. Donohue´s “lavish lifestyle.” Mr. Zeese wrote:
“On August 4, 2010, we received a letter from a purported Chamber of Commerce insider in response to our latest reward offer. In short, the insider compares Tom Donohue to Jack Abramoff, Michael Scanlon and Bernie Madoff, in the manner in which he is scamming clients to serve his own interests rather than the interests of the business community. He alleges fraud, campaign finance violations and financial impropriety that could be uncovered with a criminal investigation. Equally troubling is that he alleges that Mr. Donohue does not fear the FEC or Congress and has a plan in place to attack the Department of Justice if the DOJ investigates him.”
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A year-old, anti-Muslim email has resurfaced and is curculating once again, riding the latest wave of U.S. anti-Muslim bigotry. The email urges people to boycott a U.S. postage stamp that recognizes the Islamic holiday of EID. The stamp, which rumor-mongers refer to as a “Muslim Christmas Stamp,” was first issued about ten years ago, and is one of six seasonal postage stamps the United States Postal Service sells that commemorate Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, EID, snowmen and music makers.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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A Wall Street Journal investigation into online privacy has found that popular children’s websites install more tracking technologies on personal computers than do the top websites aimed at adults.
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David Ramli: Why did you choose to name your free software system GNU?
Richard Stallman: Because it’s funny. And since we announced the movement in 1983, which was 27 years ago, to call it the new system would be extremely misleading.
DR: The Government’s planned mandatory ISP filter is practically dead now. Should people keep talking about it?
RS: Australia already has Internet censorship and it has censorship of links. Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) made a link to a foreign political website and it got threatened with a fine of $11,000 per day if it did not remove that link. This is censorship and it has to be abolished.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Intel threatened legal action Friday against anybody who uses its proprietary crypto key — leaked on the internet — to produce hardware that defeats the so-called HDCP technology that limits home recording of digital television and Blu-ray.
“There are laws to protect both the intellectual property involved as well as the content that is created and owned by the content providers,” said Tom Waldrop, a spokesman for the company, which developed HDCP. “Should a circumvention device be created using this information, we and others would avail ourselves, as appropriate, of those remedies.”
Gaming In Linux : Rollercoaster Tycoon
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:18 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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That desktop Linux offers myriad compelling advantages for business users is no longer the subject of much debate. All that remains for many Windows users is to give it a try.
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Using Linux is “almost natural, but you still need to poke around to be really fluent — just as in any OS with a lot of features,” Pogson added.
“I have exposed Grade 1 kids to GNU /Linux GNOME desktops, and after they learned to click a mouse they were off to the races,” he recounted. “They were the only humans able to max out that terminal server.”
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Server
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Red Hat is facing another competition from Amazon on form of Linux AMI. Amazon has announced the availability of the Amazon Linux AMI.
The Amazon Linux AMI is a supported and maintained Linux image provided by Amazon Web Services for use on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). “It is designed to provide a stable, secure, and high performance execution environment for applications running on Amazon EC2,” claims Evangelist Jeff Barr in his blog post.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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On September 9 the news of Broadcom’s release of the code for some of its wireless Ethernet chip sets sent shockwaves throughout the Linux community. Broadcom owners, as well as distribution developers have a reason to celebrate.
In the past, Broadcom owners had to resort to NDISwrapper or rely upon the limited reversed engineered drivers. Neither was optimal. The release of the code by Broadcom should eventually mean a much better Wi-Fi experience for owners of systems with Broadcom chip sets. But for those that like to read between the lines there may also be a deeper significance to this move.
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Applications
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As a final conclusion, Miro is just great firstly because of the awesome HD movie feeds it provides. However, as a movie player it does not offer the more advanced options dedicated movie players provide, like video and audio effects, support for DVDs, etc. But this is not the case, since Miro’s goal is not to do these things, but to offer a great way of watching online videos.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Kopete was initially very innovative, at least in its goals: to communicate with people, while leaving the IM network as a channel. We brought the concepts of “metacontacts” (bad naming), but basically you say people in your contact list, no matter if they were available on MSN, ICQ, or both.
Today I have a telephone with internet 24/7 in my pocket and I can IM on the bus. I don’t choose IM networks as a soccer team, but rely on them because I have friends on various of them. Just like I use twitter for “geeky stuff” while Facebook is a more “relaxed” environment.
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Ubuntu is one of the most popular, powerful and useful operating systems of the world. While Mac is locked to Apple machines and Windows is expensive and vulnerable to viruses and attacks, Ubuntu is the only operating systems which has all the merits — its highly secure, free of cost and can run on Apple machines as well.
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The point here is that, no matter what Linux distribution you start from, you can make it do anything, be anything or look like anything. If wished you can take an Ubuntu installation and have it look, feel and perform like a Fedora distribution. Or you can take a Fedora installation and have it as slim and trim as Puppy Linux.
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Both releases seem to be shaping up well, if very differently — as befitting the focus of the distributions and projects. Ubuntu 10.10 is a polished consumer OS that is well-suited for users who are new to Linux, or just prefer a desktop system that’s easy to use. Fedora’s developer-centric approach makes for an OS that is easy enough to use, but better suited for developers or experienced users who want to tinker with technologies before they make an official appearance in RHEL and other distributions. Ubuntu, on the other hand, is the end result of development rather than the beginning. Many of the changes in 10.10, e.g. the Ubuntu One improvements and the application indicators, are unlikely to show up in other distributions (excepting, perhaps, Linux Mint).
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat Inc., one of the Triangle’s high-profile companies, is scouting for sites in other states where officials may also be wooing the open-source software developer to move its headquarters from Raleigh.
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SmarTrend issued an Uptrend alert on shares of Red Hat on August 23, 2010 at $33.03 per share (13.4% return since that call). This bearish candle pattern may point to a reversal of the previously called Uptrend.
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Fedora
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Momonga is a Linux distribution based on Fedora. It is a community-developed distribution with roots in Japan (the name is derived from a species of flying squirrel found in Europe and parts of Asia). Like Fedora, it is a multi-purpose distribution, a Free distribution, with a script that makes it easy to build and install non-free applications
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Debian Family
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I put this down to being a complete noob, and reinstalled Lenny. Later I learnt that the upgrade has to be staged- certain packages have to be updated before doing a full upgrade, otherwise the upgrade falls down.
Recently I saw a post on the Debian forum which suggested that an upgrade was now a relatively simple process- involving just a kernel upgrade before a full upgrade, so I thought I’d give it a go.
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In the process of doing some other things, I have just noticed that those who thought the “Barf Bag” wallpaper that showed up in Ubuntu 10.10 Beta was just a “placeholder” were probably correct.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical has unveiled the a list of provisional tracks for the Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) scheduled for October 25-29, 2010 in Orlando, Florida.
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Phones
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Nokia/MeeGo
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Sunil Saxena spent some time reviewing the MeeGo Architecture, along with our current thoughts on how we plan to define MeeGo compliance. The MeeGo compliance spec is still being developed, so now is a good time to review it and provide feedback.
Bill Pearson was the next presenter talking about AppUp and the Intel AppUp Developer Program, which helps developers focus on what matters: platform sexiness, making money, getting recognition, and low friction deployment, while Intel helps with boring things like validation. Developers can create applications or components that they can sell to other developers. In addition to revenue from selling applications, the Million Dollar Development Fund provides additional incentives. Robust analytics are also available on the developer dashboards, to learn more about how your application is selling.
Rajiv Ranganath gave us an overview of Qt, which has over 350,000 commercial and open source developers.
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Android
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The current lockdown of Linux based devices (including Android phones, TiVo, and many many consumer devices) is due, simply, to the Linux developers’ unwillingness to update their code to the GPLv3 license. We* contribute to Linux, Linux is taken for use in Android (and remains Open and Free), and then the phone manufacturers take our work and lock it up and sell it to us with reduced functionality. Big thanks, manufacturers.
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Tablets
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Avaya, an enterprise communications systems company, just announced a high-end table PC that is primarily designed for business conferencing. Called the Avaya Flare, the device has an Intel Atom processor and runs Android operating system. It is said to make use of Avaya unified communications software utilizing a new interface called Flare User Experience and features Aura Conferencing and the Linux-based Avaya Aura Messaging software.
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Viewsonic demonstrated a 10.1-inch, Android 2.2 “G-Tablet” that’s bound for U.S. sales, powered by an Nvidia Tegra 2. Meanwhile, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon Wireless say they’ll offer the Android 2.2-based Samsung Galaxy Tab tablet this fall.
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OS Tested: Ubuntu 10.04.1
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So you’ve got your GNU/Linux based box. You’ve installed the base system and you’re good to go. Welcome to the world of freedom. But then what? How do you determine what packages to install. How do you decide which of the alternatives to go with?
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OpenSolaris is dead, but OpenIndiana lives on. Just a few weeks after Oracle made it clear that OpenSolaris was dead as a doornail, the Illumos and OpenIndiana folks have a distribution ready for the OpenSolaris community that’s been left in a lurch by Oracle.
The code dropped on Tuesday, so I haven’t had a lot of time to muck with OpenIndiana yet. I spent a few hours with the live CD and installed it into VMware.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Clearly, the status bar’s days are numbered. Even Internet Explorer 9 has removed the bottom-dwelling bar in favor of inline tooltips.
Now, in the latest updates to Firefox 4, Mozilla’s browser has moved status bar link previews to the right-hand side of the Awesome Bar. Hover a link, and the destination URL appears in soft, gray text. Sure, it looks OK when you’re currently viewing a page with a nice, short URL — but what about on something like an Amazon product page? Take the jump to see!
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I think Firefox 4 is a very smart product. It looks better than 3.6 overall, tabs on top or without them, it feels faster, it has lots of useful features, and it’s got the Web 2.0 bling bling. Linux beta lags a step behind, but that’s understandable. Performance is good in all aspects, with major improvements in responsiveness. Memory consumption is fairly modest. Firefox 4 is a pleasant addition to the browser arsenal.
Firefox 4 is a plenty of good, old stuff and a sprinkling of new to make you feel young and excited again. Mozilla, good job. Even the revolutionary stuff is done with style and moderation to make a hot-headed conservative like me smile. You should look forward to the next release. Firefox 4 is going to be a superb browser.
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One day after it released updates for its Firefox web browser, the Mozilla Project has issued versions 3.1.4 and 3.0.8 of Thunderbird, the latest stable and legacy branch updates of its popular open source email client. According to the developers, the latest maintenance updates improve the applications overall stability and address several user experience concerns found in the previous stable branch release.
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Mozilla software engineer Rob Sayre has announced the release of “Kraken”, a new browser benchmark. The developer says that unlike other browser benchmarks, such as SunSpider, V8 and Dromaeo, Kraken focuses on realistic workloads and on forward-looking applications.
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CMS
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Unlike Facebook, Diaspora is a decentralised social network. Your information, such as pictures and status updates, is stored on your “seed” — a personal Web server — and can be shared with your friends. In addition to the option of running your own seed, the project’s developers hope to provide a hosted service, in a similar manner to the WordPress.com blogging platform: WordPress can be installed on your own server or you can use a third-party service provider (or WordPress.com itself).
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Business
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Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) (DEFINE:ESB) is a technology that performs a critical role in SOA (DEFINE:SOA) architectures, enabling data and message integration.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Saturday, September 18th is Software Freedom Day, a worldwide celebration of user freedom. It’s a great opportunity not only to introduce new people to free software, but to connect with other free software activists in your area or online.
But what about the day after? How can we sustain these links? How can we make sure that people in your area who hear about free software can find a local community to connect with?
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Now we’re looking for a very good software engineer to join the Bazaar team at Canonical, working both on the core tool itself and on how it’s used by Ubuntu developers.
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Finally, amongst other bug fixing and other development work by the usual suspects, we had a short review of what the current Hurd contributors still need to use a GNU/Hurd system for most of their day-to-day tasks. This may help to prioritize the development efforts.
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Licensing
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Openness/Sharing
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In a world where movies are produced on budgets of hundreds of millions of dollars, at a time when studios expect a huge return on their investment, in an industry where the opening weekend can make or break a film–one man refuses to live by society’s (or the movie industry’s) rules. One man is willing to put it all on the line and do something different. Something daring. Something… free.
[...]
The key idea to take away here is freedom: freedom of the consumer to see what they’re paying for before they spend their money. This empowers the viewer, letting them control where they spend their money. Rather than spending their money up front before watching a film, they can see the work for free. As a result, more people are likely to watch the film, or listen to the music.
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Standards/Consortia
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Security/Aggression
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A man who objected to a CCTV camera keeping watch on his bedroom window from the house opposite appeared before a judge – for stealing the camera and throwing it in a river.
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Finance
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Sept. 16 (Bloomberg) — Frederick Kaufman, a professor at College of Staten Island, Alexia Howard, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., Dennis DeLaughter, the owner of Progressive Farm Marketing Inc., and Alex Wittenberg, a partner at Oliver Wyman, talk about agricultural futures and commodity markets. They speak with Pimm Fox on Bloomberg Television’s “Taking Stock.” (This is an excerpt. Source: Bloomberg)
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That’s what journalists are supposed to do: Set the agenda. Rarely, however, do we get the headlines. But last night, on Bloomberg TV, the Food Bubble came through . . .
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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This article focuses on grassroots digital activism in the Arab world and the risks of what seems to be an inevitable collusion with U.S foreign policy and interests. It sums up the most important elements of the conversation I have been having for the last 2 years with many actors involved in defending online free speech and the use of technology for social and political change. While the main focus is Arab digital activism, I have made sure to include similar concerns raised by activists and online free speech advocates from other parts of the world, such as China, Thailand, and Iran.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Ottawa tells Peace Region ISP that it’s not Canadian enough for new slice of spectrum
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Up to £500m will be taken out of the UK economy according to the Government’s announcement today about the cost sharing for the letter writing regime following the Digital Economy Act. The BIS cost order confirms the 75/25 split of costs between rightholders and ISPs.
ISPs will of course pass on these costs to their customers. According to the Government’s own estimates that means that up to 96,000 individuals will not be able to afford an internet connection anymore.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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When IT Business’s Brian Jackson asked me for a comment, I noted that such estimates were notoriously speculative (see Glyn Moody on this) and that the BSA would do far better to tell us how much Canada has gained from its recent significant reductions in piracy. Last year, the BSA said the Canadian rate dropped by three percent to 29%, the biggest drop among developed countries and – the BSA noted – an all-time low. In fact, since 2006 the BSA says that there has been a five percent drop in Canada. Has that created thousands of new jobs and generated billions in new revenues and taxes?
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Having Trademarked the Ungulate Look, Restaurateur Butts Heads With Imitators
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Copyrights
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Negotiating with individual authors or publishers for the rights to a single work may be cumbersome, but so too are the proposed reporting requirements. Moreover, individual negotiations hold the advantage of potential costs savings for students and ensuring that the actual authors receive full compensation for the use of their works. In other words, win-win-win for authors, teachers, and students.
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Going back to the section on Digital Locks, let’s assume that Bill C-32 passes into law with no changes. So Randy Bachman releases a new compact disc, and the Record Label uses TPM/DRM on it. The way the law is currently written, Randy Bachman could not legally break the TPM/DRM, even if he owns the copyright. Even worse, he wouldn’t be legally able to break the TPM/DRM if he owned the Record Label, and the compact disc pressing plant. You might argue that he shouldn’t need to, as he’d still have the masters, but accidents have happened before, and masters have been lost. Even if Randy controlled every step of the chain, legally he can’t break the TPM/DRM he decided to use. Does this make sense?
Microsoft Propaganda Film
Credit: TinyOgg
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09.17.10
Posted in News Roundup at 6:27 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
Offbeat
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Desktop
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If you have paid attention to virtually any IT news site over the past few weeks, you’ve likely noticed an argument between several blogs. The topic is in regards to whether or not Linux actually has 1% market-share. This argument has been debunked and counter-debunked as of late, and no side seems to be gaining any traction in this debate. My view? I couldn’t possibly care less. Neither side between the Windows and Linux camps will ever be able to post accurate adoption numbers, and they never will.
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Linux needs to be saved? Of course not, but: Linux adoption is often criticized because it’s not popular amongst the common users, anyway, most sysadmins will tell you that they’re using Linux on their servers. Linux (or Unix-like) servers are running very succesfully all around the world.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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WebcamStudio For GNU/Linux creates a virtual webcam that can mix several video sources together for recording or live broadcasting.
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Kernel Space
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We reported last month that a native ZFS module was coming to Linux and would be released in mid-September. Rather than using ZFS-FUSE that runs the Sun/Oracle ZFS file-system under the FUSE module so that it lives outside the Linux kernel (and runs rather slowly as our benchmarks show), this new ZFS module is native to Linux and open-source but due to the CDDL license it’s being distributed as a module and will not be included in the mainline Linux kernel. This module has now entered a closed beta testing process.
KQ Infotech has been working on this native ZFS module that in turn is based on the work of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. KQ Infotech has now announced their ZFS work with a few details on their Linux kernel module and to apply to be part of the beta testing process.
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The oversight means that untrusted users with, say, limited SSH access have a trivial means to gain unfettered access to pretty much any 64-bit installation. Consider, too, that the bug has been allowed to fester in the kernel for years and was already fixed once before and we think a measured WTF is in order.
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A vulnerability in the 32-bit compatibility mode of the current Linux kernel (and previous versions) for 64-bit systems can be exploited to escalate privileges. For instance, attackers can break into a system and exploit a hole in the web server to get complete root (also known as superuser) rights or permissions for a victim’s system.
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Graphics Stack
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More details will come later along with the audio/video recordings that ended out the X.Org Developers’ Summit in Toulouse, but here are a few random bits from so far today:
- For those that have become interested in coming up with a new logo for X.Org, Alan Coopersmith issued this mailing list message today. Coming up with a new logo for the X.Org Foundation has been on their agenda for many years, but now it may finally materialize thanks to Phoronix readers.
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Back in February at FOSDEM in Brussels, Luc made a presentation on modularizing Mesa and DRI drivers, which ended up in a very heated discussion but ultimately his ideas fell on deaf ears. With X.Org Server 1.10, Keith Packard of Intel has expressed interest in merging the drivers back into the server, or in other words de-modularizing the X.Org Server after it was modularized a few years ago as being a feature.
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Alban Crequy, a Maemo developer, for the past several weeks have been working on bringing D-Bus directly into the Linux kernel. Why? Huge performance improvements.
Alban’s kernel D-Bus work is based upon the previous work of Ian Molton did for Collabora with KDbus for prototyping a kernel implementation so that D-Bus cuts down the number of required context switches that are needed compared to running the D-Bus daemon in user-space.
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Applications
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Beast is a powerful music composition and modular synthesis application released as free software under the GNU GPL and GNU LGPL, that runs under unix. It supports a wide range of standards in the field, such as MIDI, WAV/AIFF/MP3/OggVorbis/etc audio files and LADSPA modules. It has excellent technical abilities like multitrack editing, unlimited undo/redo support, real-time synthesis support, 32bit audio rendering, full duplex support, multiprocessor support, conditional MMX/SSE utilisation for plugins, precise timing down to sample granularity, on demand and partial loading of wave files, on the fly decoding, stereo mixing, FFT scopes, MIDI automation and full scriptability in scheme.
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A computer program that merges a number of files together into one archive file, or a series of archive files, for simpler transportation, storage, or backup is called a file archiver. Archiving or packing refers to the process of making an archive file, while unarchiving, unpacking or extracting means reconstructing the original files from the archive.
The simplest file archivers just gather a list of files and concatenate their contents sequentially into the archive. For transferring a large number of individual files over a high latency network like the Internet, numerous file archivers employ archive formats that provide lossless data compression to reduce the size of the archive.
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Proprietary
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With the release of the beta of Internet Explorer 9 today, it might be best to remember that over 50 percent of the Windows community will not be able to try it, let alone decide to use it, as Microsoft has seen fit to lock them out of the choice.
On the other hand, there is a browser that is fast, free, and works on your Windows version all the way back to Windows 98. It also happens to work on many other platforms, such as Unix. Linux, Mac, and even OS/2 (though like OS/2, it has not been updated for that platform for a while).
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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I thought of an idea for a potentially fun RTS game. It’s based on the FOSS mindset. Think of Sim City where you’re building a city, managing it’s resources, taxing people, keeping a balance between residential, industrial and commerce zones, providing transport etc. Now put that type of balance into FOSS.
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A lot is going on with Basilisk Games, the bringers of the Eschalon Books cRPG series.
Basilisk games support their games well and didn’t forget about Book 1; recently they released 1.06 version which is compiled using the latest Ubuntu 10.04 libraries and should work better with newer distributions.
All you have to do to get the latest version is to email Basilisk Games with your purchase information (order number works best!) and they will activate a new download link for you.
But if you have no problems with your current version of Book 1, you don’t need the update as it offers no additional content.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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As many of you no doubt know, and a few might not, rekonq is KDE’s Webkit-based browser. Under heavy development for a while now, we can see this super-fast browser coming of age in a hurry. For users of Linux Mint 9, the version in the repositories mirrors that of what was installed by default on Kubuntu 10.04 Lucid – 0.4.0.
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This was just a short update to the series – KDE4 still has a lot of good points, and computer users learn to live with the flaws in their chosen desktop environment.
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One of the new applications introduced with KDE 4 was Okular. KDE 3 had a PDF viewer named KPDF, but Okular aims to be a complete document viewing solution, supporting many different file types. Okular is fast-loading and works in any operating system and desktop environment that can run KDE applications.
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GNOME Desktop/Novell
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This week we have the last video in Jeremy Allison’s series of interviews from his trip to GUADEC, the GNOME conference. In this video, he talks to Michael Meeks, early GNOME hacker and OpenOffice.org developer. Jeremy and Michael talk about collaboration, malware, and how Michael started his involvement with GNOME. For those who are new to open source, Michael gives tips for those who want to get involved in the GNOME community, developer and non-developer alike. For non-developers, Jeremy also gives translations of geek-speak throughout.
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Johan has updated his beautiful Fundamental Round 2 theme which we featured in our “5 Beautiful Elementary-ish Gnome Themes” post. The new version – 2.1 – comes with 6 color schemes, each with and without Nautilus breadcrumbs.
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PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Red Hat Family
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While Red Hat’s leadership in the enterprise Linux market is without question, the cloud tells a different story altogether. Red Hat’s cloud strategy has thus far focused too narrowly on customer retention, opening significant opportunities for Ubuntu to gain traction in the cloud — and gain traction it has, according to EC2 cloud market statistics.
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We caught up with Gordon Haff, Red Hat’s Cloud Evangelist, on the floor of VMworld last week and grabbed a short interview with him. In the discussion, we touch upon what the cloud really is, and where it makes the most sense in terms of enterprise use.
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Debian Family
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Ubuntu, look out: This one offers more, and eats up less. And Arch, look out, because this one can do much the same, with a lot less time spent setting up.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical, Ubuntu Linux’s parent company is meeting with engineers and product managers from many top device and computer manufacturers in Taipei, Taiwan on September 24, 2010.
The commercial sponsor of Ubuntu will be hosting its second annual Original Design Manufacturers (ODMs) and Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) at the Ubuntu Hardware Summit. Companies confirmed as attending include: American Megatrends Inc. (AMI), Phoenix, Compal, Dell, Foxconn, Intel, MSI, Marvell, and Quanta. In other words many of the leading PC, laptop, and tablet players will be there to learn about how to work with Ubuntu on boot time optimizations, hardware enablement, debugging, multi-touch, networking and more.
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For Ubuntu enthusiasts, you should know that the next iteration of Ubuntu – Maverick Meerkat is set to release on 10 Oct 2010. For those who are keen to find out what’s new in this release, here is the full review (and screenshots) of Ubuntu Maverick.
This review was done on Ubuntu Maverick beta. While most of the features should be finalized, the artwork might still change prior to the final release.
When you run the LiveCD, it will first boot up and show you the option to choose “Test Ubuntu” or Install Ubuntu. In the past, this is usually done before it boots, but now, it has been moved to after the boot.
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As many of you know I enjoy listening to podcasts during my commute to and from work. One that I regularly listen to is Cranky Geeks featuring John C. Dvorak and guests. It’s also no secret that I’m a massive fan of Ubuntu. So today was a double-whammy when Ubuntu got a mention on the show.
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There is always a lot of debate whether which file manager is the ‘best’ for the Linux desktop. Some would argue for Dolphin because they are KDE users, or Dolphin because it’s KDE but also offers a more simplistic interface, other prefer GNOME and use Nautilus, and still, some will like Krusader because of the many features or PCManFM for it’s simplicity, or Midnight Commander due to its TUI interface. So, even though you may have heard this many times before, I’m going to repeat: the best application for a specific user is the one which fits him better and helps him get the work done, in an easy fashion.
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Some of the features we are seeing in Maverick are, as usual, newer versions of applications. This release potentially has a larger jump in versions, as Lucid synchronised and merged from Debian Testing; but Maverick reverted to the usual practice of importing from Debian Unstable, which has higher version numbers. One of the surprises that came out of Debconf (the Debian conference) was the announcement of their feature freeze, which meant that Debian stabilisations commenced mid-cycle for Maverick in preparation for their next stable release.
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Shuttleworth continues to list how hard the Ubuntu team works for the idea of free software and how important their work is. He points to the Papercuts Project, which formed to simplify the interface and fix as many bugs as possible. He mentions their cutting-edge design department and how they (and he) are shaping the desktops of tomorrow. He points out that Ubuntu is where the action is.
In conclusion, Shuttleworth again praises projects from each corner of the community and urges members not to argue with each other because that is counterproductive.
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Phones
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Android
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An interesting piece in the Mobile Business Briefing points to the possibility that European carriers like Orange, T-Mobile, and Vodafone could be working together to build their own OS, possibly following the China Mobile model of creating their own flavor of Android far-removed from the official Google code.
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I’m happy to announce that the StatusNet client for Android recently hit the App Market for Android systems. I think it’s a really nice piece of software. I’m proud that the hard work of our great development team — especially Zach Copley who’s led our client development, Brion Vibber who’s worked on the client platform, as well as Sam Doherty’s excellent UI design — has paid off so well.
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Tablets
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Motorola Inc., maker of the Droid smartphone, is aiming to introduce a tablet device early next year to challenge Apple Inc.’s iPad, said Co-Chief Executive Officer Sanjay Jha.
“Just as Droid was competitive I think with iPhone, we want to make sure that any tablet that we deliver is competitive in the marketplace,” Jha said yesterday at a technology conference hosted by Deutsche Bank AG in San Francisco. “We will only deliver that when that occurs. Hopefully that’s early next year.”
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Following up on its $150 Android-powered tablet called GenTouch78, Augen has now brought a netbook with Android to Kmart and priced it at $190. The 10.2-inch device has a 1024×600 display and uses Android 2.1, which should now be legally sanctioned rather than a pirated copy. Processing is kept light even relative to smartphones with an 800MHz, ARM11-based chip and 256MB of RAM.
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Unlike the iPad, Galaxy Tab and Kindle, the XO-1 is not a touchscreen device and runs on the free operating system Linux.
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Writing software to protect political activists against censorship and surveillance is a tricky business. If those activists are living under the kind of authoritarian regimes where a loss of privacy may lead to the loss of life or liberty, we need to tread especially cautiously.
A great deal of post-mortem analysis is occurring at the moment after the collapse of the Haystack project. Haystack was a censorship-circumvention project that began as a real-time response to Iranian election protests last year. The code received significant levels of media coverage, but never reached the levels of technical maturity and security that are necessary to protect the lives of activists in countries like Iran (or many other places, for that matter).
This post isn’t going to get into the debate about the social processes that gave Haystack the kind of attention and deployment that it received, before it had been properly reviewed and tested. Instead, we want to emphasize something else: it remains possible to write software that makes activists living under authoritarian regimes safer. But the developers, funders, and distributors of that software need to remember that it isn’t easy, and need to go about it the right way.
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Every so often, we here at OStatic compile guidance resources for popular open source platforms and applications, and one of our favorite ongoing projects for producing documentation is FLOSS Manuals. It’s an ambitious effort to produce free, online guides for open source software that we initially covered in this post. FLOSS Manuals is an excellent learning and reference resource for titles such as OpenOffice, Firefox, Audacity, Blender, Inkscape and more. There are now quite a few titles available there that are worth taking note of, and that you can get for free. Here is our updated guide to the site.
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Events
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The Eclipse Foundation has published the program for this year’s Eclipse Summit Europe (ESE), which will take place from the 2nd to the 4th of November in Ludwigsburg, Germany. This fifth annual summit will feature several workshops, lectures and demonstrations.
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Web Browsers
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Given that I benchmark PC hardware on what seems like a daily basis, benchmarking a slew of Web browsers felt both strange and familiar at the same time. After all, the process of benchmarking isn’t far different, and interestingly, it was actually kind of enjoyable. It’s interesting to see just how vastly different the performance is in various areas from browser to browser, and unless you actually see results on “paper”, you may not ever realize the differences.
It’s clear that Opera is the big winner here, topping both of our performance tests, and also scoring a perfect 100/100 in Acid3. Google’s Chrome comes in a close second, and after that, there are large gaps between the others. Safari performed quite well also though, especially with regards to Acid3 and Peacekeeper (though it still was only half of Chrome and Opera in the latter).
Firefox 4 is good competition also though. Its Mozilla Kraken results topped the charts, and its Acid3 results are closing in on perfect. Plus, it also closes the gap with Safari in Peacekeeper, but again, it still comes nowhere close to Chrome and Opera. Those two browsers are the ones to beat right now, it goes without saying.
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Mozilla
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Today we are launching Zaphod, an addon for integrating the Narcissus JavaScript engine into Firefox 4.
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Oracle
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First of all, he made some very good points. Many people expect software to just work right out of the box. They expect the spell checker to just work, for example. Unfortunately, proprietary software has bred a certain laziness and culture of dependency in people, in my opinion. If you use a piece of proprietary software such as Microsoft Office, the proprietor will always be there to hold your hand. They hope that you decide to stay locked in to their product so that the state of dependency continues from cradle to grave so that they perpetually profit from you. This is the point that I think that Mr. Yegulalp may have missed. The whole point of free software is that if you find an inadequacy in a piece of software, you have the freedom to change it yourself!
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CMS
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Diaspora
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Four New York University students who raised a bundle of cash to build a privacy-preserving alternative to Facebook sure have their work cut out for them.
The release of pre-alpha source code for their Diaspora social Website was only a few hours old on Wednesday when hackers began identifying flaws they said could seriously compromise the security of those who used it. Among other things, the mistakes make it possible to hijack accounts, friend users without their permission, and delete their photos.
Click here to find out more!
“The bottom line is currently there is nothing that you cannot do to someone’s Diaspora account, absolutely nothing,” said Patrick McKenzie, owner of Bingo Card Creator, a software company in Ogaki, Japan.
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So this is the first developer release! Can’t wait for alpha, beta & stable releases!
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A post has just gone up on Diaspora’s blog revealing what the project actually looks like for the first time. While it’s not yet ready to be released to the public, the open-source social networking project is giving the world a glimpse of what it looks like today and also releasing the project code, as promised.
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BSD
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FreeBSD is a modern open source operating system for servers, desktops, and embedded systems, based on over 30 years of continuous development. The FreeBSD Project has participated as a mentoring organization in Google Summer of Code each year since the program’s inception in 2005. This year, FreeBSD mentored 18 students with a final success rate of 89%. The cumulative total over 6 years has been 117 students improving FreeBSD. This participation in the program has brought many new features into FreeBSD, several new long-term committers to the project, and many of the former students have by now joined some of the mentors as colleagues at their respective companies.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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All around the world people will be celebrating Software Freedom Day on Saturday. The idea is of course to both celebrate and raise awareness of Free Open Source Software issues.
I believe the first software freeing license was the GNU General Public License
Free Software Foundation is probably the heart of the Free Software movement which is defined by Richard Stallman’s Four Freedoms.
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Government
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Europe is leading in the development and adoption of open source, according to a report by Cenatic, Spain’s national competence centre on this type of software, published yesterday at an IT conference in Palma de Mallorca. “Government support is key for the adoption of open source.”
Government IT policies that promote open source have made Germany, France and Spain the three countries were open source software is used the most, Cenatic writes in its report “Informe sobre el Panorama Internacional del Software de Fuentes Abiertas. 2010″ (International overview on Open Source Software, 2010). The report is currently only available in Spanish.
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Open source software will be favoured where there are no significant cost differences between open source and proprietary solutions, Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude has said.
Responding to a parliamentary question, Maude said the Cabinet Office and the Office of Government Commerce are working on ‘guidance for procures’, which specifically covers open source software.
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Francis Maude has said that when costs are similar, the government will buy open-source rather than proprietary software.
In a parliamentary written answer on Tuesday, the Cabinet Office minister said that even where there are no significant overall cost differences between open and proprietary products, open source will be selected “on the basis of its additional inherent flexibility”.
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Licensing
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Open source has now become ubiquitous, yet management of its use remains uneven. The recent Forrester Research report at LinuxCon notes that 2010 was the year of using open source to improve business process execution speed and company growth. The adoption of open source has decreased in importance because open source is now so widely adopted.
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Openness/Sharing
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Triple yields of cocoa crops. New lives for 6.5 million poor farmers on small farms in developing nations. More sustainable chocolate for you. Those are the goals of a collaborative team crossing public and private organizations that has been working to improve the cocoa growing process to benefit the world’s cocoa farmers and help lead us to a more sustainable world cocoa supply.
They’ve also finished three years ahead of schedule. And after only a little over two years of work unlocking the Theobroma cacao genome, the team didn’t call the patent office. Instead, they released their first findings into the public domain. They say that by opening it up to the public, it will help breeders grow more robust, higher yielding, and drought- and disease-resistant trees.
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Programming
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Before learning such lessons, “I was always frustrated and rarely accomplished much,” Masover admitted. “I would instead rail about the state of languages, frameworks, OSes, and so on.
“Now, while my Ruby scripts aren’t as fast as if I’d done them in C, and my C programs aren’t as elegant as if I’d done them in Ruby, and I haven’t come up with the perfect language that’s the best of both worlds … the fact that I can live with that means that I do actually have C programs, Ruby programs, Java programs, and so on, instead of no programs,” he pointed out.
Dziuba “makes a good argument for not just jumping to new technologies that are supposed to make things easier,” Montreal consultant and Slashdot blogger Gerhard Mack opined. “People are always looking for the magic ‘make my app regardless of my programming ability’ switch, and there just isn’t one.”
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Metacity is a window manager for the Gnome desktop. By window manager I mean it controls the placement and appearance of windows on the desktop. A window may be described as the header, footer, and borders which contain content. Metacity does not format content, that job belongs to GTK.
During the Lucid development cycle the decision was made to change the placement of the Metacity window control buttons which resulted in many folks expressing their opinion pro and con. The desire was to free up space on the right for new functions expected to arrive in subsequent releases and these themes adhere to this design.
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Standards/Consortia
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He described another rivalry — the one between Google and Apple over mobile phones — as different than the one with Facebook. By increasing competition, that rivalry benefits both companies and both can do well, he said.
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Science
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Zhang Wuben is a 47-year-old nutritional therapist from Beijing, whose best-known claim, elaborated in his book Cure the Diseases You Get from Eating by Eating, is that consuming half a kilogram of mung beans every day can cure diabetes and short-sightedness, while eating five times that amount improves a patient’s chances of surviving various cancers. A frequent guest on television talk shows, his clinic was so popular that regular 300-yuan (£29) consultations, which lasted ten minutes, were booked up until 2012. Patients who wanted a fast-track service could pay 5,000 yuan (£483) for an emergency appointment with the health guru.
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Security/Aggression
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From animated logos to Web videos for hip, independent bands, HTML5 is getting buzz and gaining traction. But concerns about the security of features in the new version of the Web’s lingua franca persist.
Every technology innovation has its coming out party, and Google Inc.’s recent “dancing balls” logo experiment was widely interpreted as a high-impact debut for the next version of HTML, dubbed HTML5. But web security experts are warning that the sprawling new Web standard may favor functionality over security, enabling a new generation of powerful Web based attacks.
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New computer users are often criticized for weak username and password combinations which can create significant security vulnerabilities in any organization.
Many companies have even imposed strict password policies which may include regular forced password changes, automated password generation and ‘strong password’ validation before accepting a new password.
While strict password policies may work well in theory, their value is often undone by something as simple as a post-it pasted on a computer screen to help an employee remember his newly generated strong password.
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Finance
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Stock prices were little changed on Thursday as investors reacted cautiously to data suggesting that the recovery remained halting.
The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia’s survey of regional business conditions showed that manufacturing activity was nearly flat in September, while claims for unemployment benefits dropped to a two-month low but still remained high.
The mildly reassuring data reduced investors’ expectations that the Federal Reserve, which meets on Tuesday, would renew quantitative easing in the form of large debt purchases aimed at stimulating the economy.
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The measures also stand to shape the behavior of bank executives in undetermined ways, with some analysts suggesting the rules could lead to steep price hikes for some business and consumer services or push financial firms to pump more cash into government bonds and other low-risk investments.
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Some of Ms. Warren’s supporters think this move is something of a half-measure – they would have preferred a conventional nomination, with all the fanfare of a classic confirmation battle in the Senate. There is something to be said for that, but the interim appointment route is by far the best way forward for three reasons.
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Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and his House counterpart, Minority Leader John Boehner (Ohio), are locked in a standoff with President Obama over the fate of tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003 during the Bush administration. Those cuts, scheduled to expire at the end of this year unless Congress acts, lowered the tax burden for every taxpayer – but helped to drive the federal deficit to record levels.
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President Barack Obama is naming Elizabeth Warren a special adviser to oversee creation of a new consumer protection bureau, dodging a fight with Senate Republicans who view her as too critical of Wall Street to be confirmed as the agency’s chief.
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Ever since the 1973 Federal Election Campaign Act passed, public disclosure of the money used to influence elections has been a cardinal rule of U.S. politics.
Voters’ right to know who is behind the money spent trying to sway them was firmly established by the Supreme Court’s 1976 decision in Buckley v. Valeo, which upheld the constitutionality of campaign finance disclosure laws.
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Federal regulators are set to propose new rules that could make it harder for financial firms to disguise their level of debt.
The expanded disclosure requirements would apply to banks’ practice of temporarily trimming their debt at the end of quarters to make their financial statements appear stronger. The practice is legal but regulators say it can give investors a distorted picture of a bank’s debt and level of risk.
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Rehabilitating New York’s Staten Island Ferry Terminal. Cutting a new highway through Nelsonville, Ohio. Building a trio of battery factories in Michigan.
In a report being released Friday by Vice President Joe Biden, the White House pushes back against criticism of its $814 billion stimulus program and highlights 100 projects that it says are creating jobs and growing the economy.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Yesterday Avaaz experienced an attack on our “Stop ‘Fox News North’” petition consisting of fraudulent sign-ups of targeted individuals.
There is evidence of a deliberate and illegal effort designed to discredit Avaaz and violate an important form of democratic expression for Canadian citizens. If this is confirmed we will request a full investigation, and help to bring the perpetrators to justice.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Despite death threats and intimidation a record number of women are contesting seats in this month’s Afghan parliamentary elections. But Channel 4 News International Editor Lindsey Hilsum, who travelled to Bamyan earlier this year, says women there still live in fear of the Taliban.
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and The Progress & Freedom Foundation (PFF) urged the United States Supreme Court Friday to protect the free speech rights of videogame creators and users, asking the justices to uphold a ruling throwing out unconstitutional restrictions on violent videogames.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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*
Mobile operators and internet service providers must not be allowed to break the principle of “net neutrality” – that there should be no favouritism for connecting to certain sites online – Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, warned today.
He also said that low-cost mobile phones with a data connection were essential to ensure that the 80% of people who are not yet connected to the web could benefit from its ability to bring new information.
Berners-Lee suggested that concerns over privacy and the sharing of personal data will mean that businesses will have to improve their ability to segment the use of user-specific data such as addresses and where people are using their phones.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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At the behest of Belgian authorities, two weeks ago police around Europe conduced coordinated raids on so-called Warez Scene topsites. Hailed as some of the most important raids of their type in recent memory, the action generated hundreds of headlines. But just how significant were the raids? To find out that, first we should look at how the Scene is organized.
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“If we in the UK are going to safeguard our intellectual heritage and ensure it can be used by future generations of researchers, it is essential that we make a step-change in the amount of digital content that we collect, store and make accessible for the long term,” she said.
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Copyrights
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Stallman was giving a talk at the RMIT University in Melbourne today on “Copyright vs Community in the Age of Computer Networks”, one of the lectures he is giving during a six-week stay in Australia.
At the end of his talk, Stallman auctioned what he called “an adorable GNU” (pic below) – a soft toy – saying, “if you have a penguin (the Linux mascot) at home, you need a GNU because the penguin is useless without the GNU.” This was a dig at people who refuse to acknowledge the contribution the GNU Project has made to GNU/Linux distributions.
Stallman said file-sharing should be made legal to allow people to share files on a non-commercial basis as they had done during earlier eras.
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ACTA
GULMAtrix
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in News Roundup at 8:14 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Server
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Not one of the top-ten most reliable server-hosting outfits is running that other OS in this month’s Netcraft survey. 8 of the top ten run GNU/Linux and two run FreeBSD. The top site running that other OS is 15th. Only 4 in the top 42 use that other OS and 3 2003 sites are ahead of one 2008 site. Come on, M$, can’t you do any better than that?
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Kernel Space
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If you’re a developer with a history submitting patches for Linux or other platforms, please submit your request for Plugable sample hardware here. Because we’ll have only a trickle of each type over device over time, an important part of this is having some idea of what prior driver development contributions you’ve made. We’ll try to focus on matching hardware to the developers most likely to be able to contribute improvements in that area.
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With the release of Nexenta Core Platform 3.0 a few weeks back we decided to run some benchmarks of this operating system against PC-BSD 8.1, OpenSolaris b134, and Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS. For those unfamiliar with Nexenta Core Platform, it is an operating system that combines the OpenSolaris kernel with a GNU user-land provided by the Ubuntu 8.04 LTS “Hardy Heron” package repository, complete with apt-get support for easy package installation.
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Graphics Stack
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While most of the open-source Linux graphics drivers are currently in Toulouse for the 2010 X.Org Developers’ Summit, David Airlie of Red Hat Australia is not among those in attendance. He, however, is continuing to work on one of his latest efforts in conjunction with AMD: R600g, or the ATI R600/700/Evergreen Gallium3D driver. In the latest batch of Git commits to Mesa there is now a number of new features implemented.
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Three years ago from today marked the introduction of the RadeonHD driver, the first open-source X.Org driver for the ATI Radeon X1000 (R500) and Radeon HD 2000 (R600) series graphics cards. This driver came as part of AMD’s open-source strategy (the strategy’s third birthday was celebrated earlier this month) and with loads of public documentation for their ATI graphics processors. The RadeonHD driver was developed by Novell’s X team from Nürnberg with support from AMD, but sadly it will not be celebrating its third birthday today since the RadeonHD driver was killed off.
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Over the next few weeks there are a number of new Phoronix benchmarks to be published concerning the performance of Mesa 7.9 for both the Mesa classic and Gallium3D drivers from the different GPU vendors. Included in those tests will be new Intel Mesa benchmarks of their only officially supported 3D driver using one of the Arrandale processors, but for those currently missing out on the X Developers’ Summit in Toulouse or PhoronixFest at Oktoberfest, here’s a bonus article. For this extra round of benchmarking, we took one of the original Intel Atom benchmarks with i945 graphics and ran it with every major Mesa release since Mesa 7.4.
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Originally at the X.Org Developers’ Summit here in Toulouse this week there was going to be a talk entitled “Kill It With Fire” where Corbin Simpson (mostly known for his work on the ATI R300 Gallium3D driver) was going to be speaking about what drivers or parts of X.Org should be eliminated from the stack. This talk though is no longer occurring, in part as Corbin is no longer in attendance; he washed his US passport in the laundry.
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AMD has just released their monthly proprietary Linux driver update, which this month puts it at Catalyst 10.9. The only new “feature” of AMD Catalyst 10.9 for Linux is early support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 (RHEL6), but there are some bug-fixes.
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Applications
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Longing for a visually impressive way of browsing your music library in Rhythmbox?
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In the open-source world, we have good programs to help children start reading, too. Gcompris is a great example of such programs for young children, and it takes phonics into consideration in its modules.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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There is no question Battle for Wesnoth is the most played turn-based strategy game on the Linux platform, being probably the most polished, full-featured and addictive game in its category. In this article I will talk about development release 1.9, plans for the upcoming 2.0 release and the brand new features offered at the time of writing. For users who will want to try this game for the first time, keep in mind that the version reviewed here is a development version, that means it will be buggy and incomplete, with a lot of features stripped down or not working. Try the stable, 1.8.4 version instead.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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The new version of the KDE video editing application, Kdenlive 0.7.8, is now available to download. The developers have added twenty eight new features and corrected over a ninety seven bugs and errors from the previous version. Among the new features of the release are improved tools for colour correction and a better UI for effects, which allows users to adjust some transitions and effects directly. Users can now easily apply effects to a whole track and more reverse transitions are available.
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Red Hat Family
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Since leaving the military eight years ago, retired Army Gen. Hugh Shelton has taught, led seminars and served on corporate boards.
Recently named chairman of Raleigh-based software developer Red Hat Inc. (NYSE: RHT), Shelton says moving from the military to the business world involves a different uniform but not a change in strategy.
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RHT’s current stock price is in the band of $38.01 and $38.79, compared to 52 week band of $24.73 and $39.08. However, I calculate its intrinsic stock value to be less than $25. Moreover, in terms of ROE, it is among the worst performers among its peers.
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Red Hat will soon offer a new utility for live migration of virtual machines that doesn’t require shared storage. The protocol could drive virtualization into new environments such as public cloud computing, where shared storage is not always available, observers said.
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Fedora
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Out of the three kernels present in my Fedora 13 installation (one 2.6.33, two 2.6.34), my quest to gain a usable display (i.e. not blurry/out of sync) had me replacing the stock, open-source ati driver with ATI’s own proprietary Catalyst fglrx driver.
With the ati driver I could get perfect video in 2.6.33 but only the aforementioned blurriness in both 2.6.34 kernels (and I do have a bug open on the matter). Plopping radeon.modeset=0 into the Grub2-generated boot line had no effect.
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The Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) has decided to use Upstart instead of systemd as the standard init system for the Fedora 14 Linux distribution, which is expected to be released in November. Systemd, an alternative to SysV Init and Upstart, released in late April and used in the alpha of Fedora 14, is now scheduled to become part of the standard system in Fedora 15. Among the reasons for this decision are some problems testers recently found during the systemd test day.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu One, Canonical’s file-sharing service that has until now been little more than a Dropbox copycat, has evolved for Maverick Meerkat in ways that finally help set it apart from its competitors. Here’s a look at some of the updates to the service, and what they infer about Canonical’s longterm plans.
Traditionally, Ubuntu One has done little more than allow users to store data in the cloud and automatically sync it between different computers. Ubuntu 10.04 added a few new features to the service, like syncing Firefox bookmarks, but in general there’s been little to distinguish Ubuntu One from competitors like Dropbox–other than the latter’s cross-platform support, which Ubuntu One lacked until now.
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Opsera, vendor of the open source network and application monitoring platform Opsview, have announced that they are partnering with Canonical to provide Opsview through Canonical’s partner repositories. Opsera say that Ubuntu Server Edition is now its Linux platform of choice for running Opsview Enterprise Edition, the commercially supported version of Opsview Community.
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To be confirmed, along with more announced, in coming weeks, the tracks were made available today on the newly-launched UDS site, http://uds.ubuntu.com/. The site is a destination for information about the event for the key participants in Ubuntu’s development, from Canonical engineers and community members to ISVs and partners.
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It seems just like yesterday, the launch of Lucid Lynx, the latest Ubuntu 6-monthly offering. In fact, it was at the end of April. I know this from the name 10.04.
At first, I wasn’t convinced. The window control buttons moving to the left, to make way for the windicators, the new dark theme, new logo.
But it worked, better than ever before. It took me an hour to install everything from scratch, including all the software I use.
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Rather, with the aid of hardware sensors such as cameras, Ubuntu could “see” and respond to users’ whole-body movements, recognizing when they are and aren’t there and reacting accordingly.
“We thought about how Ubuntu could behave if it was more aware of its physical context,” wrote developer Christian Giordano on Tuesday in a company blog. “Not only detecting the tilt of the device (like iPhone apps) but also analyzing the user’s presence.”
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Flavours and Variants
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I am proud to announce the Beta release of the Ubuntu-Saner-Defaults-Remix! This is Ubuntu 10.04.1 with a some default applications replaced with saner choices and some other saner default settings and theme changes were also made. This is all being done to maximize usability and user friendliness in regard to the average user (new or potential linux user.) Further, all updates through September 3, 2010 have been applied.
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Phones
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Nokia/MeeGo
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A MeeGo-powered tablet spotted at IDF 2010 features a one-second instant on, along with an impressive 16-second boot cycle.
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One look at the N8 and E7 should be enough to convince the casual observer that Nokia is serious about design. The man behind Nokia’s hardware and software design for the last year is Marko Ahtisaari, Senior Vice President of Design and former CEO and co-founder of Dopplr. We asked Marco what it would take to be successful in the US market.
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Android
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Found at the top of reddit’s Android page today is this comic comparing the openness of Android to the closed ecosystem of Apple’s iPhone and iOS.
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Here’s an interesting use of Android. Meet the Looxcie Wearable Camera. It looks like a bluetooth headset on steroids, and in fact that is what it partially is. Looxcie is also a digital camera that can record video with 480×320 resolution at 15FPS onto an internal 4GB flash drive, for a total of 5 hours of footage.
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The huge number of apps available for Android is both a joy and something of a trial. Finding an app that does the thing you want can be something of a hit-and-miss experience. Here’s a roundup of a few of the most useful ones.
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Sub-notebooks
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The Smart Book is powered by an ARM Cortex-A8 CPU though clock speeds aren’t revealed. A custom user interface comes standard, though it can run on Ubuntu Linux or else Google’s Chromium or Android. An 8GB microSDHC memory card is bundled for storage, as is a 2GB USB flash drive. Otherwise present is Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1 and the capability to output 720p videos onto external displays. Four USB ports exist on the main body, and the tablet portion has an integrated accelerometer.
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Always Innovating’s Smart Book may just be the most flexible mobile device yet. It takes the current netbook you know and love and breaks it down into pieces, allowing you to take what you need or use as few or as many pieces as you need.
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Tablets
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The Infocast has enough hardware chops and a Linux-based operating system to transform it into a kind of a tablet. Some electronics hackers have tweaked it to run a Webkit-based browser and use the device’s native capability to run apps. It’s no iPad, but the hack is intriguing.
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Always Innovating says its new “Mini Book” mobile internet device rides piggyback on a “Smart Book” tablet, which in turn can be plugged into a keyboard to become a netbook. Built using the 1GHz Texas Instruments DaVinci DM3730 processor, the modular, hackable devices are further claimed to switch between Android, Ubuntu, Chrome OS, and AIOS Linux distros at the touch of a button.
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At 5-inches, the Streak is a lot more portable than the iPad—but still not quite as pocket-friendly (lab coat-friendly?) as the iPhone. Nonetheless, that’s where Dell wants to place its tablets, ramming it with a healthcare software app.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Thunderbird 3.1.4 and 3.0.8 are now available as free downloads for Windows, Mac, and Linux from http://getthunderbird.com/. As always, we recommend that users keep up to date with the latest stability and support versions of Thunderbird, and encourage all our users to upgrade to the very latest version.
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CMS
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The Diaspora project—an attempt to make an open source, peer-to-peer replacement for Facebook with a focus on privacy—has reached its first major milestone. The first developer alpha is now available for download and review, and the group is now accepting code contributions from the open source community at large.
Diaspora was born of the frustration with Facebook’s central control over user-supplied data and an increasing propensity to play loose with users’ privacy. “Diaspora aims to be a distributed network, where totally separate computers connect to each other directly, and will let us connect without surrendering our privacy,” project co-founder Maxwell Salzberg wrote in April.
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Semi-Open Source
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As a lightweight Java-based ESB, Mule allows an organization to create and connect a set of services across a network. MuleSoft, which offers a commercially supported version of the software, claims that Mule is the most widely used open-source ESB, with more than 2,500 enterprise users, including DHL and Honeywell.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Openness/Sharing
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Instead of patenting the genome, they have placed it online for anyone to use for free. They say that its discovery will allow breeders who use traditional methods to grow hardier, more productive and disease-resistant trees.
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Standards/Consortia
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Yes, we couldn’t resist the HTML5 temptation and decided to highlight this trending topic on our blog too. Tremendous media buzz that was caused by the latest version of hyper text markup language is really unique even for modern informational society. Anyways we think that mostly you know the core of this issue with not-supporting Flash video on some popular devices and sudden success of HTML5 video players.
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The BBC are due to renegotiate the TV licence fee in a couple of years. I’d expect this “generous” offer to freeze the fee for a year to be a cynical attempt to earn Brownie points for those negotiations. They will spin this for all it’s worth in attempt to squeeze more out of already hard up viewers. All of this while playing the victim on cutbacks. As usual the BBC play the “unbiased, trusted and independent” card while lobbying to maintain their own gravy train.
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For a decade software RAID has been downplayed as a poor substitute for the “real thing” and was only for fools and cheapskates like me. Software RAID with GNU/Linux has been one of the chief differentiators between the typical PC with that other OS and GNU/Linux terminal servers I have been using for 7 years now to increase performance for very little cost. The idea is that one uses “normal” storage-device interfaces and stitches data together in RAM to do RAID. I normally use RAID 1 so the CPU overhead is minimal. DMA on the interface chips does the transferring and the data is instantly ready for use. For RAID 5 and 6 there is some parity checking that consumes CPU cycles.
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Science
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In Dezhou, China, Shandong Vicot Air Conditioning Co., Ltd unveiled the worlds first directly solar powered air conditioner. The unit was revealed at the World Solar-Powered Air Conditioning Development Forum which was hosted in Dezhou.
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Health/Nutrition
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Asparagus grown in Peru and sold in the UK is commonly held up as a symbol of unacceptable food miles, but a report has raised an even more urgent problem: its water footprint.
The study, by the development charity Progressio, has found that industrial production of asparagus in Peru’s Ica valley is depleting the area’s water resources so fast that smaller farmers and local families are finding wells running dry. Water to the main city in the valley is also under threat, it says. It warns that the export of the luxury vegetable, much of it to British supermarkets, is unsustainable in its current form.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Record sums were invested last year in coal power – the most carbon intensive form of energy on the planet – by the World Bank, despite international commitments to slash the carbon emissions blamed for climate change.
The World Bank said this week that a total of US$3.4bn (£2.2bn) – or a quarter of all funding for energy projects – was spent in the year to June 2010 helping to build new coal-fired power stations, including the controversial Medupi plant in South Africa. Over the same period the bank also spent $1bn (£640m) on looking and drilling for oil and gas.
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All but one of the 48 Republican hopefuls for the Senate mid-term elections in November deny the existence of climate change or oppose action on global warming, according to a report released today.
The strong Republican front against established science includes entrenched Senate leaders as well as the new wave of radical conservatives endorsed by the Tea Party activists, says a report by the Centre for American Progress.
As election season gets under way, Tea Party favourites such as Joe Miller, who caused the biggest upset of the primaries when he defeated the Republican incumbent Lisa Murkowski in Alaska last month, have been upfront about their doubts on climate science. “We haven’t heard there’s manmade global warming,” Miller told the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner.
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Finance
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Writing in these pages in early 2008, we put the total cost to the United States of the Iraq war at $3 trillion. This price tag dwarfed previous estimates, including the Bush administration’s 2003 projections of a $50 billion to $60 billion war.
But today, as the United States ends combat in Iraq, it appears that our $3 trillion estimate (which accounted for both government expenses and the war’s broader impact on the U.S. economy) was, if anything, too low. For example, the cost of diagnosing, treating and compensating disabled veterans has proved higher than we expected.
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President Barack Obama will use a midday appearance Friday to announce Elizabeth Warren’s new role with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — giving her the title assistant to the president and special adviser to the Treasury Secretary, an administration official tells POLITICO.
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The debt figures are being closely watched at a time when the U.S. government is running record annual deficits. A drop in foreign demand could lead to higher interest rates in the United States.
Japan, the second largest holder of U.S. Treasury bonds and notes, increased its holdings 2.2 percent to $821 billion. Britain, which holds the No. 3 spot, saw a 3.3 percent increase in holdings to $374.3 billion.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania announced today that it has settled a lawsuit filed in May alleging that the Tunkhannock Area School District (Wyoming County) illegally searched a student’s cell phone, punished her for storing semi-nude pictures of herself on the device, and then referred her case for criminal prosecution to the district attorney’s office. Under the settlement, the school district denied any liability or wrongdoing but agreed to pay the student and her lawyers $33,000 to resolve the dispute. The student’s claims against the District Attorney’s Office were not settled and will proceed through litigation.
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Last week, we questioned whether Sarah Palin may have violated Facebook’s terms of use by using a ghostwriter to update her profile. We also criticized Facebook’s attempts to enforce those terms with state and federal computer crime laws — which carry both civil and criminal penalties — in Facebook v. Power Ventures.
As we explained, it’s dangerous for a website to claim that users who breach its terms of use also violate computer crime law. Facebook users can easily make uncontroversial choices that nevertheless violate the plain meaning of Facebook’s terms. Furthermore, Facebook shouldn’t have the discretion to criminalize certain behavior just by forbidding it in terms of use.
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A New York-based mobile-web advertising company was hit Wednesday with a proposed class action lawsuit over its use of an HTML5 trick to track iPhone and iPad users across a number of websites, in what is believed to be the first privacy lawsuit of its kind in the mobile space.
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There seems to be no end to the Haystack Affair. Who knew that this whole “Internet freedom” business was so ugly? Perhaps, it comes with the location: there must be a reason why Washington beats any other city in the world in terms of how many/how often its residents search for that very term on Google.
I’m glad that The Economist picked it up, along with many others. I’m still waiting for The Guardian to do something about their akward award to Austin Heap. (That award is deeply symbolic of what happens to good editorial judgement when newspapers are forced to run conferences and make money on things that their marketing departments don’t know how to vet.)
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Intel has confirmed that code posted to the Internet earlier this week is the master key that is part of an Intel-created standard used to make sure only authorized devices are playing copyright-protected movies.
“We can use it to generate valid device keys that do interoperate with the (High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection) protocol,” Intel spokesman Tom Waldrop told CNET today.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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After months of dragnet litigation and intimidation, some of the thousands of “John Doe” Defendants targeted in mass copyright lawsuits filed in the District of Columbia are fighting back in earnest.
The lawsuits are the brainchild of a Washington, D.C., law firm calling itself the “U.S. Copyright Group” (USCG). USCG investigators have identified IP addresses they allege are associated with the unauthorized uploading and downloading of independent films, including “Far Cry” and “The Hurt Locker.” Using those addresses, USCG has filed several “John Doe” lawsuits in D.C., implicating well over 14,000 individuals, and has issued subpoenas to ISPs seeking the identities of the subscribers associated with those IP addresses.
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ACTA
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A European Parliament majority accepted a written declaration on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) which iterates the calls to European Commissioner Karel de Gucht for more legislative transparency.
In a speech before the European Parliament Commissioner Karel De Gucht threatened the United States to leave negotiations when geographical indications would be “discriminated”, that is excluded from the scope of the negotiations on ACTA. Geographical indications cover, for instance, camembert de Normandie, parmesan cheese or champagne, and other marks of origin. The United States oppose their inclusion in ACTA. The United States also aim to keep the negotiated ACTA draft text confidential.
Richard stallman San iGNUcio
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