06.26.10
Posted in News Roundup at 8:15 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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So when I write about Linux I write what I personally know or have researched on. When I write about windows I also write what I personally know or have researched on. My opinions on those are the results of that experience. While there have been many comments posted which do not agree with what I say, they are often quite knowledgeable and show me ways of thinking I hadn’t considered. Other comments, not so much.
To end this rambling missive why don’t you consider your reasons for liking your preferred operating system and your reasons for hating the other operating system. Is it from years of experience or simply an ignorant reaction from hearsay and peer group pressure? Do you really know your operating system well enough to be able to defend it against slander? Do you know the other operating system to be able to factually put your money where your mouth is?
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The Linux marketplace appears vastly diverse and complicated, but in reality, most of the market is actually very consolidated already in everything but marketing. Red Hat has a very small, intense field around it, mostly encompassing RHEL, Fedora, and CentOS. Oracle Enterprise Linux would also be included, and this will serve as a tidbit for later articles. These systems have a very strong focus on the general business environment: desktops and servers. They are developed with security and reliability in mind. On the other side is the Ubuntu field. This field is vast and diverse. First, there are the Canonical-sponsored Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Edubuntu, Ubuntu Netbook Remix, Ubuntu Studio, and Ubuntu Server edition; then there are the redistributions such as Mint, Mythbuntu, gOS, Goobuntu, and more. In some ways, Debian can even be included in the Ubuntu cloud. Ubuntu is community and “free” focused. It is a place to try the latest and greatest. Ubuntu needs to embrace this expansive, innovative family more fully, promoting a wider Ubuntu brand.
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GNU/Linux and FOSS make the proprietors of closed-source software very afraid because the psychological relationship between the end-user and the producer of software is entirely different.
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I am proud to announce that here at ERA Computers & Consulting (ERACC) we have researched the parts needed to build Mini ITX, Tiny PC, systems and are offering a quote option on our sales site. Each of these Tiny PC systems is built to end-user specification. We build these with or without a hard drive and with or without an operating system.
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It’s a good lesson for anyone who has customers. The first step is figuring out who are your customers? When you’re Microsoft it’s not end-users, but everyone upstream: corporate buyers, resellers, and OEM shops. Actual users are little more than unavoidable nuisances. Microsoft salespeople and marketers cater strictly to the folks who sign the big checks. Their retail marketing is so awful it can’t possibly be effective, but even if it is the folks who sign the checks to Microsoft are not individual retail customers, but the stores they buy from. In any business with this disconnect between purchaser and user, the user goes to the end of the customer service line.
When you’re a FOSS developer your customers are other developers who want to use or contribute to your code, and end users. It can get even more complicated as artists, documentation writers, distributors, bug finders, testers, and corporate contributors all want to get involved with your project. It can be overwhelming, but at least everyone has a direct stake in the health and success of your project.
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Enregy Use
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What do you think about when you read or hear the word “smart” when it is applied to computers? How about a supercomputer? If any machine is smart, a supercomputer is, right?. According to a study released by the University of California at Berkeley in May, 2010, 470 of the 500 fastest supercomputers in the world run Linux, the open source operating system. That’s 91%. Evidently the people who decided to use Linux for these computers were pretty smart too.
As we think about all the ways where we can work together to create a Smarter Planet, Linux has a very natural role. First, Linux runs on more kinds of hardware than any other operating system. So if we are talking about tying together disparate systems to deliver better, more accurate, and more predictive health care, Linux can power the hardware and software to maintain the information repositories, do the data mining, and perform the analytics. That is, Linux can help provide the intelligence we will need and expect in our complex and sophisticated 21st century systems.
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One of the better open source-focused posts I’ve seen recently was “Linux as a catalyst for a smarter planet,” which included Jean Staten Healy and Bob Sutor of IBM discussing social challenges going on around the globe, and how Linux is being applied to solve problems. Filled with interesting data about how social change will make a place for Linux in the future, it reminded me of some of the many posts on open source tools for humanitarian and social causes that we’ve done. Here, you can find many of these, and some thoughts on Sutor’s and Healy’s presentation.
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Sutor and Healy also cite the example of Malta, one of the more densely populated places on the planet. The Maltese National Electricity and Water Utilities is using Linux for a nationwide smart grid for electrical and water service. So what other kinds of tools has the open source community served up for these types of applications?
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Desktop
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My time in the Mac world is numbered. My love of Ubuntu has grown.
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Audiocasts
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Ballnux
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For several years now, Sprint has been in next-to-last place among U.S. wireless network providers. But that might eventually change if Sprint continues to offer smartphones like the HTC EVO 4G ($200 with a new contract), a well-reviewed Android 2.1 handset boasting several firsts and currently a Sprint exclusive in the U.S.
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The HTC EVO 4G is arguably one of the most ambitious smartphones ever to ship with Google’s Android mobile operating system. Exclusive to Sprint, the device is one of the first to deliver 4G network connectivity. Its appeal is boosted by impressive hardware specs and a roster of outstanding capabilities, like support for high-definition video capture. It comes loaded with HTC’s unique user interface enhancements and custom applications, which round out its feature set nicely.
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Graphics Stack
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Based upon a recent email to the X.Org developers’ mailing list, Canonical is nearing the point of one of their goals for Ubuntu 10.10 of a rootless X Server, or being able to run the X.Org Server without root privileges.
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Applications
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Casual computer users often give little thought to fonts, but once you starting working on design — from your web site to your stationary needs, you soon begin to appreciate the positive effects a good typeface can have on branding and marketing. The trouble comes when you start to collect more fonts on your system than you can keep track of in your head. Worse yet, most operating systems attempt to manage fonts for you in an all-or-nothing fashion, through which large collections can slow down application speed, in addition to being tiresome to scroll through. The solution is a good font manager, like the open source Fontmatrix.
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If you use Linux, have a tablet (or a pen/tablet addon), and want a graphics tool designed specifically for that device, you need to take a look at My Paint. My Paint was designed to be used with these tools to keep the interface out of the way (unlike The GIIMP) and offer a collection of brushes unlike any other graphics application. It supports features specific to tablets such as pressure sensitivity and tools geared toward artists like charcoal and ink brushes, various smudges, and blends.
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It appears that several uses of git master and distributions with GCC/G++ 4.5, such as openSUSE 11.3 and Arch Linux are experiencing random crashes when loading or unloading plugins. We think(*) this is a bug in GCC/G++ and I am currently drafting a testcase to confirm this and also a workaround for the bug. At the moment, in order to avoid this crash, you will need to use an older version of GCC/G++, such as GCC 4.4.3. For Arch Linux you can get this from the AUR with “yaourt gcc4″, selection 6, and I would imagine a package is available for openSUSE. When compiling, press ‘t’ in ccmake to get advanced options and change the compiler executable paths to your older compiler.
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Verdict: 4/5
Considering what it offers – a great user interface, up-to-date monitoring data, email and SMS alerts – Bijk is a very good option. On top of that, it’s free. The only thing we’d really like to see is some more customisability to the interface.
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Proprietary
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This snapshot fixes a few more crash bugs that are affecting a lot of people. There is also some more work on international fonts (however, please look at the known issues below), and Geolocation using Wifi is now available for Linux.
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Instructionals
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GNOME Desktop
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Last year, the GNOME Foundation began hosting summits for developers alongside another desktop environment community: KDE. “In our meeting with the KDE conference, we’re trying to cooperate in our common goal of providing a free desktop,” said Stormy Peters, executive director of the GNOME Foundation. “So wherever we can agree to use common technology or work on the same thing, we want to do that.
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Arch Linux isn’t the only thing I have installed or used on the Mebius, since I brought it home a week ago. I did a few trial runs with other distros and OSes, although not all of them were as successful as archlinux-i586.
* Debian, oddly enough, mentioned memory errors after a network installation, and refused to boot. Unfortunately I didn’t write down the exact error message, so I don’t recall exactly what the problem was. I plan on trying this again sometime in the near future, mostly because Debian is one of the best start-from-scratch, intermediate level distros out there, and it runs on old, old machines like this.
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PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Another little thing that Mandriva paid attention to that makes me like it that much more. After reading the comments to the earlier post, I enabled the backports and installed chrome from the backports, checked the flash plugin out of the box and guess what? It just works!
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat is developing a services strategy for its North America operations that won’t conflict with services offered by the vendor’s channel partners.
Red Hat is also shooting to increase its percentage of sales that go through the channel to 70 percent from about 60 percent today, although it will likely take a couple of years to get there.
Those were among the comments offered by Mark Enzweiler, Red Hat vice president of global channel sales, in an interview this week at the Red Hat Summit and JBoss World conference in Boston.
Red Hat acquired Amentra, a supplier of system integration, business process management and system development services, in March 2008 in a move the company said complements its JBoss middleware. But that created the potential for conflict with Red Hat’s JBoss channel partners, especially in the services-intensive middleware market.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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I started getting mildly interested in boot time performance and benchmarking after I purchased my RD510 laptop and installed four instances of Jaunty on it. Very soon, I learned that the default installation, with no tweaking or modifications, yielded a handsome 18-second boot on the third installed system, located on the slow end of a fairly standard 5,400rpm laptop disk. The results on the first disk were even more encouraging, just 15 seconds. I believed that if my laptop were equipped with a 7,200rpm disk, I would have broken the 10 second barrier.
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Nokia/MeeGo
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Coming out of Computex, there’s been a lot of momentum for Meego, the Linux-based platform that can power multiple computing devices, including handsets, netbooks, tablets, connected TVs and in-vehicle infotainment systems. Ibrahim Haddad, the Linux Foundation director of technology and alliances, has just published a new article, “An Introduction to the Meego Project.”
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Android
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Speaking earlier today at the droid X launch, Andy Rubin (Google VP of engineering) said that Android phones are being activated at a rate of 160,000 per day. Yes, that’s almost two activations for every second of the day, every day. What’s even more is impressive is the speed at which the figure grows. Vic Gundotra broke the news at Google I/O last month that the number was at 100,000. Going back a few months to February, we were looking at 60,000 per day.
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Take that, along with an average of 160,000 new Android users daily and Google will eclipse iOS as the number one mobile operating system by 2012.
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I have an unlocked Nexus One with a pre-release of Android 2.2 “Froyo”, and I have a T-Mobile mobile data plan from Google; I imagine that, like most big companies, we get a pretty good deal on it. As of now, I’m never paying for Internet in a hotel or airport again.
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Google Inc.’s Android mobile operating system is winning over an important group of allies in its fledgling rivalry with Apple Inc.’s smartphone software: application developers.
More than half the 2,733 developers surveyed by Appcelerator, a mobile-software tools provider, see Android as having the most long-term potential among operating systems. About 40 percent of respondents said Apple’s iOS would have the best long-term outlook, according to the survey released today.
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Events
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How about instead you suggest a set of positive guidelines for speakers in accordance with the mission statement of the GNOME Foundation and the goal of the GNOME project: to create a computing platform for use by the general public that is completely free software.
Is furthering the development of a Free Software platform the mark of a successful GNOME event? Or is “everyone having fun”?
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“The future of Cloud services and integration” conference held today in Rome was another opportunity to share ideas about opportunities and threats emerging from cloud computing. Security vendors (Trend Micro), academic researchers, postal police officers and representatives from IT and IT security associations discussed the topic in depth.
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Web Browsers
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Cade Metz at The Register quotes Mozilla’s vice president of products, Jay Sullivan, as saying that Mozilla has no intent to bundle Firefox with Adobe Flash, as Google has said it will do with Chrome. Instead, Mozilla will pursue web standards, including HTML5. Sullivan tells The Register:
“These native apps are just little black boxes in a webpage. That’s not something we’re pursuing. We really believe in HTML, and this is where we want to focus.”
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Mozilla
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THE MOZILLA FOUNDATION’S open source email client Thunderbird has been updated to version 3.1.
Mozzarella claims that Thunderchicken is impressively fast and has new ways to search your e-mail. It includes a migration assistant and a download manager in this latest update as well as some bug fixes.
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Mozilla Messaging has announced the release of Thunderbird 3.1, a minor update that brings performance improvements, bug fixes, and some new features.
The most significant enhancement in 3.1 is the new Quick Filter bar, which makes it easy to filter and search the contents of the current folder. It has several icons that you can click to filter for messages that are unread, starred, sent by a contact, or have an attachment. It also has a search box that will allow you to find messages in the current folder.
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In the Firefox 4 nightly builds, and in Firefox 4 Beta 1, we are changing the default tab position so that tabs are on top. This is a preference that users can change by right clicking on any of their toolbars. Moving the default tab position is obviously a significant and to some extent controversial change to the Firefox UI, which is why we made the video above to help explain our rationale.
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We are excited to announce that Mozilla won the American Business Awards Stevie Award for Most Innovative Company of the Year (with less than 2,500 employees) in the software category!
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Healthcare
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Astronaut, LLC chief Ignacio Valdes, MD, MS at the VistA Community Meeting 2010-2011 VistA Community Challenges. “Setting clear, written, measurable goals is nearly always a key ingredient for achieving success. With that in mind I propose that this community sets its goal on 100 new, functioning with real patients and practitioners clinical VistA instances in the private sector in 2010.” He adds that the VistA community its members, entities and vendors is poised to do exactly that.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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If I have settled on “GNU/Linux”, the reason is not that I agree completely with all that the usage implies and reject all the arguments on the other side. Rather, it indicates that I consider it more accurate than plain “Linux.”
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Project Releases
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Apparently I missed the announcement back in April this year that EditShare is to release an Open Source version of their award winning non-linear video editor, Lightworks. Let me say that again; a well known, if not quite industry leading, professional non-linear video editor, as used in a number of Hollywood studios, is to move to an open source distribution model.
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The suite contains the ARC Linux 2.6.30 kernel for the ARC 750D processor, and a GCC 4.2.1 based ARC GNU Toolchain for Virage Logic’s complete range of ARC processor cores. Virage Logic is committed to release regular updates of the ARC Open Source Tool Suites to keep the ARC GNU and Linux tools up to date with the current standards. All of the ARC Open Source tools are available for free download at SourceForge.
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Arlington National Cemetery officials with limited expertise in federal contracting regulations and scant outside supervision improperly paid millions of dollars to companies that failed to create a digital database of the cemetery’s records.
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Rupert Murdoch’s Times newspaper has instituted a registration wall as a preliminary step toward a full-blown paywall. Readership of the online edition immediately dropped by 50%.
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Science
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Dozens of people who were blinded or otherwise suffered severe eye damage when they were splashed with caustic chemicals had their sight restored with transplants of their own stem cells — a stunning success for the burgeoning cell-therapy field, Italian researchers reported Wednesday.
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Industry documents reveal that cigarette companies add ammonia to cigarettes to freebase nicotine, which gives the smoker a faster and more intense nicotine “kick.”
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Security/Aggression
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A security expert has identified flaws in the design of some automated teller machines that make them vulnerable to hackers, who could make the ubiquitous cash dispensers spit out their cash holdings.
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Visitors to Bolton Day Nursery will soon find themselves having to undergo fingerprint scanning at the door, while all mobile phones will be banned from the nursery, and no parent will be allowed in without a child collection password.
Locks and fences will be upgraded, CCTV will be extended and no supplier will be allowed access without identification.
The £60,000 “supersafe” initiative is in response to parents’ feedback at the Chorley Street Nursery, inside the David Lloyd Leisure Club, about security being their top concern.
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As many as 4million volunteers have been forced to undergo Criminal Records Bureau checks over the past decade, according to a new report, but many are giving up on their roles because of the red tape involved and the feeling that they are under suspicion.
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CHANGES to the controversial legislation under which West Berkshire Council carries out covert operations have been introduced.
At the council’s Executive meeting last Thursday (17) Hilary Cole (Con, Chieveley) outlined a report which covered alterations to the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), which came into force on April 6, and how it would affect the council.
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Our research highlighted the injustice of the current law on this issue. The removal of such samples is in any case already policy in Scotland, leading to the inequitable situation in which people are treated very differently depending on where they live (or are arrested) in the country.
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A device that uses a high pitched irritating noise to disperse teenage gangs should be banned in the UK, according to a report for the Council of Europe.
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Of course, that’s good for the firm, but what about its investors? Well, now that it’s scared the government and the public into handing over all this cash, it looks like its investors want to cash out. The company has now announced plans for an IPO so they can walk off with the cash, built off of scaring the public over a supposed threat for which they have little actual evidence. What a deal!
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Environment
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A high-tech effort by BP, to slow the oil gushing from its ruptured wellhead, led to a large accident yesterday that forced the company to remove a vital containment cap for 10 hours.
Robots, known as remote operated vehicles, were performing multiple operations at the disaster site when one bumped into the ‘top hat’ cap and damaged one of the vents that removes excess fluid, according to the US coastguard.
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A federal judge sitting in Louisiana struck down the Obama Administration’s six-month moratorium on new deep water drilling, despite the unfolding disaster in the Gulf of Mexico caused by BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling operation. Who is the unelected man standing in the way of permitting a six-month review of this inherently dangerous activity?
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Detailed in this article is the recent oil and gas speculation investments, including investments in deep-sea drilling companies, made by the federal judge who blocked the new deep-sea drilling ruling. I recently called for his impeachment in my comments on the financial disclosure reports of Judge Martin Feldman, who struck down the temporary moratorium on new deep-water oil drilling. I based my comments on the financial disclosure reports that had been provided by the Administrative Office (“AO”) of the U.S. Courts, from the Financial Disclosure Office (FDO) of the Article III Judges Division (where I previously served as Deputy Chief). And, I stand by my strong rebuke of the judge.
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A barrel of oil contains 5.8 million BTU and can be purchased today for $77.00. But in natural gas, using today’s price of $4.80 per million BTU, you can obtain the same quantity of energy for $27.85. This price discount started developing as far back as 2005, but did not reach its current levels until after the deflationary crash of 2008. Natural gas, it should be mentioned, had always carried a small discount to oil owing to the latter’s versatility as a liquid and its greater penetration into industrial society. The present day discount is historic however. Especially with respect to its duration.
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Last week, after President Obama pressured BP to create a compensation fund for victims of its oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico, Rep. Joe Barton denounced the arrangement as “a $20 billion shakedown.” The Texas Republican said the fund has “no legal standing” and circumvents the “due process system” for assigning blame and ordering compensation.
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Everyone who thinks Big Oil should get $31 billion from U.S. taxpayers, please sign on the dotted line. That’s the message of a new ad running today in Congress Daily sponsored by NRDC, the Union of Concerned Scientists, Friends of the Earth and the Clean Air Task Force. The ad highlights the wastefulness and redundancy of the Volumetric Ethanol Excise Tax Credit (VEETC), which amounts to little more than a massive government bribe to oil companies to get them to buy and blend gallons of corn ethanol they are already required to purchase under the Renewable Fuel Standard.
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NPR’s Ira Flatow recently talked with Joel Fox, “Gasland’s” director who documented his personal investigation of the controversial “fracking” drilling techniques which many homeowners say contaminated their drinking water with dangerous chemicals.
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Finance
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The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has launched what it is calling a virtual march on Washington to oppose financial reforms being considered by Congress this week. With relatively few actual Americans willing to take their summer vacation in D.C. to march in favor of the Big Banks whose gambling broke the economy and whose practices have pillaged the financial security of working people, the Chamber has resorted to urging “avatars,” or computer representations of people, to march on the virtual capital of the U.S.
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This financial crisis is likely to be one of the major defining events for the Millennial generation. As we have seen in the past, such as with the Great Depression and the Vietnam War, crises of this magnitude have the power to fundamentally reshape society. In particular, they significantly influence the values of young people in their teens and twenties. Over the next few decades, as these young people assume leadership positions in business, government and academia, it will be very interesting to see how it all plays out.
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The goal of the big banks is to kill the Senate derivatives chapte,r and especially the fiduciary responsibility section. “The toxic swaps that are strangling public budgets and forcing drastic cuts to essential services around the country are more painful evidence of why we can’t let wall street and the big banks water down derivatives legislation,” says SEIU’s Steven Lerner.
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The lack of progress on separating the taxpayer guarantee from the big bank derivatives trade leaves taxpayers on the hook for a future derivatives crisis. When these crises inevitably occur, they will give new fuel to measures such as that offered by Senators Sherrod Brown(D-Ohio) and Ted Kaufman (D-Delaware) to shrink the size of “too big to fail” institutions so that taxpayers will not have to go down with the Wall Street titans.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Front group king Rick Berman, who has worked in the shadows for years, is starting to draw closer scrutiny from the IRS, the media and the public for the unique, self-dealing business model he developed to champion for big business. Berman, a former lobbyist, set up six nonprofit organizations with innocuous names like the Center for Consumer Freedom, the American Beverage Institute and the Employment Policies Institute. Despite their nonprofit designation, together these groups provide as much as 70 percent of the revenues of his for-profit enterprise, Berman and Company. The Center for Consumer Freedom, for example, took in $1.5 million in revenues in 2008, of which 93 percent went to Berman and his firm. The American Beverage Institute took in $1.7 million, of which 82 percent went to Berman and his firm. None of his non-profit groups have independent offices or staff, and all of them pay Berman’s for-profit business for services like accounting, copying, writing, operating Web sites, placing opinion-editorials, and bookkeeping, which is managed by Berman’s wife, Dixie Lynn Berman. Rick Berman sits on the boards of his organizations, holds a total of 24 positions within them, and he serves as Executive Director for most of them. Sounds fishy, right?
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The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) has filed a complaint (pdf) with the Federal Trade Commission to stop the country’s largest egg producer, Rose Acre Farms — makers of Eggland’s Best eggs — from making false and misleading statements in its marketing and advertising about how it treats chickens at the company’s farms.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Pakistan will monitor seven major websites, including Google and Yahoo, to block anti-Islamic links and content, an official said Friday. Seventeen lesser-known sites are being blocked outright for alleged blasphemous material.
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The Lahore High Court has directed the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority to immediately block nine websites for publishing and promoting sacrilegious material, and ordered the PTA chairman to appear in the court on June 28, 2010 along with all relevant material.
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An Australian man is suing search giant Yahoo for defamation, claiming search results on his name made him look like a criminal.
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The article is wrong on multiple levels and does not provide a clear track record. I can only recommend to listen to the original LIBE audiovisual records for yourself, in particular to the clear word of Dutch MEP in’t Veld. The press release of the European Parliament is outrageous.
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The Wall Street Journal finds that the existence of WikiLeaks and other outlets for classified information is something we must “learn to live with” that will make us “less safe.” The Weekly Standard objects to WikiLeaks because informing the public necessarily leads to informing “our mortal adversaries.” The Weekly Standard contrasted the present situation and the Supreme Court case of New York Times Co. v. United States, in which the court permitted the publication of the infamous Pentagon Papers, a 7,000-page history of America’s involvement in Viet Nam.
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Sophisticated hackers aren’t the only ones gaining access to sensitive data on the Internet. A large amount of personal information is being left exposed or poorly protected by companies and governments.
The number of identity-theft victims in the U.S. jumped 12% to 11.1 million in 2009, according to research company Javelin Strategy & Research. Fraud cases reported to the Internet Crime Complaint Center, which is partly run by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, climbed 23% to 336,655 last year.
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The amicus brief is a follow-up to one we filed last month in Facebook v. Power Ventures. Facebook claims that Power breaks California criminal law by offering users a tool that aggregates their own information across several social networking sites. For some, it may be a useful way to access various social network information through one interface. The tool also makes it easier for users to export their data out of Facebook. In its suit against Power Ventures, Facebook claims that the tool violates criminal law because Facebook’s terms of service ban users from accessing their information through “automated means.”
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The Citizen Media Law Project, EFF, and Public Citizen have jointly submitted an amicus curiae brief to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, urging the court to apply First Amendment scrutiny to the “hot news misappropriation” doctrine in Barclays Capital, Inc. v. Theflyonthewall.com, Inc. The Harvard Law School Cyberlaw Clinic assisted the coalition in preparing the brief.
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Requests by the North Carolina Department of Revenue (NCDOR) for detailed information about Amazon.com customers are unconstitutional because they violate Internet users’ rights to free speech, anonymity and privacy, according to a complaint filed today by the American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of North Carolina Legal Foundation and ACLU of Washington. The ACLU, on behalf of several Amazon.com customers, intervened in an existing lawsuit brought by Amazon to stop NCDOR from collecting personally identifiable information that could be linked to their specific purchases on Amazon.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Well apparently Smirnoff didn’t think so, so they threatened the site with a copyright and trademark lawsuit, so it was taken down. The case by Smirnoff is taken apart in Bros Icing Bros – A Case for Copyright Bullying by Overreacting Smirnoff Lawyers by legal non-profit called NewMediaRights, which heroically provides “free legal assistance to bloggers, journalists, and filmmakers getting bullied by companies into taking down their websites.”
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The Motion Picture Academy is somewhat infamous for its over-aggressive IP claims around the “Oscar” awards. It’s even sued a blog that was helping to promote the event. Apparently, just suing one website wasn’t enough, so back in May it sued domain registrar GoDaddy for allowing a bunch of domains to be registered.
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As has been discussed many times in the past, the courts have dealt with the inherent conflict between copyright law and the First Amendment by saying that the two “safety valves” of “fair use” and “the idea/expression dichotomy” helped make sure that speech was not really stifled under copyright law. Of course, there are tons of examples where these “valves” don’t work — and one clear one is the bizarre and still not clearly explained distinction between “parody” and “satire.” Parody is considered a valid fair use defense, while satire is not. The distinction is mostly about whether or not the work in question is “commenting on” the work that it is using (parody) or using the work to comment on something else (satire).
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I recently saw a play about Buckminster Fuller, an inventor, inveterate writer of mixed obscure and enlightening but wordy prose, and a teacher of considerable renown among his students and the colleges where he taught. That led me to his book Critical Path where he discusses invention and innovation. A quote: “Ideas are easy to come by; reductions to practice is an arduous but inspirationally rewarding matter.”
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We, along with a bunch of other sites, recently discussed the hilarious situation where the National Pork Board sent a 12 page cease-and-desist letter to ThinkGeek for its April Fool’s joke about “unicorn meat,” which it jokingly called “the new white meat” (not even “the other white meat” — which is the National Pork Board’s soon to be changed trademarked slogan). Se7ensamurai writes in to point out the National Pork Board is now defending its decision to send the letter, saying:
“We certainly understand that unicorns don’t exist,” said Ceci Snyder, vice president of marketing for the National Pork Board. “Yes, it’s funny. But if you don’t respond, you are opening your trademark up to challenges.”
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The free culture movement is abuzz today over news that ASCAP has requested their members to fight organizations like Creative Commons, Public Knowledge and the Electronic Frontier Foundation over what it claims as an effort to undermine copyright.
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Copyrights
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Consumers downloading free pirated movies are no longer Hollywood’s worst nightmare, but that’s only because of a new, more dreaded menace: cheap, and equally illegal, subscription services.
Foreign, often mob-run, businesses aggregate illegally obtained movies into “cyberlockers” similar to Internet storage sites used by individual consumers to squirrel away pirated video. But the for-profit version of this phenom has spawned an array of sophisticated and seemingly reputable sites selling unlimited digital movie files for as little as $5 a month.
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Along those lines, techflaws.org points us to a German publication’s coverage of the same Huntsberry talk, and it’s interesting that The Hollywood Reporter version of the story appears to have conveniently left out the part where Huntsberry blames Google for all of this (that’s a Google translation of the original). In that one, he calls Google the “biggest leech.” Of course, the courts recently shot down that claim, but it looks like Viacom and its subsidiaries are sticking to the claim.
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A disappointing decision today from a Federal Appeals Court which held that Congress has the power to take works out of the public domain in order to satisfy international treaties.
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Although the US Copyright Group do not need the information supplied as the technology is being used to collect information on anonymous IP addresses, the requests are also not unreasonable. The contract information however, is unreasonable and will not be forwarded as the private nature of any agreements we have are bound by privacy laws, something the US Copyright Group should already be aware of. We know a number of our clients do not wish to disclose their personal information any further than it has already been disclosed. However, we hope that at least one client agrees or new clients approach us providing the information required by the US Copyright Group and thus allowing us to fully test the technology used by them.
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The RIAA is in the middle of a big fight for new royalties (i.e., a performance rights tax) on songs played on the radio, going on and on about how anyone against those fees are “stealing” from them. Yet, when it comes to the royalties that RIAA members have to pay to others, suddenly those are worth fighting against. As you hopefully know, there are a few different copyrights related to music. There’s the copyright on the recording itself, which is usually held by the record label. But there is also the copyright on the song or composition, which can be held by a music publisher or the songwriter.
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All this got us wondering, though: what’s the government already doing about this stuff? Turns out the US was all over the world in the last year, spending tax dollars on IP enforcement in all sorts of ways.
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It’s also frustrating that some reporters covering this story also seem to be taking the same position, saying that this ruling is “a big blow for traditional copyright laws.” It is not. Not even close. This ruling does not change traditional copyright laws in the slightest, and is entirely consistent with numerous previous rulings (all cited in the case). All this ruling concerns is who is liable for infringement: the user who uploads infringing material, or the platform provider who hosts it. The folks who crafted the DMCA made it clear that liability belonged squarely on the shoulders of those who did the uploading, and the court agreed.
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Now, I don’t think that’s entirely accurate on a few points. He’s right that labels didn’t pay artists, or often found creative accounting ways not to pay artists. But he’s also wrong that “everyone made money” during those 25 years. Only a small percentage of artists actually made money during those years. There were a few that were heavily promoted by the labels and became rock stars, like Jagger. Other artists never made much at all.
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The THREsq story does make one point at the end that’s a little more interesting. It suggests that those of us cheering on this ruling may now be disappointed because this ruling might lead to more bogus takedowns. Basically, the judge pointed out that Google’s quick response in taking down content as soon as it received takedown notices helped give it safe harbor protections.
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ACTA
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Tensions over ACTA are rising as the next round of negotiations are about to take place, in Switzerland next week.
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A leaked document published by French advocacy group La Quadrature du Net shows that European Union member states are pushing for criminal sanctions to be added to the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) on copyright infringement.
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More leaks from behind the scenes at the secretive Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement negotiations: the EU is pushing for criminal sanctions for non-commercial copyright infringement. That means putting kids in jail for trading music with one another.
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IF THE WORLD adopts the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) treaty it will become a deeply unpleasant place to live, a bunch of top academics have warned.
Politicians are pushing for the ACTA treaty, which was negotiated in secret, to be widely adopted across the world, handing over control of law enforcement to the entertainment industry. America in particular is pushing the adoption of the treaty as US politicians pander to Big Content.
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The Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement continues to roll along, with negotiations taking place in Switzerland in the coming weeks. Rumor has it that these negotiations might be bringing us to a finalized ACTA soon, despite protests from public interest groups, technology companies, and legislators around the world that its ham-fisted approach to enforcement can do grave harm to consumers, innovation, communication, and can even make it harder for lifesaving medications to reach populations in need.
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Doctoral research into media education and media literacy at the University of Leicester has highlighted how increased legislative control on use of digital content could stifle future creativity.
The Digital Economy Act 2010 alongside further domestic and global legislation, not least the ongoing ‘Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA)’, combines to constitute a very hard line against any form of perceived copyright infringement.
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CLUG Talk 09 July 2009 – Puppet (2009)
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06.25.10
Posted in News Roundup at 5:47 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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My high school just did reports using word-processing documents file-shared and write-locked. I don’t think we had a single collision amongs four teachers and all their students’ reports. Some teachers used GNU/Linux and some used that other OS. It all worked. Indeed the simpler interface of FLOSS apps tends to be easier for students to learn which lowers the overhead of introducing them to particular apps.
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Applications
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Games
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During the past few weeks I’ve continued to work on getting X-Plane to function well on my Core i7 Ubuntu 10.04 box . It has been a long journey, and I’ve learned many things. As of now, I have my joystick hat button working with Jhat, and I have frame rates that vary from 30 to 60 fps while I’m flying.
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I’ve recently switched entirely to Ubuntu Linux as my primary operating system. Phoenix Flight Simulator has been my primary sim for the last few years, and it only runs under Windows. This got me searching for a solution to a very big problem. In the meantime, I’d been looking for a replacement to Flight Sim-X for Linux, and that is when I found X-Plane.
As far as flight simulators go, X-plane is pretty far advanced. However, for an RC fligh simulator it still lacks a few things. I tried a trainer, and a 3d
airplane,
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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Seeing that 4.4′s KDM had no support for differently sized wallpapers, I was about to submit a copy of Plasma’s code there when I noticed that trunk has some code for it. Of course, different from the rest again. Also, the login sequence is basically just lucky to be so smooth. The splashscreen is supposed to stay visible until Plasma is ready with its wallpapers and panel layout. And there is code in KSMServer to ensure this. And Plasma uses it. Yet it’s apparently not used properly – during the first login, when there is more setup to be done during login, it’s perfectly possible to see how the panels are set up.
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Red Hat Family
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As Red Hat launches a cloud strategy and inks a deeper virtualization partnership with Cisco Systems, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst has a cautionary message for VMware partners. Indeed, Whitehurst claims VMware over the next few years will suffer the same fate as Sun Microsystems. Admittedly, he didn’t use those “exact” words — but draw your own conclusions based on this report…
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Ubuntu Variants
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The Jolicloud developers have confirmed that the upcoming major 1.0 release of their operating system will include support for some touchscreen displays out of the box. The developers say that Jolicloud 1.0 will also include a new HTML5 interface and launcher.
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If you’re unfamiliar with the Chumby, you might want to go back to the May 2008 issue of Linux Journal. Daniel Bartholomew showed us all about the cuddly little gadget and explained why we might want one of our very own. The folks over at www.chumby.com still sell the original Chumby device, but they’ve come out with a new model, the Chumby One. I’m rather fond of the numbering scheme they chose, because that would mean the original Chumby is number zero. If the next model is the Chumby 10, they will get extra geek points!
How does the new revision stack up? Quite frankly, it’s great. Although it may have lost the rounded edges and squishy case, the Chumby One adds some welcome features:
* A dedicated volume knob, for quick-and-simple volume control.
* Rechargeable battery for Chumby uninterrupted mobility (battery not included).
* FM radio.
* Beefed-up CPU (454MHz).
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MontaVista Software, LLC, announced the availability of what’s claimed to be the first commercial Linux distribution and toolchain optimized for ARM Cortex-A9 processors. Offered as a market specific distribution (MSD) package for MontaVista Linux 6 (MVL6), the software includes a toolchain optimized for the multicore-enabled Cortex-A9 architecture, says the Cavium subsidiary.
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Phones
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HP wants the operating system, but is mainly focused on emerging device formats such as web-enabled printers and tablets, is the message from within the larger firm. But until the deal is finalized, expected in late July, Palm insiders say the company is not giving up on its key market and is developing new devices as well as an OS upgrade.
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Nokia/MeeGo
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We’ve already gotten an early peek at what’s in store for MeeGo on handsets courtesy of some leaked UI guidelines, and it looks like folks now won’t have to wait too much longer to try it out for themselves — Nokia has confirmed that the pre-alpha release will be available on June 30th.
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Rockbox has been chugging along for years offering an open source firmware replacement for MP3 players. But how relevant is a firmware replacement for a type of device that’s slowly going extinct? With the release of Rockbox 3.6 on June 3, now is a good time to check in on the state of Rockbox and the future of the project.
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Events
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Mark described his (and Ubuntu’s) job as taking the great work done by the development community and getting it out there where people can use it. There has been a lot of progress on the development front, resulting in a great deal of top-quality software. But that’s not where the job stops; getting that software to users, Mark says, is “a whole new level of awesome.” Achieving this new level is his objective.
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In order to accommodate its steady growth over the past few years, the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) will move to its new home, the Hilton Los Angeles Airport, starting with SCALE 9X in 2011
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It’s time to block your calendar and request approval to travel – the MeeGo Conference has been scheduled for November 15 – 17, 2010 at the Aviva Stadium in Dublin, Ireland. This is the annual conference for MeeGo developers, OSVs, OEMs, other integrators, and MeeGo project contributors.
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SaaS
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The team is using OCaml to develop Mirage. The programming language has healthy interest in the academic world but is gaining a foothold in the commercial market as well, Madhavapeddy said.
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Openness
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Government Transparency
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The UK Government is developing the next generation of its licensing framework for public sector information. Building on the approach tested for data.gov.uk, part of the new framework is a machine-readable licence suitable for making central government Crown copyright as well as information and data from local government and the wider public sector available for re-use more easily. The key features are that the new licence will be: non-transactional, in that re-users do not need to obtain individual permission for re-use; free, in that there is no charge for the licence; and it will promote innovation and openness by allowing the re-use and re-purposing of a broad range of public sector information. In assembling this solution, the Government looked at the Creative Commons and Open Data Commons models, and anticipates a high degree of interoperability between these licences.
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Google vice president of engineering Urs Hölzle has warned that unless we update the internet’s underlying protocols, any improvements to network bandwidth will be wasted.
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Science
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Agro-boffins in America say that mankind could be on the verge of the “biggest agricultural breakthrough in 10,000 years”, as researchers close in on “perennial grains”.
At the moment, most grain grown around the world has to be replanted after every crop. Farming so-called “annual” grain of this sort consumes a lot of resources and is hard on the land, which is especially worrying as half the world’s population lives off farmland which could easily be rendered unproductive by intensive annual grain harvests.
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The FDA warned consumers that Magic Power Coffee marketed as an aphrodisiac could have dangerous side effects.
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Security/Aggression
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The FBI is warning consumers to be on the alert for scammers who tie up their phone lines while emptying their bank accounts.
These “telephone denial-of-service” attacks are similar to ones that have been used by hackers for years to crash websites by flooding them with Internet traffic. But high-tech criminals are now using automated dialing programs and multiple accounts to overwhelm the phone lines of unsuspecting consumers and small- and medium-sized businesses.
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Fortress city Toronto is under even fiercer police lockdown pending the arrival of guests to Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper’s billion-dollar G20 party.
Security forces already have potentially lethal weapons such as the ARWEN anti-riot rifle with which to protect the likes of US president Barack Obama.
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A bill before the U.S. Senate would give the president power to declare a “national cyber emergency.” Apparently, such an emergency would require that the “owner or operator of covered critical infrastructure…immediately comply with any emergency measure or action.”
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Environment
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Plans to rear thousands of pigs and cows in huge new industrial units condemned by animal welfare charities
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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The European Union’s data protection authorities released an opinion Thursday declaring that online advertisers who seek to target ads at consumers by tracking their surfing habits must obtain consumer consent before engaging in such practices.
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Old news in the world of surveillance and spookery today, as the original 1946 secret treaty between the UK and US which set up the famous “Echelon” listening system is finally published.
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THIS month, at least, Daniel Ellsberg’s tale doesn’t seem so extraordinary. Private (formerly specialist) Bradley Manning, a 22-year-old US Army intelligence analyst, is under arrest for leaking confidential video of a 2007 US helicopter strike in Iraq that killed insurgents, civilians and two Reuters journalists, and of the 2009 Granai airstrike that killed up to 140 civilians. Julian Assange, Australian-born founder of the video’s broadcaster, WikiLeaks, is in hiding and believed to be being hunted by the US government.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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I’ll admit it: watching the debates about net neutrality in the US, I’ve always felt rather smug. Not for us sensible UK chappies, I thought, the destruction of what is one of the key properties of the Internet.
[...]
I urge you to read the Ofcom discussion paper, and then to make your views known – the consultation closes 9 September, so you have plenty of time (light summer reading?). You can either use the online form, or, for longer responses, send it to traffic.management@ofcom.org.uk. I aim to do the latter: when I’ve written my thoughts on the issues raised by Oftel, I’ll post them here.
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Copyrights
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BitTorrent is the ideal way to transfer large files to thousands of locations in a short period of time. This doesn’t only apply to movies and music that are downloaded by the average BitTorrent user, companies can benefit from it as well. With help from BitTorrent, Facebook can now push hundreds of megabytes of new code to all servers worldwide in just a minute.
CLUG Talk – 24 June 2008 – A review of working with technology in Central and Western Africa (2008)
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Audiocasts
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In this episode: Google releases its own command-line tool, Ubuntu drops F-Spot, and has anyone seen Mandriva? Listen to the results of our haiku challenge, and we ask, do you use open source software for freedom or function?
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Artwork
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Instructionals
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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With KDE SC 4.4, we put a fair amount of work into Javascript Plasmoid support. This has been extended a bit further in 4.5. Javascript has also blossomed as a runtime management tool for Plasma Desktop and Plasma Netbook, both of which support using Javascript for first-run layouts and configuration updates. Plasma Desktop also allows you to use Javascript for templated layouts and provides an interactive console for messing about with these things, features that hopefully will extend to other Plasma workspaces such as Netbook in upcoming releases.
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GNOME Desktop
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Clip-board managers are useful tools for users who copy-and-paste frequently or wish to copy something but use it again later. The ever-expanding resource that is Wikipedia gives two main tasks that clipboard managers such as Glippy aim to do: -
* to store data copied to clipboard, so it can be pasted after closing the host application of the data copied, and
* to make multiple clips from the history available, whereas most system-native clipboards overwrite one clip with the next.
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The GNOME Foundation released their conference speaker guidelines today. This is an important step not just in helping speakers know what’s acceptable, but also in helping audience members understand in advance what the community is likely to find objectionable and ensure that they can feel comfortable in raising concerns.
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With many Linux distributions receiving major updates in recent weeks and months we have carried out a five-way Linux distribution comparison of openSUSE, Ubuntu, Fedora, PCLinuxOS, and Arch Linux. We have quite a number of tests comparing the 32-bit performance of these popular Linux distributions on older PC hardware.
Our test system was a Lenovo ThinkPad T60 notebook with an Intel Core Duo T2400 (1.83GHz dual-core) CPU, 1GB of system memory, an 80GB Hitachi HTS541080G9SA00 SATA HDD, and ATI Radeon Mobility X1400 graphics. Below are some of the key software components for the different distributions that were tested in this article.
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Linux has changed almost beyond recognition since version 1.0 in 1994 and Ubuntu is about as polished and professional as it gets. It’s approaching the level of polish of Mac OS X, is faster and easier to install than Windows, includes a whole suite of apps and offers tens of thousands more, runs on cheap commodity hardware and costs nothing.
Nobody knows quite how many Ubuntu users there are – it’s not sold or licensed, there’s no registration process and it doesn’t “phone home” and identify itself, so it’s hard to tell. Its creators reckon around 12 million, but then, the number-two distro on Distrowatch, Fedora, claims about twice as many.
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I consider Simply Mepis to be among the first distro to get it “right” for people looking for a no-hassle, stable experience with a generally consistent environment from release to release.
At its core, Simply Mepis is created to make things easy to use right out of the box for any Linux skill level. Despite being a KDE-only distro based on Debian, Mepis allows the end user to setup their network, video configuration and other settings from the Simple Mepis “assistants.”
This is handy when you want to switch from the NVIDIA NV driver to a proprietary driver instead, yet wish to do so safely from a GUI environment.
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Reviews
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I am using Ubuntu 10.04 and really enjoying it since I have more programs to choose from then I have had with other versions of Linux.
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The most obvious, and among Arch’s Greatest Hits, is the abs tool, which will mirror the current Arch build scripts onto your local system. From there, almost anything is possible, so long as you’re willing to take the time to build things yourself.
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New Releases
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The latest release of wattOS is based on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS “Lucid Lynx” and features several advanced power management tools to help users consume less energy for their “daily computing needs”. According to the developers, the latest update has a much faster boot and install time and overall responsiveness is improved. Other changes include replacing the Exaile music player with Rhythmbox and the addition of the F-Spot personal photo management application
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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If you are testing our Unity weekly builds, you may have noticed that the Launcher is beginning to show some dramatic changes. We put a lot of effort into designing the Launcher’s deepest details, and those details will take time to surface in the weekly builds, but this post is not only about explaining you how the Launcher will be, but also to explain the rationale behind its design.
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Android
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Google Android is generally aimed at mobile devices with ARM-based processors. But we’ve seen several efforts to bring the software to x86 processors, including the independent Androidx86 project as well as an Acer netbook which dual boots Windows and Google Android.
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Google this week removed two applications from its Android Market, and exercised a feature that lets the company remotely delete the apps from a user’s phones.
Google did not reveal the names of these apps, and said only that they were “two free applications built by a security researcher for research purposes.”
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Think of Sun Microsystems, and what comes to your mind?
For me? Purple workstations–my first exposure to Sun equipment.
For others, it might be Solaris. Or Java. There’s a host of things Sun was well-known for before it was acquired by Oracle last year and systematically dismantled to fit within the Oracle ecosystem.
But I’ll bet middleware was not one of the things you initially recalled. But it’s some of Sun-now-Oracle’s cast-off middleware that may prove to be a huge business for a burgeoning new community, led by some former Sun employees.
The company is ForgeRock, which made a small splash in the open source scene when it started up this February in Norway, led by Lasse Andresen, former Central & Northern Europe CTO at Sun. The ForgeRock team was later joined by Simon Phipps, former Sun Open Source Officer, member of the Open Source Initiative’s Board of Directors, and (now) Chief Strategy Officer at ForgeRock.
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Google rules the search engine roost today, but upstarts always have their sights (and their sites) set on a share of its success. Seeks, for instance, introduces a new breed of social search engine in which users can collaborate and share their experiences in finding results, instead of keeping that information in the hands of a search engine provider.
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Events
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The Plasma team will also be hosting a Plasma Feedback Round Table. This is a session for us to sit around a room with other interested / concerned KDE folk. We will answer the questions those attending have to the best of our abilities (and record the ones we don’t have answers for to do further research on them), and discuss ideas regarding Plasma now and in the future with all in attendance.
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Mozilla
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Mozilla vice president of products Jay Sullivan says that unlike Google, the open source outfit has no intention of bundling Firefox with Adobe Flash —– or with a plug-in that runs native code inside the browser. Mozilla, Sullivan says, believes that the future of online applications lies with web standards, including HTML5.
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Project Releases
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Today we are releasing ownCloud 1.0
This is the first step of the 1.x series with a planed 1.1 really soon.
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Openness/Sharing
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In the language of my discipline, economics, openDemocracy produces a public good. Why? First, because information, analysis, commentary and active engagement with the unfolding story of democracy everywhere across the globe is an essential part of the progress of democracy. Democracy is about self-government, and where can that be without self-understanding about government?
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Thanks to everyone for their feedback on the licenses and their help with the project. We can now announce a new license to the Open Data Commons family, the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY) license. This is a database specific license requiring attribution for databases. This makes ODC-BY similar to the Creative Commons Attribution license, but is built specifically for databases. As a legal tool that only requires attribution, it complies with the Open Knowledge Definition, the Open Knowledge Foundation’s standard around defining the rights behind what something means to be “open”.
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Science
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Tens of thousands of lives could be saved if major changes were made to processed and convenience foods, the UK’s leading health watchdog will say today, challenging the government and the food industry to act to improve the nation’s diet.
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For the first time, an animal has drawn a breath with lungs cultivated in the lab. Although preliminary, the results might eventually lead to replacement lungs for patients.
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Security/Aggression
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Gov. David Paterson has proposed roughly doubling New York’s DNA database to include samples from even low-level offenders, making it the first in the nation to so broadly collect and use this evidence to solve crimes and exonerate people wrongly convicted.
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But Robert Beggs, who knows Sonne, told CBC News that Sonne was a member of a group called the Toronto Area Security Klatch, a group of security professionals who share knowledge and research on matters related to IT security.
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Environment
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The Sunday Times carried a rather large “correction” yesterday that, once read alongside the original offending article, amounted to a complete retraction. In fact, it was a giant climbdown.
In The Sunday Times and the IPCC: Correction, the paper refers to a news page story on 31 January headlined “UN climate panel shamed by bogus rainforest claim” (removed from the Sunday Times site, but available, disgracefully, on this site).
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BP has been using controlled burns to limit the spread of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. In the process they are burning much of what wildlife remains in the area alive. In particular, conservationists say that sea turtles—including the endangered Kemp’s Ridley—are being caught in burns. “Once the turtles are in there, they can’t get out,” Mike Ellis, a boat captain involved in the rescue, told conservation biologist Catherine Craig in an interview.
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Do we really need to spend £10m on researching why our pollinators are dying out?
There is no doubt that honeybees, hoverflies, wasps, bumblebees, moths and butterflies are all under threat. Since the 1970s, there has been a 75% decline in butterfly species in the UK, three species of bumblebees are now extinct, and honeybees have been having a pretty hard time for the last few years.
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In the initial stages of the spill, an estimated 30,000 barrels of oil per day were flowing from the well. In July 1979 the pumping of mud into the well reduced the flow to 20,000 barrels per day, and early in August the pumping of nearly 100,000 steel, iron, and lead balls into the well reduced the flow to 10,000 barrels per day. Mexican authorities also drilled two relief wells into the main well to lower the pressure of the blowout. PEMEX claimed that half of the released oil burned when it reached the surface, a third of it evaporated, and the rest was contained or dispersed.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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The National Union of Journalists (NUJ) has said that it will support legal challenges, such as those that could be brought by broadband ISPs like TalkTalk UK, against the recently passed and highly controversial Digital Economy Act (DEA). This is because the new law could be used against websites that publish material of public interest without permission (e.g. Wikileaks).
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From today’s Democracy Now with Amy Goodman:
AMY GOODMAN: Are you calling for Wikileaks to post the [Garani massacre] videotape online?
ELLSBERG: I’d call for President Obama to post that videotape online. Let’s see whether it confirms what his officials and the Bush officials said about it earlier, or what the truth is. Has he seen it himself? He certainly should. He has access to it. And if he does, what excuse would he have for not revealing it? So why is he waiting for Wikileaks to use its sources to decrypt that, when he can just easily release it, as he should have some time ago?
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A Hong Kong publisher said today that he had scrapped plans to publish an alleged insider account of the decision-making behind Beijing’s 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown on pro-democracy student protesters.
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Copyrights
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The on-going fight against file-sharing link sites in Spain is turning into a farce. Despite many rulings which state that the sites break no laws, still anti-piracy groups waste their money pursuing them. As yet another site is cleared of wrong doing, a lawyer who speaks out for civil rights on the Internet is clear on the piracy issue – either join the revolution, or perish.
CLUG Talk – 26 Mar 2008 – XRandR 1.2: Dynamic display configuration for Linux (2008)
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06.24.10
Posted in News Roundup at 4:20 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Africa
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MOODLE is the acronym for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment. It is an Open Source Learning Management System (LMS) or a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). MOODLE is provided freely as an Open Source Software under the GPL (GNU Public License).
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The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world’s premier Linux certification organization (http://www.lpi.org), announced with the Ministry of Communication Technologies of Tunisia (http://www.mincom.tn) a program to train and certify young graduates in Linux and Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). The program was announced during the signing of a partnership agreement in Tunis, Tunisia with Ministry officials and LPI’s affiliate in the region: LPI-Maghreb (http://www.lpi-maghreb.net).
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Dell
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What is interesting however is that Dell did not kill off the fatal phrase.
It seems that Dell remains committed to Ubuntu Linux on its laptops and netbooks and will not allow itself to be bullied too much.
Perhaps Dell sees life in Android, Chrome and Linux after all.
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Amit Midha, Dell’s president for Greater China and South Asia, told Reuters Monday that Dell wants to be a leader in the “unique innovations” that are coming to market in the next two to three years. Dell is working with Google to see where Chrome and Android fit with the “new form of computing,” he said.
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At this point, though, that’s a big if. “I think Dell is using this mostly as leverage against Microsoft to gain a more favorable OEM contract rather than gearing up to sell a small number of systems to the Microsoft haters of the world,” said Piland.
Dell wants to be a leader in the “unique innovations” that are coming to market and it’s working with Google to see where Chrome OS and Android fit with the “new form of computing,” Amit Midha, president of Dell’s Greater China and South Asia business, told Reuters Monday.
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Server
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Cloud Linux announces today that CH-Center Hosting, a Romania based full service hosting company, will offer CloudLinux across its hosted offerings.
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Graphics Stack
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After many months of hard work, Nvidia finally announced on June 22nd the final and stable version of the 256.x proprietary driver for Nvidia graphics cards. Nvidia 256.35 incorporates lots of fixes and improvements, over previous releases. Unofficial GLX support was also added for a few OpenGL extensions, as well as Thermal Settings reporting improvements, Compiz fixes, many VDPAU improvements, and many more.
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Instructionals
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Games
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Reviews
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The fun doesn’t stop there, though. Go back to the login screen, click the list button at the bottom left of the login window, and you begin to see the advantage of having accepted the defaults on installation, and thus installed almost everything… You can now choose your session type from KDE, Xfce, Fluxbox, Blackbox, FVWM, TWM and more. As I said, if you want to learn about Linux, this is an excellent distribution to use.
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Red Hat Family
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Fog Computing
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LEADING LINUX VENDOR Red Hat has announced the release of several cloud computing tools in what it calls Cloud Foundation: Edition One.
[...]
Red Hat claims Edition One is the first of several cloud offerings that will give its customers everything they’ll need to build and manage a private cloud software infrastructure.
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Results
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Red Hat’s JBoss middleware is landing big greenfield deals as well successes with established outfits like the NYSE Euronext. Red Hat has said its Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 will be its most ambitious release and designed for virtual, cloud and physical IT environments.
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As the graph below demonstrates, Red Hat has grown significantly faster than the industry average (as measured by the Information Age index, which collates the revenue growth rates of the sector’s largest suppliers), but like most businesses it saw a severe deceleration in growth during the past two years – from a height of 52% at the start of 2007 down to a low of 11% at the start of last year.
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Cisco
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Networking giant Cisco Systems and open source software leader Red Hat are expanding their joint efforts in the field of virtualization.
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Virtualisation
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Red Hat has released a new version of its Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation that integrates desktop and server virtualisation into a single platform, simplifying the management of virtual infrastructures in a single end-to-end solution, according to the firm.
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Cloud infrastructure wannabe and Linux juggernaut Red Hat has announced the next rev of its Enterprise Virtualization commercial-grade KVM hypervisor, saying it has qualified it to scale further and also adding the ability to support desktop images as well as server images.
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Other
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Like many other IT professionals, Gunnar Hellekson’s interest in computers was born at an early age, but it was not until college he received formal training in the field. While taking engineering classes, Hellekson put his skills and his entrepreneurial side to use and worked as a systems administrator to make some money. Not long after, he took the step to start up a number of Internet companies, doing business-to-business work and web development, eventually leading to the founding of a consulting company focused on helping small and medium-size arts and nonprofits in New York City. About four or five years ago, he traded the Big Apple for the nation’s capital and ended up working at Red Hat U.S. Public Sector as a chief technology strategist.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Now, for many FOSS aficionados, the post serves as a bright spot of comic relief in a world otherwise dominated by all-too-real, anti-Linux FUD.
” Hahha,” wrote one anonymous reader in the comments on Hoogland’s blog, for example. “One of the most hilarious article on Ubuntu ever.”
Some were even inspired to continue in the same sarcastic vein: “Ubuntu; why would anyone want to use that?” wrote another anonymous commenter. “Any fool could see that Windows is the best choice. Expensive, proprietary and restrictive is always better than free as in freedom.”
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Highlights of this June 2010 release are the virtual platform simulator OVPsim, which has improved its industry leading performance by 50 percent; fast models of PowerPC processors, and a MIPS-based reference platform under SystemC/TLM-2.0 which boots both Linux and Mentor Graphic’s Nucleus RTOS.
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MontaVista(R) Software, LLC, a leader in embedded Linux(R) commercialization, announced the availability of the first commercial Linux distribution and toolchain optimized for the ARM Cortex(TM)-A9 processor. Based on the revolutionary MontaVista Linux 6 (MVL6) approach, it provides a market specific distribution (MSD) and toolchain designed specifically for the Cortex-A9 architecture and provides the perfect starting point for new product designs using the low power, high performance characteristics of the ARM Cortex-A9 processor.
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Virage Logic Corporation, the semiconductor industry’s trusted IP partner, today announced it is investing in its ARC processor product portfolio by releasing the ARC GNU 2.3 Toolchain for its complete range of ARC processor cores and the ARC Linux 1.3 Operating System for its ARC® 750D processor. The suite contains the ARC Linux 2.6.30 kernel for the ARC 750D processor, and a GCC 4.2.1 based ARC GNU Toolchain for Virage Logic’s complete range of ARC processor cores. Virage Logic is committed to release regular updates of the ARC Open Source Tool Suites to keep the ARC GNU and Linux tools up to date with the current standards. All of the ARC Open Source tools are available for free download at www.SourceForge.com.
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Nokia/MeeGo
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To get down and dirty in mobile phone competition, Nokia decides to take on Apple and Google by adopting the Linux MeeGo platform for its new N-Series phones. Back in February of this year, Intel and Nokia teamed up to create the MeeGo mobile phone platform.
This bold move allows Nokia to compete more effectively with Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android-based phones. The MeeGo platform features rich applications via the blending of the Moblin Linux distribution and Linux-based Maemo.
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Nokia has confirmed that it now plans to release a preliminary version of its MeeGo platform for handsets on the 30th of June. The Linux-based distribution for mobile devices is the result of the February decision to merge Intel’s Moblin platform and Nokia’s Maemo platform under the aegis of the Linux Foundation.
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We’ve been thinking a lot about the next Nokia N900 – or Nokia N9, as it will likely be called – and the features we’d like to see from this range-topping handset. We also asked for our readers’ feedback, however, so join us after the cut to find out what the public wants from the Nokia N9…
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Nokia Oyj (NOK1V.HE) will use Linux MeeGo software in its flagship N-series smartphones, hoping the new platform will give it a better chance to battle rivals such as Apple Inc (AAPL.O) and Google Inc (GOOG.O).
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Nokia on Thursday confirmed that it will drop Symbian from its Nseries phones. A spokesperson said that all of the high-end devices after the N8 will use MeeGo, the OS co-designed with Intel. It’s not known if the work-oriented Eseries or other models would use MeeGo, but most are still expected to use Symbian^3 or S40.
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The software, too, is changing. The mobile giant is set to release an overhaul of the popular open-source Symbian Series 60 platform with Symbian 3 and soon Symbian 4, and is in the process of bringing the first devices with its Linux-based MeeGo operating system to market. Once completed, Nokia will only have three smartphone platforms for its entire fleet – Series 40, Symbian 4 and MeeGo – which are open for development from third parties through its Qt framework which can be deployed on all of the company’s devices.
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Android
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Numerous Nexus One users started receiving Google’s Android 2.2 upgrade over-the-air on their devices Wednesday night. Gauging by users’ reports, the updates appear to be hitting phones all throughout America, on both T-Mobile and AT&T, and on carriers in other countries as well. Users who were not part of the original Nexus One Froyo test group have received the software.
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The Verizon/Motorola event has kicked off, and the Droid X has been announced. We already knew the Droid X had a 4.3″ display, recorded video at 720p, and had HDMI out capabilities.
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In a brief blog post, Google has announced that it has released the entirety of the source code for Froyo, better known as Android 2.2, under an open-source license. The open-source aspect of the release isn’t new — all previous platform iterations have been open-sourced too — but there are a few extra modules in Froyo that have been opened up that had previously been closed-source.
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Every now and then, we remove applications from Android Market due to violations of our Android Market Developer Distribution Agreement or Content Policy. In cases where users may have installed a malicious application that poses a threat, we’ve also developed technologies and processes to remotely remove an installed application from devices. If an application is removed in this way, users will receive a notification on their phone.
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Apple and Google are now playing chess while everyone else plays catch up. The surge in popularity for developing tablet applications on the two leading OSes, coupled with second tier platforms seeing flat to declining interest, suggests that Google and Apple are moving the battle from phones to a broader, more long-term platform shootout for “anywhere computing.”
[...]
Why this is significant: Developers see Apple dominating in every category related to its devices and app store. Yet Android takes top honors for OS capabilities, openness, and, long-term outlook. Despite all of Apple‟s success, developers see that the winner long-term will be the mobile operating system that has the most capabilities and flexibility in scenarios beyond phones.
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Tablets
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As a matter of fact, word is that some Linux tablets are headed our way in the near future but they ain’t here yet. And while I think that Linux tablets will do well, it also drives me to expect a lot from them.
According to Jim Zemlin, the head of the Linux Foundation, it is necessary for mobile Linux vendors to increase their technical investments in order users could benefit Linux devices.
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Online, open source is a movement, and has resulted in wholesale changes to the way in which software is developed.
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Dr Koray Atalag, the inaugural holder of a fellowship also endowed by the Bedogni family, says while it’s likely the winner will be working in free or open-source software, the term “open systems” was used to take in people who may be working on components of open standards.
“The spirit of this thing is open source, but it leaves the door open for people in the non-open source world,” Atalag says.
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Open Computing is already being widely used and saving money. The French Gendarmarie’s migration to an open source desktop has saved millions of Euros. In Italy, children’s hospitals in Tuscany are saving an estimated 1,000 Euros per PC by moving to open source. And the Spanish autonomous region of Extremadura has moved entirely to open standards and open source resulting in claimed savings of 18 million Euros.
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MB: What is your view on the open source movement (free software and web services). Is it anti-business as Microsoft’s Bill Gates has suggested?
RB: No, it’s not anti-business – it’s actually very pro-business. It’s enabling. It allows more people direct access to the tools and resources they need to succeed, and also gives everyone a sense of ownership as a whole community. As opposed to one corporate body retaining strict ownership and distribution rights which is more crippling to people at the coal face, particularly in times when we all face budget and resource restrictions.
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Events
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The event will highlight, discuss and explain advantages and issues in open innovation and using Open Source software.
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Many organisations are beginning to embrace more open and collaborative approaches to innovation. Inspired by the success of open source products such as the Apache web server and the Firefox browser, many multinational companies such as Procter and Gamble, Orange and IBM have made ‘open innovation’ – the sharing of the risks and rewards of the product development process with partners – a top strategic priority.
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Web Browsers
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A bit of welcome news for Linux users who browse with Google Chrome: a change has landed in the Chromium source code which adds support for the built-in, secure password stores for both GNOME and KDE.
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Fog Computing
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In November 2008, Evan Prodromou — founder of identi.ca and CEO and lead developer of StatusNet — published a blog post on autonomo.us in which he argued that we need a distributed model for social networking sites.
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Eucalyptus (and Fake ‘Open Source’)
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So let me try to make one thing clear: Open core may be a good business model, but open core is not open source!
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I can remember the morning of the first keynotes for the MySQL Conference after Sun had acquired MySQL. You have Jonathan Swartz and Rich Green delivering keynotes where the underlying message was “we continue to allow MySQL to run its own business”.
Why was this?
Because Marten was going to announce the close sourcing of part of the MySQL Server. For years there were conversations around “if we did XYZ could we take out a critical…”. These conversations were always met with a dead silence. The codebase was neither modular, nor did any of the developers resonate with the message. The backup code had never been designed to be a standalone component so the entire message of “we are close sourcing it” was a delusion. We had no ability to do it.
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Databases
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Membase is a simple, fast and elastic data store that is optimized for demanding web applications. The software is based on Memcached, a very popular in-memory caching system. NorthScale was started by the leaders of the Memcached open source project. NorthScale also today announced the availability of the beta version of its NorthScale Membase Server.
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Education
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While it wouldn’t be the first open-sourced textbook, it may well be the first not to focus on open source and the first spearheaded by a major university.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Furthermore, I try to have faith in our community’s intelligence. Regardless of how people get drawn into FLOSS: be it from the moral software freedom arguments or the technical-advantage-only open source ones, I don’t think people stop listening immediately upon their arrival in our community. I know this even from my own adoption of software freedom: I came for the Free as in Price, but I stayed for the Free as in Freedom. It’s only because I couldn’t afford a SCO Unix license in 1992 that I installed GNU/Linux. But, I learned within just a year why the software freedom was what mattered most.
Surely, others have a similar introduction to the community: either drawn in by zero-cost availability or the technical benefits first, but still very interested to learn about software freedom. My goal is to reach those who have arrived in the community. I therefore try to speak almost constantly about software freedom, why it’s a moral issue, and why I work every day to help either reduce the amount of proprietary software, or increase the amount of Free Software in the world. My hope is that newer community members will hear my arguments, see my actions, and be convinced that a moral and ethical commitment to software freedom is the long lasting principle worth undertaking. In essence, I seek to lead by example as much as possible.
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Project Releases
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Today the TYPO3 Association released the newest version of their Open Source project TYPO3. TYPO3 has been downloaded over 4.6 million times – making it one of the world’s leading Enterprise Open Source projects.
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Government
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EU
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The European Commission will ensure that devices with always-on connectivity, like Apple’s iPhone, don’t lock consumers in to proprietary technology, Neelie Kroes, EU commissioner for the ‘Digital Agenda’, told EurActiv in an exclusive interview. A yearly scorecard will measure the industry’s progress.
“I intend to publish a yearly progress report on the Digital Agenda with a scoreboard on how we are doing in terms of implementation. This scoreboard will chart progress towards the key targets outlined in the Digital Agenda,” Kroes told EurActiv.
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US
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In Washington, the project is being called “Digital Vote by Mail” and will be open source, which means that the public will be able to examine how the software works. That’s important because it ensures transparency, officials said. District officials are working with the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation, a California group, to develop the process and ensure it is secure.
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Openness/Sharing
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It is sometimes suggested that there isn’t a real difference in terms of “openness” between share-alike (SA) and non-commercial (NC) clauses — both being some restriction on what the user of that material can do, and, as such, a step away from openness.
This is not true. A meaningful distinction can be drawn between share-alike and non-commercial clauses (or any other clause that discriminates against a particular type of person or field of endeavour), with the former being “open” and the latter being not “open”.
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We at Shareable.net harbor the belief that the growth of the Internet and mobile technology has made sharing more practical–and that this trend has the potential to minimize consumption, by redefining wealth as access to stuff instead of the accumulation of stuff. We’re working on testing this hypothesis, by launching a series of studies with the research consultancy Latitude.
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Open Data
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The OpenStreetMap (OSM) Project has announced that this year’s State of the Map conference will take place from the 9th to the 11th of July in Girona, Spain. OpenStreetMap is an open source project that is building free online maps, not based on any copyright or licensed map data. Founded by Steve Coast in August of 2004 and run by the OpenStreetMap Foundation, to date the project has nearly 270,000 users worldwide that make more than 7,000 edits every hour.
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Open Hardware
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And the open source community has lapped it up. Currently, there are 164 projects registered with the BeagleBoard website.
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Eclipse
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The Eclipse project has announced the Helios release train, a major update of the open source Eclipse integrated development environment (IDE) and many of its key components.
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The Eclipse Foundation’s annual release train, this year dubbed Helios, as planned, includes version 3.6 of Eclipse, the free development environment. Helios includes 39 projects with more than 33 million lines of code – the work of approximately 490 committers. Discussing the release, Eclipse Foundation Executive Director Mike Milinkovich said, “The Helios release is another fantastic effort by the Eclipse committer community”, noting that,”Besides the feat of coordinating such a large development effort, Helios introduces important innovations”.
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Unique browsers to the five national newspaper websites and groups which file monthly ABCe figures hit a record 131.8 million in May.
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Science
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Astronomers have for the first time observed a massive storm on a planet outside our solar system.
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Environment
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The way the ocean is fished is less predictable than we thought, according to a paper published in PNAS this week. Researchers thought that commercial interests usually fished “down the food web,” targeting species high in the food chain and moving downwards. But the new study shows that price indexes of fish play a large role and don’t always correlate with food chain position, which will make the ecosystem impact of fishing difficult to predict.
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On the morning of Saturday 18 March 1967, the Torrey Canyon ran aground on Pollard’s Rock between Land’s End and the Isles of Scilly. Over the following days, every drop of the 119,328 tonnes of crude oil borne by this 300m-long supertanker seeped into the Atlantic. Thousands of tonnes despoiled the beaches of Cornwall – and thousands more were propelled by winds and currents across the channel towards France.
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A rare and endangered species of sea turtle is being burned alive in BP’s controlled burns of the oil swirling around the Gulf of Mexico, and a boat captain tasked with saving them says the company has blocked rescue efforts.
Mike Ellis, a boat captain involved in a three-week effort to rescue as many sea turtles from unfolding disaster as possible, says BP effectively shut down the operation by preventing boats from coming out to rescue the turtles.
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I was interviewed on British radio today and was asked about this idea. Seemed hard to believe: Blair has become a climate activist (see “Tony Blair, Climate Group, and CAP call for strong technology deployment policy driven by a carbon price, innovative financing, and serious technology standards“) — and this is a no-win, resume-destroying job.
But some British pundits are actually proposing this radical solution to BP’s PR woes (see “Tony Blair is the right man to be BP chairman” and “Tony Blair’s Hiring Is Step One in a BP Comeback: Matthew Lynn.”
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The Obama administration’s six-month moratorium has put a freeze on new offshore drilling permits, but three miles off the coast of Alaska, there’s one unprecedented drilling project by BP that’s still moving forward regardless.
That’s according to two investigations this week—one in today’s New York Times and the other published online by Rolling Stone on Tuesday.
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A jailed Tibetan environmentalist used the opening of his trial today to accuse Chinese captors of beatings, sleep deprivation and other maltreatment, his wife told reporters.
Karma Samdrup – a prominent businessman and award-winning conservationist – issued a statement in court detailing the brutal interrogation methods, including drugs that made his ears bleed, used on him since his detention on 3 January.
“If not for his voice, I would not have recognised him,” his wife Zhenga Cuomao told the Associated Press.
She said Samdrup appeared gaunt when he appeared at the Yangqi county courthouse in Xinjiang, the mountainous province neighbouring Tibet.
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Finance
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Financial reform enters a crucial phase on Thursday as House and Senate negotiators begin public debate on the regulation of derivatives, the complex instruments at the heart of the financial crisis.
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The House weakens the Senate legislation in a variety of ways that would lead to fewer trades being cleared and lower capital requirements. In many ways, said Greenberger, the House offer is even weaker than the version passed in December by the lower chamber.
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When he bought a home last week with a 40 percent down payment, lawyer Kevin Fritz didn’t see the transaction as particularly relevant to the debate over global financial stability.
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The Obama administration has approved five state-designed plans to help homeowners as part of a $1.5 billion effort to assist areas slammed by the housing bust.
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A Republican filibuster appears increasingly likely to kill long-sought legislation extending jobless benefits and a host of other spending and tax measures, despite a new round of cuts to the measure Wednesday that reduced its deficit impact even further.
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Big banks are objecting strongly to a last-minute House proposal to add ailing mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to the type of firms that would be subject to liquidation at financial industry expense.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Ofcom today published a discussion paper on the practice of internet traffic management – a technique used by network operators and internet service providers (ISPs) to stem or accelerate the flow of traffic over the web.
This practice may allow network operators and ISPs to handle traffic more efficiently, to prioritise traffic by type, to guarantee bandwidth or to block or degrade the quality of certain content.
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Copyrights
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Fred says:
Memehacker, and composer Mike Rugnetta just received a note from the collecting society ASCAP soliciting funds to fight Creative Commons, Public Knowledge, and the EFF. According to ASCAP, these organizations are mobilizing to undermine ASCAP members’ copyrights because they want all music to be free. Which, if you know anything about the kind of nuanced reform work these organizations do, is a pretty gross exaggeration. The letter reads like a McCarty-era scaremongering pitch to solicit funds from composers and musicians bewildered by the current pace of music industry evolution. Read part 1 of the letter here, and part 2 here.
Blogger Molly Sheridan wrote a post asking ASCAP members how it sits with them, so if you’re a current ASCAP member, chime in. Or better yet, take a minute to donate to Creative Commons, Public Knowledge, and the EFF.
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We’ve been following the rather bizarre and dangerous lawsuit filed by Facebook against Power.com, an online service that tries to let users aggregate various social networking activity into a single service. All Power.com does is let a willing user have Power.com’s tools log into Facebook and reuse/reformat the data within its own framework. From a user’s perspective, this could be quite useful. From Facebook’s perspective this is both a violation of copyright law and a violation of computer hacking laws. Why? Because Facebook says so.
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Today a UN body is trying to reach an agreement on work on copyright exceptions for persons who are blind or have other disabilities. The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is aggressively trying to block adoption of a work program that would include the possibility of a treaty. Officially, the USPTO is proposing an alternative approach that could be a step toward a treaty. Privately, the USPTO and other federal agencies are putting enormous pressure on countries to abandon a binding treaty in favor of a very weak and even harmful resolution.
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ACTA
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Doctoral research into media education and media literacy at the University of Leicester has highlighted how increased legislative control on use of digital content could stifle future creativity.
The Digital Economy Act 2010 alongside further domestic and global legislation, not least the ongoing ‘Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA)’, combines to constitute a very hard line against any form of perceived copyright infringement.
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There is certainly no lack of debate about copyright, and whether it promotes or hinders creativity. But in one important respect, that debate has been badly skewed, since it has largely discussed creativity in terms of pre-digital technologies. And even when digital methods are mentioned, there is precious little independent research to draw upon.
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A document leaked from the Presidency of the EU reveals that Member States are pushing for new criminal sanctions into the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), a few days ahead of the next negotiation round. The proposal stated in this document reveals how illegitimate and dangerous the whole ACTA process is, while exposing the scary position of the EU calling for more repression of non-for-profit usages… and their incitation.
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…content owners have to specify precisely which files they claim are infringing. They can’t just say: “everyone can see there’s infringement on your site, find it and deal with it.” If upheld, that’s very good news, because it means that anyone that sets up a mechanism for carrying out DMCA requests doesn’t need to go through their entire holdings looking for possibly infringing materials (obviously impossible for a site like YouTube.)
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Digital Economy Bill
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The National Union of Journalists (NUJ) will support legal challenges to the recently passed Digital Economy Act, according to a new national policy.
The new policy, which was signed off by the NUJ’s National Executive Council in May, raises concern from other industry groups that the Act’s measures could be used against sites that publish material of public interest without permission, such as the whistleblowing site Wikileaks.
The union policy calls for the Act to be implemented in a way that “fully protects freedom of information and expression”.
Originally, NUJ members focused their campaigning on the controversial clause 43 on orphan works. This was later dropped before the Bill was passed into law in the “wash-up” at the end of the last government.
CLUG Talk – 22 Apr 2008 – Further C Notes (2008)
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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In fact, many find that even when the vast majority of an organization’s IT infrastructure is made up of non-Microsoft based systems, Microsoft Windows systems make up the majority of maintenance resource expenditures, both for security management and more mundane system administration and troubleshooting. Thanks in part to the nature of Google’s business and the size and influence of the corporation, it is even likely to be well insulated against any need for compatibility with Microsoft-specific ways of doing things, both internally and externally.
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Why aren’t people buying these things so easily anymore? I have the theory that, while the success of Windows was the ignorance of the user, Linux communities teach their users and this knowledge empowers people. After all, in the 21st Century, more computer users are awakening. Little by little, we are breaking this shell of fear and gullibility and we are beginning to see through the smoke generated to make us stumble. We read. We check. We double-check. We participate in forums and get informed.
Above all, beginner Linux users are abandoning herd mentality.
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Desktop
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The machine is a middle to low end machine from a few years back (2001?): AMD Athlon XP 1800 (1.5gHz). 256 MB DDR266, 40 MB Hard Drive.
[...]
I installed a raft of games, vlc, xawtv, sound-juicer, childsplay, gcompris, ktouch and google-chrome as well as the default stuff for an XFCE4 desktop. A webcam from Logitech worked and I left a self-portrait on the desktop… I expect the owner will change that quickly.
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Audiocasts
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Lift is framework for writing web applications with security, maintainability, scalability, and performance.
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Ballnux
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HP announced a netbook for students that includes a metal-hinged case, carrying handle, and worldwide V.92 modem. Available in bulk orders only, the Mini 100e includes a 10.1-inch display, customizable case, network activity light, and a 1.66GHz Atom N455 processor with DDR3 RAM, the company says.
[...]
Customization also extends to the Mini 100e’s operating system: In addition to Windows 7 Starter Edition, the device will be offered with SuSE Linux Enterprise 11 and Windows XP Home Edition, HP says.
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In openSUSE’s KDE team, we’ve recently planned the migration to Akonadi, the groupware caching solution that will be the base of upcoming KDE PIM versions, notably KDE’s address book, email client and calendar app.
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Kernel Space
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With 57 percent (4,501) of the vote, the winner of the Linux.com T-Shirt Design Contest is “The People’s Product”, designed by Mr. Said Hassan who is a marketing consultant as SADAF Information Technology in Gaza in Palestine. “This design represents that the Linux system is the collective work of people and it was done so that others can enjoy a reliable, suitable operating system away from a monopoly. So, it’s like a celebration of our efforts: Linux is our product.”
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The Linux Foundation ran a t-shirt design contest back in March to kick off the grand opening of the new Linux.com store. More than 100 designs were submitted, and of these six were selected as finalists. Almost eight thousand votes were tallied, and the community-selected winner, with 57% of the votes, is Mr. Said Hassan from the Gaza Strip, who designed “The People’s Product.” Shirts with this winning design are being produced now, and will be available for purchase at the Linux.com store soon-ish.
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The performance of Btrfs has certainly improved a great deal since it was first introduced in the mainline kernel back with the Linux 2.6.29 release in early 2009. Today’s tests show that even with old hardware both when it comes to the processor and disk drive that even still Btrfs manages to perform well both with its default mount options and then again when taking advantage of the transparent compression support. Beyond the quantitative disk results, Btrfs also provides other advantages like with the system rollback support as being worked on in Fedora and solid state drive (SSD) optimizations. We are also exploring Btrfs in other ways at Phoronix to tie it into Phoromatic for some rather unique and interesting test capabilities.
It is good to see Canonical now pushing the Btrfs installation support into Ubuntu 10.10 after it has been available as an option in Fedora for more than a year now and is even the default file-system with MeeGo. For those interested in trying out this file-system, we certainly would recommend it and we look forward to its continued adoption.
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Graphics Stack
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It has been two years since the ATI Radeon HD 4800 (RV770) series launched so we have gone back since that monumental hardware launch and have re-tested each Catalyst driver release since then to see how the performance has changed for the ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics card. The Catalyst driver has certainly matured over the course of two years in speeding up the OpenGL performance with this hardware along with bringing new features to their proprietary driver, but it is not exactly smooth sailing.
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* Fixed a regression in 256.29 where Performance Level clock frequencies were reported incorrectly in nvidia-settings.
* Fixed a 3D Vision Stereo bug that caused the stereo glasses to not toggle when the flat panel was not running at its native mode timings.
* Fixed a bug that caused nvidia-settings to crash when rendering its thermal gauge widget if the range of valid values for the thermal sensor was empty.
The 256.35 NVIDIA Accelerated Linux Graphics Driver
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While there is the “Clover” branch of Mesa started by Zack Rusin for providing an OpenCL state tracker that can be used by Gallium3D hardware drivers, it hasn’t yet amounted to much. The OpenCL state tracker is not yet working, hasn’t been touched in months, and has yet to be integrated in the mainline Mesa code-base. However, as another GPGPU alternative, it looks like a CUDA back-end that’s specific to Intel’s open-source driver may end up being worked on.
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Applications
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Moodle is great for teachers in computer labs or for distant education. When done well, a course is much easier to manage than with paper-shuffling. Marks are automatically tabulated, for instance. Students can also get fast turn-around on assignments.
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Multimedia
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First, a bit of theory on why FOSS often creates better programs for artists. It is valuable for artists not only to use the programs but to also, with a little programming knowledge, be able to make the changes to the programs and at least actively help to guide the design. Often I tell people one of the reasons why people write Free Software is because the programmer wants to “scratch an itch,” to solve a problem that they have. Having a programmer who is also an artist means the artist can design into the program the features and patterns of operation that is best for what they are doing.
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In addition to offloading video decoding duties onto compatible GPUs, the new version of VLC promises better audio support and faster performance. Thanks to extensive optimization and rewriting, VideoLAN claims HD video decoding can be done up to 40% faster (presumably without the assistance of dedicated decode hardware).
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Among some of the new features introduced by the VLC 1.1.0 player we can mention:
· GPU decoding using VAAPI for H.264, MPEG-2 and VC-1;
· DSP decoding using OpenMax IL;
· Improved seeking for High-Definition (HD) MKV files;
· Support for Blu-Ray PGS subtitles;
· Support for HD-DVB subtitles;
· Support for VP8, MPEG-4 lossless and Indeo5 video codecs;
· Encoding and decoding of the WebM format;
· Support for Atrac1, FLAC 6.1/7.1, Vorbis 6.1/7.1, MPRG-4 ALS audio codecs;
· DVD-Audio files support;
· Optimized for SSE3/SSE4 and ARM Neon;
· Improved streaming performance;
· New x11, xv and glx modules;
· ADPCM support for FLV files;
· and many more!
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Overall, I am impressed with Album Shaper. Its simply interface and uncluttered approach to menus gives the impression that it is a beginners-only app, but Album Shaper has a lot to offer shutter pros as well.
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It’s been a while since the last release. Quite a few bug-fixes have piled up in the stable branch, so here’s another release in the stable GIMP 2.6 series.
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Proprietary
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CrossOver for FreeBSD is a commercial variant of Wine released by CodeWeavers with (currently) limited support for many of today’s most popular office application and games. CrossOver Office and Games for FreeBSD is tested for performance and stability with many of todays most popular games such as Guild Wars,
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SkypeKit is described as “a collection of software and APIs that allows Internet-connected devices or applications to offer Skype voice and video calls. SkypeKit is designed to work with a wide variety of chip sets, operating systems, and audio/video devices.” SkypeKit is much more in-depth than the previous Skype API that was exposed to third-parties.
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Instructionals
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Games
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The Sega Mega Drive (Sega Genesis) was a leading 16-bit video game console system. The console was developed by Sega Corporation in 1988. Sega was unable to obtain trademark rights in North America, and it was released in that market under the name of Sega Genesis.
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After this morning’s article about Linux Game Publishing, it appeared on SlashDot, and Linux Game Publishing broke their months of silence. Below is the message, presumably by Michael Simms, the CEO of LGP.
Is grateful to Slashdot for finally noticing that LGP exists, after militantly ignoring any game release we have made for the last 5 years, as soon as reports of our death come through, we get a front page story. Slashdot – Your support of Linux is inspirational. For others who wonder, we are very much alive. We have had a couple of staffing issues on the admin side of things, which explains most of our silence, but work is progressing on more than one unannounced title. We will offer further updates as and when there is news to update you with.
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We can also determine an upper bound based on client downloads. Here we see that 21% of all our customers have at least clicked on the Linux download link.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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For now, the Pearson site continues to be dark, but there are reports that the group has managed to deliver KDE 3.5.11 for Ubuntu. The main Trinity development site is live and on Launchpad, Canonical’s, the company behind Ubuntu, Web-based collaborative software development Website.
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Others, though, are driving the bus of KDE and have chosen to “improve” the desktop. Others, who feel as I do are trying to preserve the look and feel of the 3.5 version. Whether the group doing the work can sustain an independent branch of KDE is a question. KDE is large and complex and the libraries it depends upon changed, causing some of the development of the 4 branch.
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Which Linux distributions top the popularity charts?
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Reviews
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A lightweight Linux distribution often seems to require making sacrifices — using a UI which many users would find unfamiliar and using software which is heavily cut down in functionality.
WattOS is a really interesting lightweight Linux distribution that is based on Ubuntu 10.04 (as of WattOS R2). As the name might suggest, it is also focused on low power usage and is said to work well with older and less powerful hardware.
[...]
If you are looking for a lightweight Linux, WattOS is most definitely worth a look.
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Red Hat Family
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The numbers we did get to see weren’t too shabby, either. Revenue increased by 20% year over year to $209 million, and a whopping $179 million of that business came from subscription fees. And like I said, Red Hat has a lot of guaranteed business in its internal books that won’t show up anywhere in the income statement until those customers start paying their subscription bills.
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Red Hat (RHT), which went public in August, jumped 123% from a breakout in late November to an intraday high only 10 sessions later.
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Why does RedHat still provide tools for GNU/Linux on the desktop in individual installations or huge roll-outs? Their customers demand it. If RedHat did not provide the service, then someone else would and might siphon off the lucrative server/services/training business… Ah! There’s the thing. GNU/Linux on the desktop is not a huge money maker for them but it does work for the customer and RedHat gets money for consultation/setup.
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In this morning’s Red Hat Summit sessions, Jean Staten Healy and Bob Sutor of IBM presented on the solutions that communities around the world are implementing using Linux as a catalyst for a smarter planet.
The IT industry exists to solve problems. And you can solve them at a micro level, or you can look problems that are so huge, they affect countries, or the entire world. The range is huge, and complexity varies tremendously. Smarter Planet is about a macro approach. It’s meant for those really significant problems and to answer how IT can help solve those problems.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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I like the way Ubuntu One will sync up databases. This is a great feature for developers, and I hope more will take advantage of it. Apart from that one feature though Dropbox is the better product. It is easy to install and use, pricing is better, it works across operating systems, and is something you could recommend to your technically challenged friends.
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Well, the main reason is because trying out different Linux distributions is so much fun, isn’t it? There was nothing really wrong with Fedora, in fact it did a lot of things right, but I wanted to configure my file server with a lightweight environment and then leave it alone. I’ve spent too much time on that thing already.
Firstly, I replaced Ubuntu with Arch and LXDE, to see if I could get it working with anything else than Ubuntu. I’ve installed Arch probably 50 times before, but this time I couldn’t get the keyboard layout right in X. Hal should take care of that, and yet it didn’t. Also, the screen resolution was way off, and I couldn’t get the nouveau drivers configured, while the chipset was too old for the regular nvidia driver. Exit Arch.
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As always, installing and using Ubuntu is a very agreeable experience. As with Fedora, all hardware worked out of the box, and installing extra codecs and suchlike was a bit easier. It doesn’t look as sleek as Fedora, but it doesn’t look bad either. A bit heavy for a theme called “Light”, but otherwise okay. I do think the focus on looks is a good thing, and I must admit that picture of a PC that runs Ubuntu looks very good.
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Flavours and Variants
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Developer Glenn “TheeMahn” Cady created the antecedent to Ultimate Edition in 2006, a version of Ubuntu with a Christmas theme that he called Ubuntu Christmas Edition. Its successor, Ubuntu Ultimate, drew an e-mail from Canonical, the organization behind Ubuntu, asking Cady not to use the Ubuntu name or logo because of trademark issues, so he changed the name to Ultimate Edition. Over time the distribution has grown in scope and power. While it caters to new users, it also bundles powerful tools for programming, as well as software called Ultamatix that allows users to easily install additional software and games.
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Here’s the problem I have with this electrophoretic technology: it’s only black and white. While that doesn’t matter with novels, having color sure does make a difference for many technical books. As my friend Carla Schroder, writer and editor of Linux Planet, put it, “Books in color is where it’s at, especially technical and how-to books. Why would I want to put my Audacity [an excellent, open-source audio editor] book on the Kindle, for one example, when being able to show blue waveforms and green level meters and red clipping bars adds tons of useful information.”
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Perhaps that is the future of Linux on the desktop – at least, Linux on the relatively small desktop. Like Android, it’s not the sort of Linux experience that we are used to, though MeeGo is far closer to “traditional” Linux than Android is. But perhaps it’s an experience that will bring in a new set of users; once they get used to this environment, the full Linux experience will be there for them to discover. That should be a good thing.
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One of the primary differences between the ARM version of Ubuntu Netbook Edition and the version built for x86 processors is that Ubuntu 10.7′s program launcher doesn’t require 3D hardware drivers since the whole thing is designed with 2D graphics. I have to say, the UI looks awfully snappy on the demo unit.
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CMS
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The Midgard Project has released the first maintenance release of Midgard2 10.05.1 “Ratatoskr” LTS. Ratatoskr LTS is a Long Term Support version of Midgard2 Content Repository.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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I can’t name one major Open-Source-not-Free-Software activist that offers up any real criticism to the Free Software messaging coming out of the FSF. That’s not to say it doesn’t exist – I have covered in this blog a few lawyer and professor types that laid out very intelligent and considered issues on the GPL and Free Software in general, but they are so few and far between.
The overwhelmingly vast majority of criticism against Free Software basically starts with “Freetard” and ends with “Communist/Socialist/Zealot”. Usually there are a lot of lies and distortions in the middle – I wonder what motivates someone to take a position they are not able to rationally defend, one which they must resort to (and repeat) logical fallacies of all flavors?
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Openness/Sharing
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Increasingly, due to the good offices of Creative Commons, much of the content on the web can be legally repurposed or appropriated for other use. I think this is a good thing. None of us want to waste time re-inventing the proverbial wheel, and we could bear in mind what Pablo Picasso once said: ‘Good artists borrow, great artists steal’. So OK, ‘steal’ is an emotive word, which we probably don’t want to associate with, but I get the sentiments behind the statement. A lot of art and music could be said to be ‘derivative’ – and there have been many court cases and fallings out over this grey area of creativity, but here’s my point: I don’t mind at all if other people borrow my content for their own purposes, as long as they attribute it to me and don’t make any commercial profit at my expense. Many already have – some people have actually translated my content into other languages or used as a part of larger works. I’m an advocate not only of Open Educational Resources, but also the idea of Open Scholarship, which is where academics and scholars not only make their content available for free, they also open up themselves to constructive criticism from their peers. I hope we see more of this in the coming years and I am confident we shall.
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Standards/Consortia
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OdfKit is a project that reuses WebKit technology in a toolkit for working with ODF office documents. KO GmbH is sponsored by NLnet to work on OdfKit for three months. This week, Chani, who is on her way to Akademy, is working with me on OdfKit and since she’s here an entire week, we’re calling it OdfKit Hack Week.
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Environment
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The Mimosa Dancing Girls strip joint on the edge of New Orleans was probably not what BP chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg had in mind when he promised last week that the company would look after the “small people” affected by the Gulf oil spill. But then every day seems to be full of unpleasant surprises for BP.
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BP has been accused by a senior US politician of lying to Congress to reduce its liabilities, after an internal company document showed that the oil giant’s own worst-case assessment of the size of the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico was 20 times its public estimate.
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An oil worker who survived the BP Deepwater Horizon explosion has claimed that the oil rig’s safety equipment was leaking several weeks before it exploded, triggering the huge spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
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Plans to overturn the 25-year old global ban on commercial whaling in return for reducing the numbers of whales killed each year were in confusion today with governments and groups divided.
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Finance
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Many economists, myself included, regard this turn to austerity as a huge mistake. It raises memories of 1937, when FDR’s premature attempt to balance the budget helped plunge a recovering economy back into severe recession. And here in Germany a few scholars see parallels to the policies of Heinrich Brüning, the chancellor from 1930 to 1932, whose devotion to financial orthodoxy ended up sealing the doom of the Weimar Republic.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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One of our alleged sources, a young US intelligence analyst, Bradley Manning, has been detained and shipped to a US military prison in Kuwait, where he is being held without trail. Mr. Manning is alleged to have acted according to his conscious and leaked to us the Collateral Murder video and the video of a massacre that took place in Afghanistan last year at Garani.
The Garani massacre, which we are still working on, killed over 100 people, mostly children.
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If you forget to do what your doctor tells you, you’re not alone. But now, engineers have created a way to make sure you’re following doctor’s orders.
CLUG Talk 10 November 2009 – Upstart (2009)
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Send this to a friend
06.23.10
Posted in News Roundup at 6:34 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Linux Journal’s Readers’ Choice Awards offer the opportunity for readers to vote for their Linux and Open Source favorites. We compiled nominations and came up with the following list. If your favorite is not listed in any category, we encourage you to write in your vote (it’s also okay to skip voting in categories not applicable to you).
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As Steven Vaughan-Nichols notes, Hewlett-Packard, the number one PC seller on the planet is trending toward becoming a significant Linux distributor. In acquiring Palm, HP also acquires the Linux-based WebOS, and if HP is smart, it will pursue a very open strategy with WebOS, possibly on mobile phones, and possible on iPad-like tablet devices. HP also has acquired rights to Phoenix Technologies’ HyperSpace, a lean Linux distro that provides instant-on capabilities.
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Desktop
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It is unfortunate that HP doesn’t offer Gnu/Linux on these machines. The way HP offers ‘options’ to choose the desired processors and other hardware, it would be a fair business practice to offer choice of operating system as well for those enterprise customers who want to run their own OS but don’t want to pay Microsoft tax.
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Minitube is just one example but I could name hundreds off the top of my head. I love these little projects and while most of the attention is on the grown up side of Linux and open source software, I have a special fondness for those projects that are a little less ‘mature’. I love what companies like Canonical have done to polish their Ubuntu Linux distributions into an operating system worthy of powering the computers that make business tick. In fact, I love the fact Ubuntu is a respected and grown up product. We’ve made it. This is the big time.
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Skip Guenter is a Director for The HeliOS Project so one would expect him to put in a little extra effort but Skip passed “a little extra” sometime in early May. Skip worked dozens of his own hours to get equipment running, computers operational and things organized for the technical side of the room. I also want to thank Ron West for his dedication to what we do and the sweat equity he put into Linux Against Poverty. What many people did not see was the pre-activities prior to LAP.
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Audiocasts
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Karen and Bradley briefly talk about waiting for the Bilski case to be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.
This show was released on Tuesday 22 June 2010; its running time is 08:39.
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Kernel Space
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It would appear that Linus Torvalds has resolved to apply a strict policy of accepting only bug fix changes to the kernel after the merge window has closed. Torvalds has also stuck his oar into the debate over the Android suspend block API and made the situation even more complicated.
For years, major changes for each new Linux kernel version have been merged into the main development tree during the merge window, which usually lasts about two weeks and concludes with the release of the first pre-release version of the next kernel (2.6.x-rc1). Thereafter, changes are theoretically restricted to patches which fix existing bugs without giving rise to new ones. In practice, RC2 and RC3 have included the odd major change and some clean up work, such as resolving compiler warnings, has found its way in at an even later stage.
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Examples of FUSE File Systems
There are many examples of file systems that use FUSE. Sometimes FUSE is used for prototyping or testing file systems or it is used as the file system itself. It is beyond the scope of this article to list all of them or even a good chunk of them, but some that you might recognize (or might not) include:
* SSHFS This is a file system client that can mount and interact with directories and files on a remote system using sftp. Very handy file system for mounting remote file systems.
* GmailFS This FUSE based file system was written to use Google’s email storage as a file system. Originally it used the gmail web interface but this kept changing. The previous link takes you to a new version of GmailFS that uses IMAP to use the gmail email space as a file system. One of the interesting aspects of this file system is that it’s written in Python.
* EncFS This FUSE based file system provides an encrypted file system for Linux. For a discussion about encrypted file systems and Linux please read this.
[...]
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Graphics Stack
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The second X.Org Server 1.9 release candidate was released earlier today after the first RC making it out just last week, but already the third release candidate is available to interested parties.
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Applications
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Multimedia
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Xnoise is basically an music player but it can also play videos too and unlike other Linux music players, it uses a tracklist centric design:
The tracklist is a list of video or music tracks that are played one by one without being removed (right side of window). This gives you the possibility to enqueue any track in any order, regardless if they are on the same album or not.
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VLC 1.1.0 Final is released, this release comes with a lot of improvements, it is faster than the previous version, has Better streaming capabilities, better audio experience, improved web plugins and comes with support for WebM decoding and encoding.
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Instructionals
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There are a few reasons why I use Linux Mint instead of Ubuntu on my systems. That being said one of the reasons I do not list for using Mint over Ubuntu is their “Software Manager”. The software manager in Mint 8 was flat out sad compared to the Ubuntu Software Center that Ubuntu 9.10 included. Now even though the software manager in Mint 9 has many improvements, it still has issues, and I don’t think it is quiet on-par with the updated Software Center Ubuntu 10.04 includes.
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Games
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I’m so far out of the loop these days that I didn’t even realize E3 was this past week until after the initial conferences, but out of the annual conference comes this new footage from G4 of long-time Linux pal id Software’s latest title, Rage.
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There’s not a whole lot of info on WorldKi, it seems a very ambitious project that combines game distribution with game development, with monetization all along the way (eg. Middleware devs can sell their libraries, Artists their art, and finally devs their games). If FOSS game devs can pay the bills from foss games alone, we might see some real growth..
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My hands tremble as I write this and my mind is left weakened by the things I have witnessed. The contents of this message might be too terrible and unspeakable to believe, but I assure you that it is all very real. For the sake of us all, I urge you, dear Reader, to keep an open mind, and very seriously consider the matters which I am about to disclose.
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GNOME Desktop
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On Monday, we suggested Ubuntu as a good starting point for experimenting with desktop Linux. If you have the option, dedicate a machine to it – by 2010 standards, even a modest-spec PC will run it fine. You’ll be very pleasantly surprised by the transformation from a lumbering old XP box burdened with years of cruft to one with a fresh install of an OS that doesn’t need multiple layers of security software.
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Reviews
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One of the mini distribution based on Unity Linux, it a great choice for old machines cause it does not take a big amount of RAM and CPU usage, using OpenBox 3.4.11 lightweight window manager, simple LXPanel, and many installed application will mention it later on the review.
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PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Never thought I would be writing this, but I am actually considering moving my Linux boxes (based mainly in OpenSuSE and Fedoras) to Mandriva! During my hey days we always considered Mandrake (it’s name then) something of a play distribution or a distribution for Linux beginners and should not be used for ‘serious’ work.
Fast forward about 10 years, after a name change I don’t know why suddenly I felt an urge to pick up the latest version of Mandriva 2010 to give it the proverbial spin. After playing around with the bought version of Mandriva (yes I actually bought a copy!). I really started liking it. Let me just list down a few of the reasons why.
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The Linux company, which is based in France and Brazil, had been operating in recent months under the threat of potential bankruptcy, as its finances were reportedly precarious.
According to the French press Laprévote rallied investors “to return the group to balance and find a good business model.” He said that the community does not need to be concerned about the outfit’s future any longer.
Laprévote took the CEO job in April. In May a posting in one of the Mandriva forums revealed major cash flow problems and the existence of plans to perhaps sell or merge the company.
One of the possible buyers named was Lightapp, but that deal apparently fell through, and then Linagora was rumoured to be in talks with Mandriva.
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Fedora
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Design team has kicked off concepts for Laughling release theme quoted: Something that can illustrate the emergence concept, like multiple objects combined to create a new one (more complex).
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When I find an outstanding distro, such as Fedora, I prefer to buy the media from an on-line vendor as a way of showing my support. Most of the time the money goes directly to the vendor, however, I happened upon the Sponsored Media Program today and found a vendor who participates in this program.
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The Fedora 13 Xfce spin has more applications than the LXDE spin. So far the machine crashed on the screensaver (in Xfce, not in LXDE, and the same thing has been happening with Ubuntu Lucid if I don’t choose blanking the screen instead of a random screensaver).
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Currently I prefer to use Ubuntu, after I felt the ability to provide Ubuntu Graphical on my laptop, especially Ubuntu 10.04. There are a few that made me feel at home using and choosing Ubuntu Linux operating system, which are as follows:
1. No Virus – because Linux does not recognize the files of his Win32 executables, so the possibility of taxable virus is 0%, it is also felt by fellow users of the Linux operating system in general.
2. Open Source – Linux distributions are open source and the source code can be edited and modified according to our needs. We can learn how to work the Ubuntu (Linux) Operating System
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Colin Watson (Ubuntu Development Manager) just announced on the Ubuntu-Devel mailing list that you can now perform installations with a BTRFS root filesystem using the latest Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat daily ISO. Note: I’ve downloaded the latest ISO and I do not see an option to format a partition as BTRFS when choosing to specify partitions manuallt so probably this will be available starting tomorrow’s daily ISO.
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Wind River has rev’d its GUI development suite for embedded devices, adding support for OpenGL 3D graphics. Wind River Tilcon Graphics Suite 5.8 also broadens its embedded target operating system support from Linux and VxWorks to Windows CE and Windows XP, and adds support for more hardware platforms, including the Intel Atom, says the company.
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Android cofounder and Google vice president Andy Rubin just announced at the Droid X event that 160,000 Android devices are being sold per day. That’s up sharply from last month when Google announced that 100,000 Android devices were being activated each day.
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Events
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The Linux Foundation today announced the addition of new sessions and keynotes for LinuxCon 2010. The announcement finalizes the list of speakers and professional session planned for the conference, which will take place in Boston August 10-12.
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Mozilla
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Today, Mozilla is happy to release Firefox 3.6.4, the latest security and stability release for Firefox, used by nearly 400 million people around the world to browse the Web. This release provides crash protection for Windows and Linux users by isolating third-party plugins when they crash.
Results from our beta testing show Firefox 3.6.4 will significantly reduce the number of Firefox crashes experienced by users who are watching online videos or playing games. When a plugin crashes or freezes while using Firefox, users can enjoy uninterrupted browsing by simply refreshing the page.
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An interface designer interning at Mozilla has suggested that the company mimic gimmicks in Google’s Chrome to make users think Firefox starts up faster. In an entry on his personal blog that was reposted to Mozilla’s uber-blog, Planet Mozilla, John Wayne Hill, an Indiana University masters student interning this summer at the open source company, spelled out changes that would give users the feeling that Firefox starts quicker.
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SaaS/Eucalyptus
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Back in March 2010, Marten Mickos, best known as the man who built MySQL into an estimated $100 million enterprise, made headlines when he stepped in at Eucalyptus in the role of CEO. But even before that, a partnership with Canonical to provide the platform at the heart of the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud beginning with 2009’s Ubuntu Server Edition 9.10 garnered Eucalyptus a lot of notice.
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The term “open core” essentially means that the heart of a software project is built on, and remains, open source but added features may not be (particularly a commercial version intended for enterprise use).VC-funded software startups love this model.
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Mixing
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This proprietary to open source to public domain source code release Standard will bring to an end the present conflict between proprietary and open code development models. Some companies and individuals will choose to develop their software as open source, to take advantage of the extra and free resources that the open source developing model provides, while others will prefer to develop it as proprietary code, to gain a competitive advantage once it is release. One way or another, within a set number of years the code will become public domain, free for all to use, share and modify.
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Server
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The idea behind this project is to test the architecture of a heavy duty web server.
Although it’s a really nice and graphically appealing PHP website, the major interest is to test hardware and resource usage / op.sys. (ubuntu server 10.04) and basic server modules.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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One interesting explanation offered when I asked on Twitter came from Ars Technica’s Ryan Paul – himself a key Free software developer as author of the great micro-blogging client Gwibber.
He suggests the situation is precipitated by the influx of new technology strategies such as Software as a Service, mobile, tablet, virtualisation and web services. Since the applicability of software freedom philosophies to these technologies is often unclear, there’s no positive rallying-point for activists and the only remaining alternative is to demonise anyone engaging with them. That happens even if the engagement is aimed at subverting or liberating them.
The articulation of software freedom arose before today’s massively-connected society, and today requires thinking and experimentation to make it fit the new reality – hence my work at OSI.
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But also the FSF already had positive campaigns. Here some recent examples from the FSFs:
* Document Freedom Day: The Document Freedom Day is a day for Document Freedom and for Open Standards. FSFE did most of the work for the central organisation of the DFD in the past years to promote Open Standards. The FSF also has a campaign page for Open Standards.
* rOgg On: For this years DFD FSFE promoted Ogg Vorbis. The German and the Austrian team encouraged two radio stations which already use Ogg vorbis, by giving them a prize and a tart with the “rOgg On” slogon. Deutschlandradio stated that they Feel more honoured than for the Grimme Prize”. The picutres clearly show how positive that campaign was. During that campaign we translated FSF’s PlayOgg website into German, which also is a positive campaign.
* I love Free Software For this years Valentine’s Day we started the “I love Free Software” campaign. People can show their love to Free Software.
* PDFreaders.org FSFE’s Fellows started a campaign for Free Software PDFreaders and also explaining Open Standards in this context.
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Government
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According to Rob Pegoraro at the Faster Forward blog, the District “will let overseas voters cast ballots online using open-source, standards-based software, not the closed, proprietary mechanisms that have dominated electronic voting throughout its troubled history in the United States.”
A Palo Alto, Calif., developer of election software, Open Source Digital Voting Foundation, will provide the new system. According to company representatives, starting with September’s primary election, D.C. residents serving overseas and others far out of town won’t have to choose between voting by mailed-in paper ballot or a faxed or e-mailed ballot.
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Openness/Sharing
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The “Free Culture” Movement, instantiated in a 2004 publication by Creative Commons founding member Lawrence Lessig, is a reaction to content ownership in a digital age. Because The Open Clip Art Library is, at it’s core, a platform to freely share and collaborate created content, it will be forever intertwined with the Movement.
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Open Data
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Science is based on building on, reusing, and openly criticizing the published body of scientific knowledge. For science to effectively function, and for society to reap the full benefits from scientific endeavors, it is crucial that science data be made open.
That’s the belief of four leaders who have put forth a groundbreaking set of recommendations for scientists to more easily share their data – The Panton Principles – and who have been named the latest SPARC Innovators for their work.
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We’re proud to announce the release of the Portability Policy, the latest creation from the DataPortability Project. We believe that this will help further the vision of digital freedom that was the founding ideal of our group two years ago.
The software industry is still figuring out the right balance between open and closed, but we believe that communication is the first step. The DataPortability Project encourages standard, plain language policies describing how data and digital “stuff” can be moved from one product to another.
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Open Access/Content
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The Internet has recently made possible the free global availability of scientific journal articles. Open Access (OA) can occur either via OA scientific journals, or via authors posting manuscripts of articles published in subscription journals in open web repositories. So far there have been few systematic studies showing how big the extent of OA is, in particular studies covering all fields of science.
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Science
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Sometimes even noise can produce a gold mine of information. Back in 1964, scientists at Bell Laboratories, listening for faint radio signals they had bounced off of an early communications satellite, detected static that seemed to be emanating in space from all directions. That static turned out to be cosmic background radiation left over from the big bang. In the decades since, studies of that radiation have underpinned much of what we know about the universe.
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Environment
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The judge who overturned deepwater drilling bans allowing BP to resume oil extraction in the Gulf of Mexico, had shares in Transocean and other firms in the industry, it was revealed today.
Yesterday, a Louisiana-based judge Martin Feldman ruled that Barack Obama’s six-month drilling moratorium in the Gulf was unjustified because it assumed that all deepwater drilling was as dangerous as BP’s.
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Europe will import its first solar-generated electricity from North Africa within the next five years, European Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger said in an interview on Sunday.
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BP is the top dog, arrogating to itself the lion’s share of the wealth from the deepwater oil reserves and displacing the risks onto the rest of us. The oil industry took pains to secure a statutory limit on its liability from offshore oil spills to a paltry $75 million, after which we taxpayers pick up the tab. Efforts to raise that liability cap to $10 billion or eliminate it altogether are in the works, but there is sure to be fierce opposition, and not just from Republicans.
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Knock a glass of water over a page. The fibers will soften, the ink will run, the corners will curl. Wet paper is no good to anyone, but few people realize just how much water goes into producing the dry, white page.
“You need water to grow the trees, clean the wood, separate out the cellulose from the lignin, turn the pulp into paper, and then steam dry it,” says Gilles L’Hermitte, Sustainability Development Manager at paper manufacturers Arjowiggins Graphic. Which all adds to the argument for recycled paper. “If you start with an ‘urban forest’,” as L’Hermitte calls it, “you’ll need much less water to turn old pulp into new paper than if you start with a tree.” Arjowiggins Graphic estimates that their mills use up to 47% less water for paper from de-inked pulp than from virgin sources. And, they claim, because the recycled pulp has to be cleaned so many times to rid it of all the ink, it comes out even whiter than the virgin page.
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Finance
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New measures of national income. GDP is outdated; inaccurate, invalid, and unreliable. Better measures of national income that count real costs (like pollution) and benefits (like health) are what will shape better behavior from organizations and markets.
Measures of well-being. GDP is a measure of income. What’s missing from that picture? Well-being, of course. More income doesn’t automatically make everyone better off all the time, in the same ways. Without measures of well being to live up to, no better behavior is likely to ever flow from organizations and markets.
New currencies. A currency is an especially cruel a form of collective punishment, an implicit tax. In the aftermath of inevitable, regular-as-clockwork financial crisis, everyone holding a currency suffers, whether or not they had anything to do with said crisis. When currencies are created that are independent of countries and regions, people will the choice to escape the bone-headed organizations and markets within them. That, in turn, will set incentives for better behavior. Creating “product”? Stop. Create a currency instead.
New measures of returns. What counts as a “return,” anyways? Increasingly, as we’ve recently discussed, bleeding edge investors are beginning to develop measures of returns to people, communities, and society. They provide a more nuanced, sophisticated picture of the value a firm has actually created — or a market allocated — than mere financial returns (“profit”). Better behavior from organizations and markets is ineluctably tied to better measurements of what is returned from them.
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Leaders target funding for unemployment benefits, Medicare and Medicaid — but neither party has suggested trimming more than 60 tax breaks worth $32 billion to special interests.
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Americans aren’t convinced new Wall Street rules will prevent a future financial crisis.
An Associated Press-GfK Poll finds that 64 percent of those surveyed aren’t confident that a financial regulation overhaul before Congress will avert another meltdown.
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In the end, the political clout of 18,000 auto dealers scattered nationwide was too much even for President Barack Obama.
House and Senate negotiators putting final shape to a sweeping overhaul of Wall Street regulations all but agreed Tuesday to exclude auto dealers from the oversight of a consumer financial protection bureau.
“The political reality is that those of us who have fought against an auto dealer carve-out can’t prevail,” Representative Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill.
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State Street isn’t one of the iconic firms of Wall Street. It doesn’t even make the top 10 largest bank holding companies in the country. But on Capitol Hill this week, as lawmakers finalize new rules regulating Wall Street, Boston-based State Street wields enormous influence.
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President Barack Obama’s top economic advisers are urging America’s major economic allies not to sacrifice economic growth to efforts to trim budget deficits.
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JPMorgan Chase emerged from the financial crisis as one of the strongest banks on American soil. Now it wants to make up lost ground overseas.
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Stocks fluctuated Wednesday after the Federal Reserve indicated that problems in Europe pose a threat to the economy.
The Dow Jones industrial average rose about 4 points in late afternoon trading while broader indexes fell. Treasury prices rose, pushing down interest rates. The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note fell to its lowest level in more than a year.
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House negotiators on legislation providing an overhaul of the financial system have agreed to drop their demand for a $150 billion fund to cover costs of liquidating large, failing institutions.
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The Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, said on Tuesday that taxpayers were recovering their investment from the financial bailouts as the program was wound down. But he acknowledged there would probably be a loss from the rescue of the insurer American International Group.
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The lead Senate Wall Street reform negotiator acknowledged Tuesday that Democrats are facing a nail-biting vote in the Senate, forcing congressional leaders to lean on Republicans to pass a bill unlikely to gain the support of two Democrats who have been holdouts for weeks.
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The Consumer Federation of America is throwing its 40th annual awards dinner tonight honoring Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) and House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) for their public service. And the consumer advocacy group received interest in the dinner from an unlikely quarter: the financial services industry.
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One of the fiercest debates during the Wall Street Reform conference negotiations has been over Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME)’s amendment to improve the quality of capital used by America’s banks. The amendment would accomplish this by eliminating the designation of “trust-preferred securities” as Tier 1 capital.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Whistleblower website Wikileaks has made contact with the US government over claims that an American serviceman is one of its sources.
Soldier Bradley Manning has been held for three weeks without formal charge.
The US is investigating claims that he passed confidential information to Wikileaks.
Site editor Julian Assange told BBC News that, so far, the US authorities have not yet been in touch with him.
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James Madison (drafter of the US first amendment) once wrote that “government, without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or perhaps both”.
This is certainly true of Afghanistan, where the US-led coalition has been able to avoid a true audit of the impact of its presence via tight control of the media combined with manipulated patriotism.
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The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, who is at the centre of a US security scare, has emerged from hiding to say that he is not afraid of the Pentagon but that he has been advised by his lawyers to avoid travelling to the United States.
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China’s online games companies must take steps to protect children from unwholesome and corrupting content, according to new regulations issued Tuesday by the Ministry of Culture.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Anger and confusion remains high over these private “back door” meetings that the Federal Communications Commission has been holding with various “stakeholders” regarding its proposed open Internet rules. Reform groups are still up in arms over the Tuesday gatherings, which appear to have focused on a legislative solution to the problem. Congress, it should be noted, is exploring rewriting the Communications Act in response to the current FCC logjam on the issue.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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THE US International Trade Commission (ITC) is investigating a complaint from the maker of very expensive printer ink, HP, that some of its rivals are making the stuff a lot cheaper.
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Copyrights
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US Copyright Group, which is really DC-based law firm Dunlap, Grubb and Weaver, has made a lot of news recently for unleashing thousands of lawsuits on people it accuses of infringing on copyrights, in an effort not to stop infringement, but to send out “pre-settlement letters” to get people to pay up to avoid the lawsuits. Dunlap keeps insisting, despite similar efforts accusing perfectly innocent people of infringement and demanding payment, that its technology is reliable and credible. CCS Labs, a company that does work in the computer crime field, was curious about this and asked US Copyright Group for the right to review its methodology and technology.
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Michael Geist sez, “There was considerable attention yesterday on a media report stating that Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore warned against ‘radical extremists’ opposing C-32. A video of part of his remarks has now been posted online. The comments, which come after the prepared speech, feature a no-holds-barred attack against those arguing for fair copyright. According to Moore, some proposed amendments to C-32 are not genuine but rather part of an attempt to oppose copyright and copyright reform, to drum up fear, and to mislead. Moore encourages confrontation, urging the audience to confront on Facebook, Twitter, talk shows and in the media until ‘they are defeated.’”
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As the Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore has declared war on copyright reformers who object to his plan to bring US-style “digital locks” rules to Canada, I think it’s worth spelling out what my objections, as a Canadian author, are to his plan (my books are distributed across Canada by the excellent HB Fenn; last year I won the Ontario White Pine Award for best book; as I write this, my novel For the Win is on the Canadian bestseller lists).
[...]
Get that? People who create stuff should have the right to let their audiences move copyrighted works to other platforms.
I challenge Minister Moore to climb down from his nasty smears about copyright reformers and address this and other legitimate concerns over digital locks rules. Thousands and thousands of Canadians spoke out against this kind of rule in the Canadian copyright proceedings. James Moore has tabled a bill that ignores the results of his own consultation, and then had the bad grace to smear the creators and audiences who, in good faith, came forward to participate in the debate over the future of Canadian copyright.
He owes us an apology. And an explanation.
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Will Microsoft soon be targetted by Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music’s BPI (British Phornographic Industry)
Microsoft’s Bing search engine now offers playable search results”, says CNet News.
“We have identified the following links that are available via Google’s search engine, and request the following links be removed as soon as possible as they directly link to sound recordings owned by our members”, p2pnet had the BPI saying, quoting Chilling Effects.
And Gargle is only a facilitator.
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Movie fans downloading free pirated films are no longer Hollywood’s worst nightmare, but that’s only because of a newer menace: cheap, and equally illegal, subscription services.
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Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore’s “radical extremists” comment yesterday generated considerable attention, though he privately denied saying it in some correspondence (one DM: “Not what I said. Not even close”). New video has now been posted that confirms the comment and further attacks on those supporting fair copyright. The latest comments:
With regard to the legislation, we really did try to strike a balance with this legislation. You’ll notice, I think, we’re now three weeks into the public consideration of the legislation that we tabled. There is a lot of commentary out there on this online and I think the response that we’re getting is that that generally is the case. The only people who are opposed to this legislation are really two groups of radical extremists. In the continuum of political ideaology, if you go really extreme to the right or really extreme to the left it actually swings back around. That is sort of where we are.
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Well this is a pleasant surprise. Like many others, I had assumed that the court reviewing the Viacom/YouTube lawsuit would not accept either side’s position for summary judgment and the case would go to a full trial. However, as Eric Goldman alerts us, the court has quickly ruled in favor of Google/YouTube, saying that it is, in fact, protected by the DMCA’s safe harbors.
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ACTA
CLUG Talk 8 September 2009 – PAM (2009)
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Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 5:36 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Recently, a new client called with a Quickbooks issue. I should probably mention that I do a lot of Quickbooks (POS and Financials) troubleshooting. Most generally this work is done in Windows.
Sometimes, however, we get a call about a Quickbooks Linux server. That was the case this time. What was going on was the client’s machines were all losing connectivity to the server. So they called me in. I gained remote access to the server and started poking around.
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The feature allowed PlayStation users to replace the standard PS3 operating system with a different one, such as Linux – a popular free alternative to Windows available for download on the internet – allowing them to use the device as a personal computer as well as a video games console.
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Events
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The full schedule for LinuxCon North America 2010 has now been announced. LinuxCon organised by the Linux Foundation will take place from the 10th to the 12th of August at the Renaissance Boston Waterfront Hotel.
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Virgin America’s Ravi Simhambhatla is delivering a keynote at this year’s LinuxCon North America. He will be giving us the CIO view on how to sell the value of open source internally when cost isn’t the only driving factor. Mr. Simhambhatla took a few minutes to answer some of our questions as we prepare to see him speak in Boston on August 12, 2010.
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Desktop
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While Windows XP coated Ubuntu make users feel familiar with the Gnu/Linux systems, it also takes away many benefits that native Gnu/Linux Desktops environments like Gnome and KDE offer. However, YlmF OS seems to be a good efforts to introduce people to Gnu/Linux and remove their doubts about the system.
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The second annual “Linux Against Poverty” computer drive collected more than 200 used computers from Austin homes and businesses Saturday.
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Ballnux
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Applications
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Econometrics is the application of statistical or quantitative methods to understand economic issues and test theories, and models. It is the study of economic models, mathematical statistics, and economic data. It is also a set of tools which can verify or disprove economic theory using real-world data. Econometrics is an essential part of university economics degrees.
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The default menu application in Ubuntu is functional, but it is also down to earth basic. GnoMenu tries to replicate the looks and functionality of KDE’s Menu application. And I have to say, it almost does. GnoMenu comes with a number of themes and a easy to use configuration menu. Looks like it deserves a try isn’t it? Let’s give it a shot.
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Proprietary
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The Wine developers have announced the availability of a fourth release candidate (RC4) for version 1.2 of their Windows API implementation. Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator) is free open source software that allows users to run Windows applications on Linux and Unix by providing its own native replacements for Windows DLLs.
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Windows, Mac OS X and Linux 64-bit versions are now in widespread use, and software for the operating systems is following suit. So it may seem a bit backward that Adobe withdrew its only 64-bit version of Flash Player.
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Adobe had a version of Flash which ran on 64-bit versions of Linux while Windows users were stuck in 32 bit. This week it seems that rather than releasing a 64-bit version for Windows has, in its wisdom, pulled the Linux version.
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Also due to get Flash Player 10.1 are Palm’s WebOS, Research in Motion’s BlackBerry OS, Nokia’s Symbian, the MeeGo version of Linux from Intel and Nokia, and Windows Phone 7–though not at that operating system’s debut, Murarka said. Many companies will pre-install Flash Player 10.1 on their phones through deals Adobe is hammering out, but in the case of Google, those with Froyo phones will be able to download it directly from the Android Market.
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ISL Online, one of the world leading providers of cloud based communication and collaboration, has released ISL Groop for Mac and Linux. Users can start a meeting and invite participants from all over the world in a few minutes no matter which OS they use.
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Instructionals
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Games
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Platform: Linux, Other OS via virtualization (VirtualBox) and LiveCD (Ubuntu 10.04 LTS)
Release Date: 2011
Price: Client and server are free under GPL version 2, player subscriptions start at $5 per month.
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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A while ago, the KDE promo team organized a competition to choose a design for labels that producers of software within our community can use to show that they are part of KDE.
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New Releases
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Scientific Linux Fermi 5.5 has been released for both i386 and x86_64 architecture.
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The SystemRescueCd developers have issued the sixth update to the 1.5.x branch of their Linux distribution. Based on the Gentoo LiveCD, the SystemRescueCd is configured as a tool kit for administering or repairing an operating system and recovering data after a system crash. Supported file systems include Ext2, Ext3 and Ext4, ReiserFS, XFS, JFS, VFAT, NTFS, ISO9660 and Btrfs.
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· Announced Distro: Parted Magic 4.11
· Announced Distro: openSUSE 11.3 RC1
· Announced Distro: Sabayon SpinBase and CoreCDX 5.3
· Announced Distro: SystemRescueCd 1.5.6
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Kiddix OS, a family-friendly operating system built on Linux, is being offered on a pay-what-you-want basis through the end of this month. According to the Kiddix website, the OS contains “child-friendly” web browser, word processor, calendar, e-mail, paint, multimedia player and calculator applications in addition to educational games, extensive parental controls and two regular games (“Frozen Bubble” and “Planet Penguin Racer”).
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Zenwalk Core is a one of a kind complete 300MB base Zenwalk system designed to build high-performance / high-security non-GUI Linux servers, or to be used as the base of your own custom light-speed Desktop System. You’ll be amazed how it can be installed in just 10 minutes using the auto-install setup option on a dedicated disk : then you’re ready to query the Netpkg repository to install your desktop of choice, or any network servers like Apache, Postfix, … in case you’re a network administrator. Feel free to check our repository for availability of any application, you’ll notice it’s fairly complete (you can also use Slackware packages as Zenwalk 6.4 is Slackware compatible).
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Superb Mini Server version 1.5.2 released (Linux kernel 2.6.33.5)
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PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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After weeks of concern about the “catastrophic state of it’s finances” and an indefinite delay in the release of version 2010.1, the French website LeMagIT is reporting that Mandriva has been saved by new investors. The article quotes Mandriva Director General Arnaud Laprévote: “Today the company found investors who decided to invest in the company, in order to give balance to the organization and to find a good economic model.” He added that “the community and users no longer need be concerned.” Due to regulations regarding confidentiality the identity of the new investors was not disclosed. Laprévote went on to explain: “we were aware that the existence of Mandriva was threatened, and today that is no longer the case.”
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Red Hat Family
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In just a little while, I’m leaving my office to pack for my trip to the Red Hat Summit/JBoss World 2010. As you might imagine, there will be a Fedora booth at the show. And of course, we’re giving away plenty of goodies like Live USB keys containing Fedora 13 for every attendee. I’m looking forward to seeing plenty of Fedora friends at the conference, including the illustrious Matt Domsch, 2010 RHCE of the Year for the EMEA region Sandro Mathys, and many others.
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As such, Amdocs will expand the use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux across its development environment in an effort to increase flexibility, enhance performance and drive cost savings.
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Meanwhile, Whitehurst says Red Hat will continue to develop and support its desktop Linux offering but the company has no plans to make a major desktop Linux push. The reason: Whitehurst sees plenty of demand for desktop Linux but he has no idea why customers would actually pay for desktop Linux.
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The past year has been a good one for Linux vendor Red Hat, and as it looks forward to its fiscal 2011, the outlook remains strong. That’s due at least in part to new customer wins and partnership initiatives the enterprise Linux player unveiled this week.
Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) is set to report its first-quarter fiscal 2011 earnings today after market close. The earnings report comes during the Red Hat Summit, where the open source software vendor is hosting customers and partners to discuss their latest innovations.
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The Red Hat Partner Center is a community portal used for sharing sales advice and software tools for cloud services, virtualisation, platform and middleware systems.
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Red Hat is not as precisely coupled to the economy as many other IT players. Throughout the Great Recession, Red Hat got its brim a little wet, but it never blew off Wall Street’s head and got trampled in the mud like so many other companies. And as the economy recovers, the commercial Linux operating system and JBoss middleware distributor is growing at more or less the same rate – like nothing ever happened.
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Shares were down 3% in after-hours trading at $29.93. Through the close, the stock has risen 64% in the last year, outperforming the broader market.
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The good times continue to roll at Red Hat, which posted a 20 percent jump in revenue and earnings per share in the latest quarter.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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We’ve noticed that a lot of the Papercut patches are being submitted by new community members! The bugs are trivially fixable and all it takes is for one person to show interest and fix the bug. We’re getting new members involved and willing to help Ubuntu. We were wondering , how can we keep up this energy and momentum?
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Ubuntu Light was announced a few months back and is intended as a ‘fast boot version’ of Ubuntu for quick access to basic internet features such a a web browser, Skype & Empathy..
The new ‘Unity’ interface Ubuntu Light is intended to be fast, responsive and quick – in the video below Ubuntu Light goes from off to Yahoo! in less than 20 seconds on one of Dell’s newly announced i-core series of laptops/netbooks.
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Many in the Ubuntu community are looking forward to the release of Ubuntu 10.10 this October. One reason, as you’ll see here on a new Dell 14R, is the introduction of Ubuntu Light, which Canonical is working with OEMs to get pre-installed as a dual-boot option on Windows laptops — with the benefit being they can access popular productivity and communication programs like Google Chrome/Chromium, Skype, Totem Media Player, IM, etc. in about 7 seconds.
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A Dell executive has revealed that the company is in talks with Google and is exploring the possibility of shipping netbooks with Chrome OS, the search giant’s cloud-centric Linux-based mobile operating system. The news reflects Dell’s interest in experimenting with new platforms.
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The service providers that Tilera and Quanta are hoping to sell the Tile-based servers to are not afraid to recompile a Linux software stack on a new architecture if it gives them an edge, any more than they care about using various Unix and Linux systems for specific jobs today.
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E-Readers
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Firefox was of course an open-source software development project, versus Microsoft’s proprietary IE. The Nook is meant to break two closed systems. One is Amazon’s proprietary Kindle format for e-reading books, versus the Nook’s open ePub format.
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The Android-based Nook is currently 3G only, while Amazon’s Linux platform is based around Wi-Fi. However, Barnes & Noble is to introduce a Wi-Fi Nook priced at $149 (£101), putting more pressure on Amazon.
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Phones
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With some minor patches we got the HD2 Linux kernel to boot on different windows mobile qsd8250 based devices like Acer s200 or Toshiba tsunagi tg01. It will be interesting to see if the same problem will be observed on these devices.
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Nokia/MeeGo
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Nokia’s rumored tablet had some of its details firmed up today in one analyst note. The device would use MeeGo, the mobile OS designed with Intel, but would use an ARM processor and not the Atom Z600 Intel would prefer. Digitimes Research claimed in the note that it would have either a seven- or nine-inch screen and would be assembled by Foxconn for the fall.
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It’s likely that the new tablet will run MeeGo, a new Linux-based operating system that was formed by the merger of the Maemo and Moblin projects. Maemo was largely a Nokia-backed project, and the company has already released several smartphones and small internet devices running the Linux-based operating system.
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Android
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Citing “multiple sources close to Google”, bloggers at TechCrunch report that the top priority for the next Android update, codenamed Gingerbread, is to homogenize the user experience and address criticisms of fragmentation. This could severely curtail the freedom of licensees to create their own user interface overlays – most famously, Motorola’s Motoblur and HTC’s Sense.
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Toshiba
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Computer hardware manufacturer Toshiba has unveiled a new smartbook mobile internet device (MID) that runs version 2.1 of Google’s open source Android mobile operating system. Similar to a standard netbook, the AC100 smartbook features a clamshell form factor, a full sized keyboard, a web cam and a 10.1 inch display with a resolution of 1024 by 600.
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The Toshiba AC100 looks like a standard netbook, albeit a particularly swish and sleek netbook, but it’s more (and less) than that.
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Chrome OS
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Despite all these possibilities it is arguable that Google missed the mark by imposing hardware restrictions which meant that OEM’s could only use more expensive hardware such as SSD’s. Google’s further insistence that Chrome OS devices have to boast HD capable screens and powerful graphics solutions has meant that the price of the envisaged Chrome OS device is sure to shoot through the roof.
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According to a report by InforWorld, IBM is going to open source the EGL language, compiler, generators for Java and JavaScript, as well as tools. By open-sourcing EGL, IBM looks to expand its reach.
This would also enable development of Eclipse based tools, added the report.
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Open source telephony solutions are not new. However, for enterprise telephony buyers, the risk of any downtime is too great to consider open source alternatives to Cisco, Avaya, Siemens, and other well-established telephony vendors.
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Lists
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If you’re part of a small business, chances are you’re always looking for ways to save money. What many business owners and managers don’t realize is that they can get all the software they need to run a business — quite literally all of it in most cases — 100% free of charge. That includes operating systems, word processing programs, accounting software, email servers, graphic design programs and more.
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Cloudera
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Code-named “Ora-Oop,” the free software will accommodate users who need to link relational data in Oracle databases with the data handled in Hadoop, which serves as a large-scale storage and computation engine, said Michael Olson, Cloudera CEO.
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Codenamed “Ora-Oop,” the new open source connector from Cloudera and Quest connects Oracle and Cloudera’s Hadoop distro — known as Cloudera’s Distribution for Hadoop, or CDH — via an interface that allows for bidirectional data transfers. It supports Oracle data types and table variants.
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Databases
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I participate at the MySQL Conference in Silicon Valley every year and look forward to the diversity of ideas, projects and companies that represent the ever-growing open source database landscape. This year, CUBRID, an open source database project backed by a company from South Korea, caught my eye. What was most impressive to me was the team’s enthusiasm about open source software and its belief that an open source model can work for developing good software and, at the same time, for building a healthy services business in Asia as well as globally.
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Oracle
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GlassFish Server Open Source Edition 3.0.1 and the commercial Oracle GlassFish Server 3.0.1 product are both now available. This is the first product release under Oracle, and the newly branded Oracle release includes numerous critical fixes and updated platform support.
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CMS
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WordPress is one of the most popular open-source content management systems in use on the internet. But despite WordPress’ popularity, one knock against it has been the fact that it’s always been more a ‘blogging engine’ than ‘true’ CMS.
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WordPress is available as an open source download that anyone can setup and install on their own server as well as on a hosted platform at WordPress.com. According to Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), WordPress.com is the 12th most visited site in the world, with 120 million unique visitors in April.
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Education
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The grant in question was a mechanism of Becta, the government agency that was in charge of IT in education until it was scrapped in May. At the time, the Coalition said it would save £80m by getting rid of Becta and cutting back on other Department for Education quangos.
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Business
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The product I’m examining this week, ZenCart, does have basic shopping cart functionality, but through a series of add-on modules, it gives businesspeople many more capabilities. The major thing that sets ZenCart apart from the competition is the fact that it is open-source software. Open source means the source code is made freely available to the user community.
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Monitoring
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Zenoss, Inc. raised $4.83 million in convertible preferred stock of a targeted $5.2 million offering, according to an SEC filing.
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Hustace: Most OpenNMS users find that our XML-based configuration options give them all the flexibility they need to set up OpenNMS for their monitoring needs. But the fact that we’re an open source project offers a lot of value for enterprises who really require one or more modifications to the product as we ship it. And if the modifications make sense as enhancements for the product, they often find their way into a future release that provides benefit to the entire community, but most importantly, doesn’t leave the implementer’s OpenNMS installation forked — with custom source code that must be maintained separately from the project and re-introduced whenever the project is upgraded.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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After 30 days, Nasuni will donate the unwon $5,000 to the Free Software Foundation as a thank-you for the Gnu Project — specifically GnuPG, a Free Software implementation of the OpenPGP standard. Said Rodriguez, “The Gnu Project continues to inspire technical excellence among the best and brightest minds. They are the real heroes.”
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Project Releases
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After more than a year of development the open source Jspresso project has released version 3.5 which promises to streamline rich Internet application development for Flash, Ajax and Swing interfaces
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Openness/Sharing
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Although I’m still focussed on 1p2U.com, some time later this year I hope to set up the website culturalliberty.org – a site dedicated to the restoration of everyone’s cultural liberty, especially from its constraint by anachronistic privileges such as copyright and patent (which should have been abolished along with slavery).
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Map Kibera is an open-source project started in 2009 in response to the lack of information available for the Kibera district of Nairobi, Kenya – one of the world’s largest slums.
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The winners in the new Digital Economy will be those who master the free by offering enough to make you want to pay for more, like the open source software company who got me to pay $80 for some extra binary that I didn’t need really need (and certainly could have avoided paying for).
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The Office of the Vice President for Academic Affairs has been awarded a $150,000 grant to establish an initiative that provides open-source textbook access for Illinois students.
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Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude has said that public releases of data will use open standards when possible.
Answering a parliamentary written question from Labour MP Tom Watson, Maude said the government will use open data standards for future releases of public data, based on the advice of the Public Sector Transparency Board. “Where possible we will use recognised open standards including Linked Data standards,” he said.
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To spur innovation and drive biopolymers more widely into injection molding applications, NatureWorks LLC is borrowing a page from the computer industry and making details for its new, high-heat, high-impact bioresin, Ingeo™ 3801X available by providing open source access to both formulation and compounding procedure.
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The following guest post is from Ivan Begtin, who is a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Government Data.
I would like to give a brief overview of a few projects I have been working on related to open government data in Russia.
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Open Hardware
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A robot has been trained to play pool to a decent standard in the space of approximately one week by some of the ”open source robot” guys over at Willow Garage. The best part is that this machine plays by the rules.
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Last but not least is the BeagleJuice. As the main source of power, it’s fitting that the power switch is located on this 2600 mAh power pack. It outputs up to 1.5 amps, promising a max battery life of 6.5 hours for the BeagleBoard (no info on how the BeagleTouch’s operation affects this). Charging is accomplished through one or both type-B USB ports.
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Standards/Consortia
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Sencha Touch is licensed under version 3 of the GNU GPL License (GPLv3). A commercial version will be released at a later date.
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Security/Aggression
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The prospect of CCTV in tower blocks reared its ugly head in the media last week after Harriet Harman raised the issue at Prime Minister’s Question Time.
Back in 2009 No CCTV commented on proposals to put CCTV in several tower blocks in Oxford following a trial of cameras in one block, ‘Foresters Tower’ in 2008.
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Security cameras were not working properly when four people were shot at a Birmingham music event, it has emerged.
An emergency meeting of city licensing chiefs agreed to a police request for an immediate ban on future events at a room in the Custard Factory, Digbeth.
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West Midlands Police has increased its security budget by 25 per cent in the past three years, figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act reveal.
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The city of Annapolis, Maryland recently received a Homeland Security grant for 20 new surveillance cameras in the downtown area. The city of Baltimore already has nearly 500. According to the watchdog site PhotoEnforced, the state of Maryland has at least 375 red light cameras and 80 speed cameras. Your government is watching you, Marylanders. But don’t think for a second that it’s going to tolerate you watching back.
On Saturday, Yvonne Nicole Shaw, 27, was arrested by sheriff’s deputies in Lexington Park, Maryland. According to the Southern Maryland News, Shaw was cuffed and booked for recording deputies who had come to an apartment complex in response to a noise complaint. Sheriff’s Cpl. Patrick Handy’s report explained that Shaw was standing about 12 feet from him, and that Shaw “did admit to recording our encounter on her cell phone for the purpose of trying to show the police are harassing people.”
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THINK SAFETY FIRST along with stability for the sake of the Domain Name System (DNS), the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) chief executive has told the organisation’s Brussels meeting.
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Environment
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Campaigners have unveiled a petition signed by more than a million people calling for maintenance of the global moratorium on commercial whaling.
It was presented to Australian minister Peter Garrett outside the International Whaling Commission meeting in Morocco.
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In a recent conversation about the safety and ethics of synthetic biology in the wake of the announcement of the synthetic genome, many of the professors I was chatting with commented on how they hoped new synthetic biology technology would lead to bacteria that could eat the oil spilling into the gulf of mexico even as I type this right now. Of course, the “technology” for oil eating bacteria already exists and have already been used for clean up in previous oil spills–many naturally occurring species of bacteria can already break down the hydrocarbons in crude oil. The natural oil eaters end up competing with each other, however, leading to decreased efficiency in an already slow clean-up process (these are bacteria after all, not oil-phiranas). Genetic engineering and directed evolution technology has led to the design of improved strains of oil eating bacteria that can proceed more quickly and more stably than the natural strains, and has already been patented–in 1971.
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Finance
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One of the reasons the federal budget is chronically in the red is that most people, historically, couldn’t care less. The national debt is an unfathomable abstraction that doesn’t show up on your 1040 or your monthly bills. Over the last few decades, very few people lost sleep worrying if the budget would ever be in balance.
Keynesian economics, as well as political incentives, argued for ignoring the issue. When times were good, we could afford to indulge. When times were bad, deficit spending was the accepted formula to stimulate the economy.
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RNC chair Michael Steele defended Wall Street as the creators of wealth in a combative interview today while urging the Obama admin not to “demonize” and “demagogue” against a system that plunged the economy into recession.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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So, it looks like the industry is going to plan B: which is going back to trying to ram through legislation that will require ISPs to take the draconian step of protecting one industry’s broken business model. And to get this going, it looks like the industry has set up a neat little set of astroturfing groups and “consumer” campaigns that try to hide the specifics, but clearly are designed to get similar three strikes legislation (similar to the Digital Economy Act in the UK) put in place in the US.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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A libel suit against a website has been thrown out of court because the potential damage to the reputation of the person making the claim was so small.
Johanna Kaschke sued blogger David Osler after he published an article about Kaschke’s arrest in Germany in the 1970s in connection with a link to an extremist political group that was never proved.
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Creative. Apparently, the guy who did this, one Barry Ardolf, was trying to frame his neighbor. Around the same time, he apparently also sent child pornography to his neighbor’s co-workers, using a fake email address pretending to be the neighbor. If the “open WiFi” haters were correct, he would have been able to do this without any way to catch him. But, of course, that’s ridiculous. With a little effort, the FBI was able to trace the origin right back to Ardolf — and he’s now been arrested for threats to the VP and for identity fraud.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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As leaders in Congress announced a series of hearings this June to tackle huge telecommunications issues with a focus on the Internet, the top phone and cable organizations that control the majority of the access to the Internet have hired 276 former government officials to lobby both the Congress and the executive branch.
According to data obtained from lobbyist disclosure forms and the Center for Responsive Politics, seventy-two percent of the lobbyists hired by AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Verizon, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association and the US Telecom Association have previous government experience. These organizations combined to spend $20.6 million lobbying the federal government in the first quarter of 2010.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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A recent CNET video on “Intellectual property rights vs. journalism” shows a Stanford University’s Innovation Journalism conference on June 7, with a panel discussion by various mainstreamers discussing the quesion “Is intellectual property protection a threat to journalism?” The lack of libertarian principle and sound economics has these commentators floundering as they discuss various cases where IP infringes free speech and freedom of the press.
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It is a well-known fact that in particular numerous newspaper publishing companies are currently suffering from an increasing downturn of their classic paper-based business model.Their long-established but obviously now depreciated business model had been centered around the exploitation of the relative scarcity of news contents. Paying buyers of paper copies who can also be fed with advertising material were attracted, creating a handsome stream of revenues both from buyers of paper copies as well as from advertisers.
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That was one of the few areas of consensus at a gathering convened at Google headquarters Wednesday night. Some 60 business people, coders, journalists, attorneys and others attended the fancifully named Techdirt Saves Journalism, a powwow whose goal was to spark a few ideas that might prove useful to enterprising newcomers, as well as those who write journalists’ paychecks today.
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It first threatened to sue over the use of the logo, but Neighborhoodies didn’t fold. They, properly, realized that trademarks only cover use in commerce and for products that the mark actually covers. Seeing that the New York Herald Tribune has not operated since 1966 (and the NY Times only owned the brand after that), it’s difficult to see how the NYTimes has a legitimate trademark request.
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Copyrights
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To expedite DMCA claims, Google specifically requests sufficient information “to permit Google to notify the owner/administrator of the allegedly infringing webpage or other content (email address is preferred).” But BPI does not do that. It only lists out the above webpages.
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The lawyers targeting thousands of people who allegedly pirated “The Hurt Locker” and other films on BitTorrent are fighting to keep the litigation on track.
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In a bid to avoid a third trial — after two mistrials — the Minnesota federal judge presiding over the 4-year-old Jammie Thomas-Rasset case wants the Recording Industry Association of American and the defendant to negotiate a settlement.
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We’re holding the UK’s first ever dedicated digital rights conference on Saturday 24 July.
Our keynote speaker for ORGCon is Professor James Boyle, the world’s most influential copyright scholar. Boyle will address the question of why we are locking up our cultural heritage when technology offers new and exciting ways to engage with creative works:
The Incredible Shrinking Public Domain: A Paradox
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All in all this is an incredibly frustrating ruling. It feels like the court didn’t actually want to address the admittedly difficult question of how the First Amendment and copyright law come into conflict, so it just punted and said “well Congress knows best, so it’s okay.” The case will almost certainly be appealed, potentially for an en banc (full appeals court review) or directly to the Supreme Court. So this most certainly is not over yet. But after a reasonable ruling last year to this year’s reversal, it’s definitely a step backwards for anyone who believes in the importance and sanctity of the public domain.
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Biden spoke to the media alongside Victoria Espinel, the U.S. intellectual property enforcement coordinator, to introduce the government’s strategy on protecting the country’s intellectual property.
“We used to have a problem in this town saying this,” Biden told reporters Thursday at a press conference in Washington, D.C. “But piracy is theft. Clean and simple. It’s smash and grab. It ain’t no different than smashing a window at Tiffany’s and grabbing [merchandise].”
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Vice President Joe Biden announced the multipronged plan to stem the loss of billions of dollars a year generated from innovation, which he described as “perhaps our greatest export.”
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Espinel joined Attorney General Eric Holder, Vice President Joe Biden, and other top administration officials at the White House today to introduce the plan. It is intended to help coordinate the various agencies working on IP as well as ensure the products available on the U.S. market are safe, Espinel wrote in a blog post.
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As expected, it looks like Victoria Espinel, the White House’s IP “Czar” has released the official “Joint Strategic Plan to Combat Intellectual Property Theft,” as required by the ProIP Act. Given the history so far, we had expected the report to be quite one-sided in favor of the industry, and the initial announcements about the report suggested that was to be the case. Specifically, in announcing the report, Hollywood’s best friend, Joe Biden, made some typical uninformed comments about how infringement was no different than “theft.”
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The “Imaginary Property Czarina”, Victoria Espinel, is actually a vestige of the Bush years. Her position was created under a law he signed, but Obama got to appoint the first person to her position. Unfortunately, the Obama/Biden team has been given bribes by the Imaginary Property cartels to prop up their ailing business model of artificial scarcity that kept them alive back when media was more defective than it is now and copies were hard to make.
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We just wrote about a DMCA takedown notice from BPI to Google that appeared to be setting Google up for a future lawsuit, and now it looks like the IFPI, of which BPI is a part, is going even further. TorrentFreak, following up on our post about BPI, noticed an even more direct takedown notice from the IFPI demanding that Google block any link to The Pirate Bay.
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A copyright-compensation levy on blank digital media and devices should only be charged when they are likely to be used to make private copies of copyrighted works, an adviser to the EU’s top court has said.
Many European countries allow citizens to make private copies of copyrighted works but charge a levy on blank CDs, digital media players and DVDs and use the money generated to compensate copyright holders for the unlicensed use of their work.
CLUG Talk 30 June 2009 – Shell Environment Tweaks (2009)
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06.22.10
Posted in News Roundup at 1:58 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Someone left a comment on one of my posts similar to, “Linux won’t be popular on the Desktop until it runs Windows applications.” To which I silently responded, “Huh? and, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” We have WINE for running Windows applications and it works reasonably well for those who care to spend the time to work through any problems with it. I don’t think the Linux Community needs to spend time on such an undertaking. Is anyone asking Apple to run Windows applications so that it will gain popularity? No? Then, why should Linux? If you want to run Windows applications, run them on Windows.
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Now that most of our work for FLOSSMETRICS is ended, I had the opportunity to try and work on something different. As you know, I worked on bringing OSS to companies and public administration for nearly 15 years now, and I had the opportunity to work in many different projects with many different and incredible people. One of the common things that I discovered is that to increase adoption it is necessary to give every user a distinct advantage in using OSS, and to make the exploratory process easy and hassle-free.
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Dell
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So why did Dell back down from their claims for Ubuntu Linux. I’m not getting any answers from Dell, but I think it’s pretty easy to guess: Microsoft took note of people talking about Dell saying nice things about Linux, and decided to “have a word” with Dell. Microsoft has been pushing the computer vendors around for decades — which is why Windows is so popular, not because Windows is better than the alternatives.
But, and this is what I find really interesting, Dell didn’t pull the comments about Linux being more secure. They just softened them. I think this speaks volumes. It means that Dell remains committed to Ubuntu Linux on its laptops and netbooks. It also means that Microsoft can’t get away with being the bully it once was to computer manufacturers.
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Google
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“We have to have a point of view on the industry and technology direction two years, three years down the road, so we continuously work with Google on this,” Amit Midha, Dell’s president for Greater China and South Asia told Reuters in an interview.
“There are going to be unique innovations coming up in the marketplace in two, three years, with a new form of computing, we want to be on that forefront … So with Chrome or Android or anything like that we want to be one of the leaders,” Midha said, adding that there were no firm announcements to be made but talks were underway.
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ITS BORING NAME ASIDE, Toshiba’s AC100 “mobile Internet device,” as the company calls it, runs Android 2.1 and has an Nvidia Tegra 250 processor, a 1024 x 600 screen and 512MB of RAM. Boasting 7-day standby with split second bootup, its battery life for “full use”, which includes 3G internet access, can last for 8 hours according to Toshiba. 3G is optional while WiFi comes as standard.
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Server
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This is the quintessential sort of clue you hear on the TV game show “Jeopardy!” It’s witty (the clue’s category is “Postcards From the Edge”), demands a large store of trivia and requires contestants to make confident, split-second decisions. This particular clue appeared in a mock version of the game in December, held in Hawthorne, N.Y. at one of I.B.M.’s research labs. Two contestants — Dorothy Gilmartin, a health teacher with her hair tied back in a ponytail, and Alison Kolani, a copy editor — furrowed their brows in concentration. Who would be the first to answer?
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Ballnux
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So Samsung finally posted the source code that they were legally obligated to provide me in order to fulfill the contract they entered into with me as a recipient of GPL’d source code that they distributed. Maybe.
[...]
If nobody calls companies to account when they have not lived up to their side of the agreement, they’ll get the idea that it’s OK to continue ignoring their obligations, so with all due deference to Mr. Kuhn, I feel it is my right to demand that the contract between myself and Samsung be fulfilled.
One last thing, and this is for Samsung:
Quit asking people why they want the code, or what they’re going to do with it. It’s none of your damned business if all the customer does is print it all out and use it for toilet paper, you’re still legally obligated to fork it over.
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Applications
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Musical inspiration may come from heaven, but once it arrives, you’d better record it or it’ll fly back to where it came from. MuseScore software lets you set down your music notation and compose (or at least create sheet music) on your computer.
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With the ARRL Field Day just around the corner, I decided, in the spirit of my own Linux Odyssey that I should find and use a new logging program. It is the search for this program that prompted these thoughts.
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Instructionals
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Games
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Today Cute Knight Kingdom came out of beta and is now available for GNU/Linux !
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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Krita
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Last week, Krita development really picked up, and if today’s commit rate is anything to go buy, this week will be just as good! We had fifty commits in week 24. Our bug count is now 58, but that’s after Sven Langkamp closed half a dozen bugs today. People seem to like Krita 2.2 and do very nice work with it. If you give 2.2 a try and you experience a problem, please inform us about it. There’s a very cool and handy Report Bug menu option in the Help menu!
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Equally easy to overlook are improvements like the drag and drop support for tabs in the Dolphin file manager, the use of the semantic desktop features in creating Konqueror bookmarks, or the support in Kontact for alternate calendars and new holiday listings.
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Debian is the daddy, the basis for Ubuntu, Mepis and others. It’s intentionally restricted to only open-source components, so it’s a bit more work to get proprietary code such as graphics or wireless network drivers working, or the official versions of Java, Flash and so on. Good for servers if you know what you’re doing, but not a great desktop choice unless you’re already a guru.
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If you’re new to the Linux or open source community, you might not have heard of live disc or USB distributions yet. They let you run a operating system on PCs without installing anything on the hard drive. It loads directly from the CD/DVD disc or USB flash drive. Many full Linux desktop distros, such as Ubuntu, can be ran in this live mode. However, there are also live distros created for a wide-variety of other specific applications and solutions. Here we’ll review several of these. Let’s get started!
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Reviews
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Ubuntu Netbook Remix, or UNR, sports the same purple theme that the Gnome Ubuntu release has. There is only a toolbar at the top, and then the Netbook Interface. Different to Gnome-Shell, which I spent some time with over the past seven days, I have none of that feeling of “where do I go now” that Gnome-Shell leaves me with.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) is the only other Triangle technology company to make the list, ranking at No. 95. The Raleigh open-source software company had IT turnover of just 5 percent in 2009 and maintained a $1,250 training budget per IT employee.
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Across Fort Point Channel is AcrossWorld Education Co. Inc., which launched last year to bring freely available college-level courses to developing communities across the globe. To do so, it is hoping to emulate the success of another company that has been a big winner in monetizing free content — Red Hat Inc.
Unlike Raleigh, N.C.-based Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), which took the open source operating system Linux and turned it into an enterprise-level software player, AcrossWorld is tapping the courses available through the open education resources movement for its business model. Like Red Hat, however, AcrossWorld will be making its money by selling expertise. For AcrossWorld, that means helping collect and structure courses for colleges that otherwise would have to invest major funds in developing their own curricula.
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Prompted by their positive collaboration and customer experience as a long-time Red Hat Enterprise Linux customer, NYSE Euronext turned to JBoss Enterprise Middleware to integrate their disparate and legacy proprietary infrastructure.
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Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Nyse Euronext (NYX), the leading and most liquid equities exchange group in the world, has standardized on Red Hat’s JBoss Enterprise Middleware.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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But Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat wants to change the game: according to the whiteboard of the “Implementation of delivering apps post-release” blueprint, a new Ubuntu repository “extras.ubuntu.com” will be created and new applications will be uploaded to this repository even for the already released Ubuntu versions. The new applications will have to be approved by the Application Review Board.
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My father-in-law Ron is 88 years old, a member of what Tom Brokaw called The Greatest Generation, those who survived the Great Depression and went on to fight World War II — in Europe, in Ron’s case. Time is taking its toll now on all of those folks: limited mobility, slower reaction times, often reduced vision. It can happen to all of us who live that long.
[...]
I sent copies of my articles to Ron from time to time. He had been interested in computer hardware some years ago and had accumulated a good many bits and pieces, but had long since given it away; unfortunately, a lot of his enthusiasm had gone with it. Still, he always read the articles and a few months ago he remarked that Linux sounded interesting. Naturally I jumped at the opening, offered to send him a Live CD, and to my surprise he said he’d love to try it. I sent him Ubuntu 9.04, a short summary of it, and references to the Ubuntu sites on the web.
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You can clearly see an Ubuntu logo on the the back of one of the characters’ monitor from Channel 4’s geek comedy ‘The IT Crowd’ (which has just started a new series o’er here.)
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Mint
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After using the new Mint Community website for testing, with some new tests too, the last development ISO still had some minor bugs. Two were easy to fix, but the other two KDE ones have been a real pain. Well lets say they are very easy for a user to configure using system settings if you know where to look but to have them enabled by default is…. well… I gave up. KDE 4.4 now has new ways to generate the configs it wants after putting your configs there first.
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E-Readers
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The price war in e-readers is on and the scrum between Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook may be enough to change the buying calculus for dedicated reading devices.
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Barnes & Noble just launched a new Wi-Fi only version of the Nook for $149 and cut the price of the original, with both Wi-Fi and 3G from $259 to $199. Whoops! And, what’s this? I no sooner finish this blog and Amazon drops the bottom-line Kindle’s price to $189. That’s great, right? Wrong. It’s actually just postponing the end of all dedicated e-readers.
[...]
Besides, in the next few months you’re going to see a flood of Linux-powered iPad clones and other tablet devices. I expect these tablets to have prices ranging from $150 to $250 and, thanks to most of them running Google Android, they’ll be able to run many of the same applications that now live on Apple iPads. Besides, when it comes to e-readers, the Nook is an Android Linux device and there’s already a Kindle for Android application.
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VLC
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During the last year, the VLC developers have received several injunctions by e-mail from employees at AOL, asking us to either comply to a license not compatible with free software or remove the SHOUTcast capability in VLC.
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Mozilla
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Recent Firefox 4 nightlies feature new support for Web Sockets, a new technology (an HTML5 spin-off) that enables bi-directional communication between a web browser and a server.
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SaaS
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On the other hand, the tablet PC systems I see so far are limited to control by some folks other than myself. You see, for now these are closed consumer devices that do not allow me to install or choose my own operating system and only work best when connected to “the cloud”. The tablets by Apple come with all the restrictions that come with any Apple system, only worse in this case. The tablets from Google are at least supposed to use an open source operating system. But still, Google’s dedication to “cloud computing” puts their tablet in a questionable light as far as control over “my stuff” is concerned. At least with a laptop, notebook or netbook PC I can still have a local disk installed with my operating system of choice, a complete set of productivity applications installed and full control over my own data. No access to the ‘net? That is no problem with a device with local storage where I can keep my data and work on it with locally installed applications.
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Oracle
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OpenOffice.org is a flagship for free and open source software, released under free software licenses and achieving downloads in the hundreds of millions. OO.o is a success by most measurements, but there have long been murmurings of discontent among developers resulting in complaints of “non-responsiveness and lack of leadership” on the project. The argument is not that the project is a failure, but that OpenOffice.org could be so much more, given a less top down approach to project management and a looser rein on developers’ ability to get involved.
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Business
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In any discussion of FOSS’s potential to be profitable, Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) is invariably held up as the poster child for success.
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The explanation of why zero pure play open source vendors have hit the one billion dollar revenue mark has never seemed, to me, particularly complicated. The economics of open source are, as Glyn notes above, fundamentally differentiated from the closed source models that preceded it. Open source as an application development model enjoys many advantages over proprietary, in-house development; distribution and usage among them. But revenue extraction has not traditionally been a strength, for obvious reasons. When payment is optional, as it is with most open source software, fewer users become commercial buyers. Next up, a study proving that objects further away are harder to see.
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BSD
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Dru Lavigne currently serves on the Board of Directors for the FreeBSD Foundation and is the current Chair of the BSD Certification Group. As of August 2nd, she will be adding Director of Community Development for the PC-BSD project to her resume.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Open Data
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The following guest post is from Lance McKee, who is Senior Staff Writer at the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Geospatial Data.
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Twitter is one of the most popular social networking tools around today. But of the 50 million+ “Tweets” broadcast daily (according to Twitter), not all that many are being sent or received by engineers, many of whom say they just aren’t buying into the micro-blogging service based on “140-characters or less” text messages.
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A former Massey Energy coal miner has filed a federal whistle-blower complaint, claiming he was fired after complaining about unsafe conditions at two Massey mines in West Virginia, NPR News has learned. One of the coal mines is Upper Big Branch, where an explosion killed 29 workers April 5.
Ricky Lee Campbell’s complaint says he repeatedly told his supervisors about failing brakes on the coal shuttle cars he drove at the Slip Ridge Cedar Grove mine.
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When Intel first unveiled its “Silverthorne” microarchitecture in 2008, it was clear that the low-power, in-order processors based on it (i.e., Atom) would be at the very bottom of the performance heap. It’s fair to say that none of us in the tech press ever expected to see a server based on the design, much less one that would be aimed directly at Intel’s high-end Xeon line. But we weren’t the only ones watching the Silverthorne announcement.
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According to Steve Auckland, Metro UK’s managing director, the paper made an operating profit even during the worst of the recession in 2009, its seventh successive year of profitability.
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The competitive interplay between Apple and Google will continue to help smartphone software outpace PCs. But iOS and Android also benefit wildly from the structure of the smartphone industry. Apple and Google are pushed not just by each other, but by the symbiotic advancement in chipsets and the system integration work of component vendors that I detailed above. The entire smartphone innovation value-chain just works.
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BCS
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Rebel members of the BCS have been threatened with libel action unless they withdraw claims that appear to question the probity of the organisation’s Trustees.
The BCS is the midst of £5m ‘transformation’ programme that includes re-branding to “BCS: the Chartered Institute for IT”. Such moves have not gone down well with some members.
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Science
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The 1000 Genomes Project, an international public-private consortium to build the most detailed map of human genetic variation to date, has completed three pilot projects and announced the deposition of the final resulting data in freely available public databases for use by the research community.
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Europe will import its first solar-generated electricity from North Africa within the next five years, European Energy Commissioner Günther Oettinger said in an interview on Sunday.
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Astronomers at the University of Sheffield have managed to record for the first time the eerie musical harmonies produced by the magnetic field in the outer atmosphere of the sun.
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Security/Aggression
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Fighting homegrown terrorism by monitoring Internet communications is a civil liberties trade-off the U.S. government must make to beef up national security, the nation’s homeland security chief said Friday.
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Mr Mayes story is a perfect example of how our power-hungry society has become one ruled by bureaucratisation and rationalisation. How a council warden can think a few plants could represent flytipping is quite ridiculous and shows how the state is obsessed by the tiny details instead of seeing the bigger picture.
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Exclusive: The Government is planning to switch to a scaled back, ‘patient-held’ electronic care record, severing central control over the controversial programme, but stopping short of scrapping it altogether.
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Who spends the money? Politicians. Do they always spend as wisely as they know how? Not at all. In many fields politicians of all parties conspire to spend wilfully, knowing full well that they are wasting considerable sums that will do no good to anyone. They hope they are at least buying votes, but there is little evidence that their profligacy even succeeds in this. Law and order and drugs prohibition are just two of many examples where pursuit of populism trumps spending money well.
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Environment
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That’s the start of a guest post from Dr. Jonathan Koomey, a project scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Koomey has been a friend and colleague for more than a decade and a half — and we’ve spent a lot of time debunking mis-analysis in this area (see “Ignore the media hype and keep Googling — The energy impact of web searches is very LOW“).
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Now, as Japan pushes to overturn the 24-year ban on commercial whaling, the former whaler has come forward with allegations of widespread criminality among the men with whom he spent months in the freezing waters of the Antarctic.
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BP is accused of destroying the wildlife and coastline of America, but if you look back into history you find that BP did something even worse to America.
They gave the world Ayatollah Khomeini.
Of course there are many factors that led to the Iranian revolution, but back in 1951 the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company – which would later become BP – and its principal owner the British government, conspired to destroy democracy and install a western-controlled regime in Iran. The resulting anger and the repression that followed was one of the principal causes of the Iranian revolution in 1978/79 – out of which came the Islamist regime of Ayatollah Khomeini.
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Tony Hayward, the tactless shithead CEO of BP might “like his life back,” but what about the 99% of the birds caught up in the oil spill catastrophe who will inevitably die from suffocation and liver and kidney damage?
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‘Obama cannot order pelicans not to die (no matter whose ass he kicks). And no amount of money – not BP’s $20bn, not $100bn – can replace a culture that’s lost its roots.’
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A company controlled by Total and Chevron has been found guilty of host of grave safety failures that led to the Buncefield oil depot explosion and the largest fire in peacetime Europe.
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The man President Barack Obama picked to run the $20 billion Gulf oil spill damage fund said Monday many people are in “desperate financial straits” and need immediate relief.
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Finance
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Watching BP (BP) CEO Tony Hayward mundanely evade responsibility for the historic ecological disaster unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico may have angered members of Congress and television viewers alike. And split screen images of the underwater well continuing to gush vast quantities of oil as Hayward demonstrated little emotion or sense of urgency only heightened the irritation.
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Representatives of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and American International Group Inc. will appear before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission as the panel holds a hearing on the role of derivatives in the credit crunch.
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The class action seeks to recover damages on behalf of plaintiff and a class of all other individual and institutional investors who purchased or otherwise acquired shares of Goldman Sachs common stock during the class period. The defendants in the case are The Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Lloyd C. Blankfein, David A. Viniar and Gary D. Cohn. The complaint alleges that defendants violated Sections 10(b) and 20(a) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 by issuing a series of materially false and misleading statements concerning Goldman Sachs’ business model and reasons for Goldman Sachs’ business success during the class period.
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A judge today in New York signed an order granting Goldman Sachs Group Inc. more time to respond to a April 16 lawsuit accusing the firm of defrauding investors while selling mortgage-linked securities, records say.
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On May 10, just hours after the European Central Bank stepped into government bond markets for the first time, Axel Weber broke ranks with most of his colleagues on the ECB’s Governing Council — including his boss, President Jean-Claude Trichet.
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For a year, users have been fighting furiously to fend off changes in how the securities are bought and sold, and have had considerable success in the House. Then, this spring the tide turned against them in the Senate. Now, with a bloc of business-friendly Democrats pressing hard, the issue has exploded into one of the biggest battles as a House-Senate conference crafts the final version of a financial-regulation overhaul.
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As Congress rushes this week to complete the most far-reaching financial reform plan in decades, the banking industry is mounting an 11th-hour end run.
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The proposed financial reforms pending before Congress could cost Goldman Sachs nearly a quarter of its annual profits, Citigroup analysts estimate in a new report.
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New York lawmakers say the changes could cripple an industry that’s the state’s lifeblood.
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There is great deference to power in the United States, and perhaps that is appropriate. But those now calling the shots should remember that they will not be in power for ever and – at some point in the not too distant future – there will be a more balanced assessment of their legacies.
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Long-term unemployment, a jobless period of six months or longer, has reached a historic high. In March 2010 more than 44 percent of the unemployed fell into this category.
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The FDIC has closed nearly 250 banks since the beginning of 2008, and the number of failures is expected to peak during the third quarter of this year. Cleaning up such financial wreckage has depleted the agency’s deposit insurance fund, which goes toward putting seized banks into receivership and backstopping individual accounts of up to $250,000.
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Saudi Arabia’s central bank holds more than twice the amount of gold previously estimated, a shift that analysts said reflected more of an accounting adjustment than an indication the oil rich nation was veering away from its conservative reserve policy.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Well, here’s an interesting privacy conundrum. In the US, if you are arrested, the government records your DNA in a giant database. There is already some controversy over the fact that it’s upon arrest, and not conviction, but the privacy issues appear to go much deeper. Slate is running a fascinating article about how there are some serious privacy questions raised by law enforcement using that DNA database to track down relatives of people in the database.
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The elusive founder of WikiLeaks, who is at the centre of a potential US national security sensation, has surfaced from almost a month in hiding to tell the Guardian he does not fear for his safety but is on permanent alert.
Julian Assange, a renowned Australian hacker who founded the electronic whistleblowers’ platform WikiLeaks, vanished when a young US intelligence analyst in Baghdad was arrested.
The analyst, Bradley Manning, had bragged he had sent 260,000 incendiary US state department cables on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to WikiLeaks.
The prospect of the cache of classified intelligence on the US conduct of the two wars being put online is a nightmare for Washington. The sensitivity of the information has generated media reports that Assange is the target of a US manhunt.
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The International Federation of Journalists has condemned the jail sentence and fine handed out to Venezuelan columnist Francisco Perez.
“It is a brutal, unacceptable judgment with very few international precedents,” said the Brussels-based body that represents around 600,000 journalists in more than 100 countries.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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As I wrote in my submission using the online survey, it would be far better if the BBC simply released the iPlayer code as open source, and allowed companies and people to support the platforms they are interested in. This would save money and enable a far greater range of devices to be supported. I also recommended allowing the atomisation of content, rather than forcing people to watch pre-defined channels – in other words, in the way we consume content online.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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1.Supreme Court Ruling in Monsanto Case is Victory for Center for Food Safety, Farmers
2.Supreme Court’s Ruling on Monsanto’s GM Alfalfa: Who Won?
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Meat
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The super-genius legal-beagles at the National Pork Board have done their duty: they caught ThinkGeek advertising their “Canned Unicorn Meat” (an April Fool’s gag product) using the Solemnly Registered Trademark “The Other White Meat Circle-R,” so they sent them a 12-page cease-and-desist letter.
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Copyrights
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Has file-sharing helped society? Looked at from the narrow perspective of existing record labels, the question must seem absurd; profits have dropped sharply in the years since tools like Napster first appeared. But a pair of well-known academics argue peer-to-peer file sharing has weakened copyright in the US… and managed to benefit all of us at the same time.
“Consumer welfare increased substantially due to new technology,” write Felix Oberholzer-Gee of Harvard and Koleman Strumpf of the University of Kansas. “Weaker copyright protection, it seems, has benefited society.”
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An anti-trust exemption that would allow newspaper to operate as a cartel *in the public interest*. George Orwell would have loved it.
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A movie director in India is threatening legal action against lawmakers after it was revealed they gathered and watched a pirate copy of his hit movie. The film, titled ‘Raajneeti’ (‘Politics’), was released early this month in theaters but dozens of lawmakers from the Indian Bharatiya Janata Party didn’t visit one. They were caught after their illicit screening was broadcast on TV as part of a news report.
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The BPI, the RIAA’s UK counterpart, has gone up against the Holiest of Holies, American online advertising conglomerate Google, says Chilling Effects.
Short for British Phonographic Industry, the BPI contributed to the British government’s Digital Ecomy bill, complete with its ACTA Three Strikes and you’re Off The Net element, with hardly a murmur from the UK lamescream media.
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With that in mind, I had to chuckle to myself when I read the news that the producer of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” has started shooting the project with a mere $5-million budget and a crew that likely ensures a quiet direct-to-video release (if that).
[...]
The producer was forced to rush this thing into production now – otherwise he would lose the rights altogether after tying them up for nearly 20 years.
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A friend just forwarded me an email “from” the CEO of Universal Music (really from an email marketing campaign system if you look at the headers) that encourages him to push for new laws in the US to kick people offline for file sharing. To date, the RIAA and others in the recording industry have known better than to seriously push for a three strikes-type legislation in the US, knowing that it is a battle that they very well might lose. They had hoped, quite strongly, that various ISPs would come to simply agree to implement a three strikes plan to kick people offline after three accusations (not convictions) of copyright infringement. But it’s been nearly a year and a half since the RIAA believed those deals were close, and there’s still nothing to show for it. Nothing.
So, it looks like the industry is going to plan B: which is going back to trying to ram through legislation that will require ISPs to take the draconian step of protecting one industry’s broken business model. And to get this going, it looks like the industry has set up a neat little set of astroturfing groups and “consumer” campaigns that try to hide the specifics, but clearly are designed to get similar three strikes legislation (similar to the Digital Economy Act in the UK) put in place in the US.
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ACTA
CLUG Talk 12 May 2009 – IPTables (2009)
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