06.27.11
Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, Oracle, Patents at 10:14 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Another look at the complaint against MPEG-LA, Oracle’s case against Google’s Android, and Paul Allen’s case against the world
The fight against aggression with software patents is met with some early success, but it is premature to declare victory before final judgments. Moreover, addressing the problem on a patent-by-patent basis would be inefficient and almost impractical.
Patents are hurting standards and the FTC is being informed of that by the good folks behind Ogg (EN | ES).
It was not so long ago that there was federal intervention following bad practices with patents from Rambus, as we explained at the time [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]. For the patent holder/s it is great to have standards which virtually force everyone to pay a tax, but for everyone else it is unfair, unreasonable, and discriminatory.
According to Patently-O (a pro-patents blog), it is possible that more resistance to software patents will soon need to come. To quote their conclusion:
That Federal Circut decision was based on the court’s machine-or-transformation test that was subsequently discredited by the Supreme Court in Bilski v. Kappos (2010). In the wake of its Bilski decision, the Supreme Court vacated the Federal Circuit’s Prometheus decision and remanded for a new opinion. On remand, the Federal Circuit again affirmed that the Prometheus claims are eligilble for patent protection.
The Bilski test or Bilski case keep coming up on occasions and sometimes they become a successful basis for invaliding patents that reach the courtroom. But a step further is needed. Anything short of elimination of all software patents would simply leave Free software in a dubious state, or a state where only a subset of it is approved for use (but not for redistribution). Right now even Java, despite being Free software (supposed to be GPLv2, not v3), is under a patent attack from Oracle. Since Google is willing to go quite far and challenge the allegations, Oracle’s patents (that it bought from Sun) are almost deemed unenforceable (if they become invalid, which is increasingly likely). To quote:
Oracle’s Java infringement case against Google isn’t going exceptionally well for the database giant these days, with another setback delivered by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) in the form of a patent reexamination this week.
Historically, things haven’t been rosy for Oracle since their August 2010 lawsuit was launched, accusing Google of infringing on Oracle’s Java software.
Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems’ Java technology when it bought the company in 2010. Instead of licensing Java from Oracle to use in Android, Google developed a “clean room” version of the Java virtual machine, Dalvik, for Android instead. Oracle says that Dalvik deliberately infringes on Java anyway, despite efforts to build Dalvik from scratch.
Another case against Google et al., this one from Microsoft’s co-founder, is weakening. Groklaw reveals that:
In a judicious (pun intended) move, the court has considered the motion for stay filed by the defendants seeking to stay the trial until after the USPTO completes the reexaminations of the Interval patents. Despite Interval’s opposition to this motion, the court has granted the stay [PDF], and the trial will now await the outcome of the USPTO determinations.
So here we have another case where upon filing a lawsuit, the patents in question get challenged and perhaps, just hopefully, they might be declared invalid and the lawsuit which is hinged on them get tossed out.
In its patent extortion escapades, Microsoft (or Apple) typically goes around suing small companies or mere distributors that have little incentive — unlike Google — to go ahead and invalidate patents — a tedious and expensive process. █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Novell, OpenSUSE, SCO at 9:46 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A look at what Attachmate does with Novell’s side affairs having passed software patents to Microsoft (via CPTN)
ONE THING we keep reminding readers is that Attachmate, a proponent of proprietary software and prominent Microsoft partner, neglects Novell after it gave Microsoft the patents and did almost nothing to utilise Novell’s assets. As an aside, the OpenSUSE project is still very quiet for known reasons, with the exception of cyclical posts like People of OpenSUSE, milestone announcements (very low-profile these days), Weekly News (latest), and flash-player alerts (because Adobe’s software is shoddy). The Mono trap which is banshee (patent-encumbered) is still spreading through OpenSUSE (one of the first distributions to adopt it, if not the first) and we cannot help wondering what the future has in store. Novell is no longer around and Attachmate distanced itself from this project, on which it still has trademarks. Attachmate in general is a very mysterious entity with mysterious funding sources [1, 2, 3].
Groklaw‘s PJ (Pamela Jones) is still around; she is watching Novell’s case against SCO — a case which Attachmate has not halted based on this assessment. It is interesting that, as far as we know, no interviewer has yet asked Attachmate about the court cases against Microsoft and SCO. Attachmate has made no statement about it either, just as it hardly names OpenSUSE or makes a plan for another SLE* release (maybe 12 would be expected, as SLE* 11 contains old packages).
Novell managers are continuing to flee while Attachmate puts its own people in charge. Latest example:
Enterprise software supplier Attachmate has announced the appointment of Norman Rohde as Vice President of Sales for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Attachmate specializes in software solutions for terminal emulation, legacy modernization, managed file transfer, and enterprise fraud management.
Considering news like this, what are the chances that Attachmate will stick to Novell’s strategy with court cases and OpenSUSE? We will definitely keep an eye open. █
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Posted in Hardware, Microsoft at 9:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Red flags in Microsoft’s DRM-encumbered hardware, this time with prospects of (mis)using DMCA laws
There is not so much to say about the Xbox family of products anymore. The founders have all left Microsoft (last one to leave did so recently) and the rivals are doing a lot better, even in the United States.
Last year Microsoft started attacking companies that essentially complemented Xbox360 [1, 2, 3]. It is always a bad sign when a company sues in an attempt to salvage some profit, not at all minding the impact on public opinion.
Ars Technica now asks,”[c]an Microsoft use the DMCA to kill competing Xbox 360 accessories?”
Can Microsoft remotely disable third-party accessories from working with the Xbox 360 and get away with it?
The Redmond, Washington software- and console-maker did just that, and claims copyright law gave it the right. At issue is Microsoft’s 2009 remote disabling of Datel memory cards, which prompted an antitrust lawsuit that lives on today—litigation that has morphed into the latest test of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
The 1998 DMCA makes it a crime or civil violation to offer a product or service that circumvents a technological measure designed to protect copyrighted material.
Consoles are essentially a single-purpose computer whose sole purpose is to run games (and there is DRM to enforce this restriction). Kill switches on such consoles is a subject we explored here before. This whole trend helps rationalise the need for software freedom. █
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Posted in Site News at 8:53 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“According to some views, certain rights derive from God or Nature” –Wikipedia
Summary: Whether secular of religious, political or apolitical, people are assumed to have rights, however nowadays the term “rights” is ascribed to corporations, which are not humans
The word “right” was in some way hijacked by the “bad guys” — those who see themselves as being “right” by merit of being more powerful than everyone else. Originally, but to an extent to this date, the word right was mostly associated with laws that protect the public from those with too much power. Phrases like “rights holder” probably diluted the word “right” in the same way that the word “open” got misused in many ways (we covered this a lot in the past). One might argue that the word “free” came to mean inexpensive and “freedom” now means deregulation (i.e. more power to those already in power), so when Dr. Richard Stallman told me that the name “Techrights” would not be clever — arguing that “rights” is a loaded term — I went with that name anyway. That name was actually proposed by our Web host, Tracy. By the way, Stallman will be on a future episode of TechBytes, as soon as we get everything sorted out. The subject of consultation regarding name can be brought up there.
“Companies do not have rights, people do.”Patents are sometimes said to fall under “intellectual property rights” (IPR), which is funny because a site with “rights”in its name actually goes against many of those so-called ‘rights’, alleging instead that it is the right of inventors to do their work without reading patent applications and the right of citizens everywhere not to pay tax to companies in other countries that had nothing to actually offer other than pieces of paper. What we find in some of those sound bytes that contain “rights” in them is that just as “freedom” came to mean deregulation (e.g. “free market”), rights came to mean something that actually harms real rights of citizens. It’s all PR-speak and we need to take back our vocabulary, even if the path there is a tad abrasive. Companies do not have rights, people do. █
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Posted in Asia, Europe, Free/Libre Software, GNU/Linux, Patents at 8:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: GNU/Linux-friendly policies from the Indian government and some encouraging news from Kerala, as well as the Indian education sector which increasingly adopts Free software
T
ECHRIGHTS is proud to have friends in India*, who continue to teach the West all about the importance of freedom which India not always had. On a separate note, my colleagues from India sure show the way forward in technology, by increasingly adopting knowledge from other countries, refining it, and putting it out there for others to build upon. The country recognises the fact that for excellence in the sciences, knowledge must be shared, not monopolised, and as pointed out by Mark (in IRC) last week, the West’s attempts to put lot of patents inside India — as we covered repeatedly some years ago — is a miserable last effort to keep a foothold despite all the debt (historically, the West used debt to enslave other countries, only to more recently become a principal borrower from countries like China).
“When it comes to Free software adoption, India is doing pretty well.”A long time ago we leaked a document that showed how Europe wanted to harm India, using a treaty involving intellectual monopolies. It is clearly in the interests of large European businesses (not the same as European people). This is not acceptable from the point of view of Indians, who are merely pawns in this battle. If their politicians abandon their voters and choose the path of greed instead, then atrocious treaties like this one too can be signed, acting as a waiver against Indian leadership.
When it comes to Free software adoption, India is doing pretty well. Quite often we include links in this site about GNU/Linux preinstalls in India, even the increased usage there (a new low-cost tablet is coming from India fairly soon, and it only runs Linux). Despite the fact that Microsoft turns a blind eye to counterfeiting in place like India (Microsoft prefers counterfeiting to GNU/Linux), at the government level we have been seeing a lot of support (at least on paper) for Free software, open standards like ODF, and occasionally hostility towards RAND (uniform fee on vital ideas/access) and software patents. On a relative scale, India may not have so much influence on world powers, but it sure nudges other countries in the right direction. Maybe more leaders will become humble through realisation of the impact on their neighbours in the East (there is already a moral awakening to the mistreatment of labour force in China, for example).
To illustrate just how much ahead India has come policy-wise, consider this reference.document available at eGov Standards (a government site) [PDF]. It s a “FOSS friendly one,” argued the person who sent the pointer and indeed, based on a cursory look, this draft is full of references to GNU/Linux and Open Source.
According to this article which we found this morning (“Free or open source for students?”), Kerala has completed a moved to GNU/Linux in education, The wording seems to suggest a complete abandonment of Microsoft Windows. Surely it may take another generation or two for this fundamental change to have a major effect, but it’s a big step in the right direction.
Recent discussions on which software package to be incorporated in the free laptops to be distributed to students this year in Tamil Nadu have highlighted the attempts across the country to promote the use of Free and Open Source Software in education and other fields.
That’s the opening of the article. Kerala is somewhat of a leader in this regard, but it is not alone really. In fact, the hope is that the policy set in Kerala will spread to more regions, even outside of India. Many eyes will be put on Kerala which serves as a bit of a case study when it comes to going into Free software at schools. Microsoft did try to intervene against this [1, 2, 3], but evidently Microsoft failed.
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* In 2008, for instance, our Indian followers organised a Boycott Novell protest, amongst others.
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:06 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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So in my personal opinion, it is pointless comparing a Mac experience to a Linux Desktop one.
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I’m extremely excited to announce that exactly 11 years ago today I made my very first post at LQ, which served to introduce it to the web. As I’ve stated numerous times, since then LQ has exceeded my expectation in every way. 4,382,316 posts and 457,176 registered members does not even begin to tell the story. The community and mod team that has grown here at LQ is truly amazing and something that I’m very proud to be a part of. I’d like to once again thank each and every LQ member for their participation, dedication and feedback. Without you guys, LQ quite simply wouldn’t exist.
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In the latest (and seemingly final) batch of documents dumped on The Pirate Bay by computer hacker outfit ‘LulzSec’, a familiar looking operating system can be seen in use.
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Rebooting machines is a interesting study in the varied opinions of the Linux community. On one end, there are folks who will use ksplice or simply avoid rebooting for any reason short of a hardware failure. On the other you have desktop users who reboot their machines daily. I’m somewhere in the middle: For servers if there is a security update to the kernel or glibc that applies, the server should be rebooted. For my laptop, I usually reboot when there’s a reason (I want to test something related to the boot process, there’s a security update, etc).
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Yesterday I mentioned what Anton Altaparmakov of Tuxera had recently said about their NTFS kernel driver being the fastest Linux file-system, which erupted into a large debate in our forums. Within that mailing list thread was also another interesting comment by Linus Torvalds. “Userspace filesystem? The problem is right there. Always has been. People who think that userspace filesystems are realistic for anything but toys are just misguided.”
Torvalds additionally added, “fuse works fine if the thing being exported is some random low-use interface to a fundamentally slow device. But for something like your root filesystem? Nope. Not going to happen. So Andrew, I think that arguing that something _can_ be done with fuse, and thus _should_ be done with fuse is just ridiculous. That’s like saying you should do a microkernel – it may sound nice on paper, but it’s a damn stupid idea for people who care more about some idea than they care about reality.”
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For the multiple Linux kernel power regressions that I’ve talked about on Phoronix now for a number of weeks and have been affecting mobile Linux users en mass, I said I was looking for a better power measuring approach by using an AC power meter / UPS rather than a notebook battery to use in nailing these regressions. Using such a power meter would lead to a fully-automated process by the Phoronix Test Suite as no longer would I need to keep pulling the power plug from a laptop, could use much faster hardware, and allow for some other interesting possibilities. Well, last week I bought a power meter that plays with Linux. So now there’s some news to share.
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Applications
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There was a time when I was obsessed with finding good, free, stable, Adobe Flash animation software, because at the time I was also obsessed with Homestar Runner and other online cartoons and I wanted to make my own. This was before I knew about how much hassle Flash actually is across multiple platforms and long before I knew of the disadvantages of making online animations in proprietary formats.
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Sometime it’s useful to do an assessment of what’s online on your network, probably you think to know every server and service running, but I had more than one surprise in the past, with “test server just plugged in for a short time”, “New test service” or worst, hacked machine that exposed “new service”.
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As you might know thumbnails in Thunar are generated with tumbler. For obvious reasons the tumbler package in Fedora cannot include the tumbler-ffmpeg plugin. By popular demand I now rolled an add-on package called tumbler-freeworld. When installed, this is what it looks like:
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Almost a year ago, I invested in a central London based post-production company. At the time, I had dreams of pushing open source software solutions into the professional post-production arena. Things haven’t quite worked out as planned, and I’ve made very limited headway on this project. Business imperatives took over and changing a whole ecosystem is a big job. I’ve continued to use Linux on my laptop and happily connect to printers and network drives, but that’s about all.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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The Wine development release 1.3.23 is now available.
What’s new in this release:
* Support for stubless COM proxies on x86-64.
* Builtin dxdiag now outputs real information.
* Monochrome bitmap format in the DIB engine.
* Beginnings of a true shell Explorer builtin.
* A number of new D3DX9 functions.
* More support for Indic text shaping.
* Various bug fixes.
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Games
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Beacon is a sweet platformer created in just 48 hours by indie developer randomine that takes us on a memorable 15 minute journey. With fantastic retro music score and 8-bit pixel graphics, the game creates a wonderful atmosphere where an stranded astronaut tries to solve the mystery of a distant planet and how he landed there.
The gameplay is very much like retro platform games that involves lots of jumping. Your character have a jetpack that you can use to reach greater heights. But the core gameplay involves scripted events, hints and clues you uncover while exploring which makes you think for few seconds from time to time. There is no killing, shooting enemies but you just avoid projectiles shot by jumping and moving around.
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Indie Game Studio Oxeye Games is working on a new 2D multiplayer action game – Cobalt. The game was originally being developed as a story driven single player game but now all the focus has shifted on development of multipayer and co-op mode.
The game is currently in early stages of development and an alpha build will be released this year for Windows, Mac and Linux platforms. The game will feature cooperative challenges, duel maps as well as team-play game modes.
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Fantasy baseball and baseball stat fans can enjoy a new updated version of the leading cross-platform game for baseball statistics, historical recreation and simulated management game, Out of the Park Baseball v12, now available for all three major platforms. The new version sports more immersive features, a revamped financial system and online leagues.
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The official release date for Unigine’s OilRush real-time strategy game has been June or July of this year in the midst of summer. Recently though we’ve been reporting that it’s looking like the release date may slip for this visually-intense game with a native Linux client. After talking with Unigine Corp, it looks like a delay will be inevitable.
When chatting with Denis Shergin, Unigine Corp’s CEO, on Friday, it appears there will be a minor delay in their planned summer release. “It seems that in order to deliver a good game we need more time.” Additionally, Unigine Corp is still held up by Valve (for Steam) and other publishers.
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This project aims to reimplement the game engine of Theme Hospital, and be able to load the original game data files. This means that you will need a purchased copy of Theme Hospital, or a copy of the demo, in order to use CorsixTH. After most of the original engine has been reimplemented in open source code, the project will serve as a base from which extensions and improvements to the original game can be made.
Changelog:
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Desktop Environments
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But the miracle didn’t sustain. Today, the same techniques that made yields multiply have now rendered many fields unusable due to the upward leaching of subsurface salt deposits, a process that has left their recently enriched owners both destitute and desperate. So also with nuclear energy, which at one time seemed to promise limitless clean energy, but today seems fraught with threats both immediate, with the risk of accidents, and long term, through our failure to come up with adequate storage solutions for radioactive generator waste. And while new technological advances have opened up previously inaccessible sources of fossil fuels, the recent deep drilling disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, as well as unresolved concerns over deep water pollution arising from oil shale “fracting,” remind us in this domain as well that accidents happen, and that unanticipated consequences, by definition, cannot be anticipated.
Meanwhile, the process of globalization continues apace, in all of its positive and negative aspects. The latter include increasing competition for finite resources conjoined with the inevitability that greenhouse gases and nuclear fallout do not respect national boundaries. Indeed, it seems only a matter of time — and not much of that — before hostile alliances and the threat of war rise again. This time it will not be ideologies that define power blocs, but resource dependencies and trading relationships.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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KDE has released a first release candidate of the upcoming 4.7 release of the Plasma Desktop and Netbook workspaces, the KDE Applications and the KDE Frameworks, which is planned for July 27, 2011. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team’s focus is now on fixing last-minute bugs and completing translations and documentation.
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GNOME Desktop
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In the past users could just select the their favorite terminal in gnome-default-applications-properties. Some things required additional configuration: For a mail client the system needs to know the command to compose a new mail or to add attachments and for a terminal emulator an option to run something in a terminal is required. Developers could pre-configure these values with an xml file in $(prefix)/gnome-control-center/default-apps.
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Dhananjay Sathe sent in news of an application he’s been working on that will be of use to GNOME 3 users.
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It’s not a race but people do keep track of the relative popularity of various distros of GNU/Linux. After years of being at the top of the heap on Distrowatch, Ubuntu has been passed by Mint and Fedora. At the same time openSUSE passed Debian GNU/Linux.
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Slitaz is yet another Linux distro! (oh no…) It’s a very small and efficient one, ranking in the same category as Damn Small Linux and Puppy. I am probably not the most qualified person to talk about linux distros as i am not the bigest fanboy of them (i’m more of a windows/mac user – but let’s remember mac os came from the same place as linux UPDATE BELOW), but if you want to hear a somewhat more impartial view on the matter keep on reading.
[...]
So definitely go and give it a try, it’s worth at least that!
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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The Mageia project has announced the arrival of a first preview of a Mageia port for ARM processors. According to the developers, the Mageia ARM port, code-named “arm eabi”, will use the hard float feature of Cortex family processors. It currently includes several development tools, basic network services, Firefox and LibreOffice and a full GNOME desktop environment – a minimal version of KDE is also included.
Mageia ARM
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Gentoo Family
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The first system I worked with to begin the weekend was Sabayon 6.0. I had Sabayon 5.5 previously installed, liked it a lot, had added quite a bit of software to it, and during a recent upgrade it ran out of space. I unsuccessfully tried to clear the cache of enough space to make it worthwhile to keep, but the disk stayed 100% full, so it was an excellent candidate for a replacement. Too bad: it had worked well, and it also only recently started offering rolling release upgrades as an alternative to fresh installations. But I needed a fresh installation, plus installing a new system always shows off the new features – and sometimes the limitations as well. That, at least initially, proved to be the case here. Sabayon is in the middle of making some infrastructure and packaging improvements. Chances are that in the long run these will work very well. In the meantime, though, I ran into problems. When I went to update the system, it told me that there were eight new packages available, but none of them would install for me, and I started getting error messages about something wrong with the package management system. I sent one of them along to Sabayon; hopefully it reaches them, they are aware of whatever issue it was that cropped up, get it fixed soon, and maybe even drop me a note to let me kno
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Sabayon 6 KDE seemed faster and more stable than Sabayon 5.5 KDE, and the replacement of Mozilla Firefox with Chromium was a pleasant change, I suppose.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat declared war on VMware’s Cloud Foundry today, announcing that 65 new companies have joined the Open Virtualization Alliance backing KVM in a month’s time.
In May, Red Hat, SUSE, BMC Software, Eucalyptus Systems, HP, IBM and Intel, announced the formation of the Open Virtualization Alliance.
As of today, 65 new members have joined, including Dell. Scott Crenshaw, who leads Red Hat’s cloud effort, denounced what he called VMware’s proprietary cloud platform.
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The US stock indexes closed the week on a negative note amidst rising concerns for the Italian banking sector, Greece’s austerity plans.
The Dow Jones industrial average lost 0.96 percent or 115.42 points to close at 11,934.58. The Nasdaq Stock Market Inc. composite index was down 1.26 percent or 33.86 points to finish at 2,652.89. The Standard & Poor’s 500 fell 1.17 percent or 15.05 points to end at 1,268.45. Among other major indices, the New York Stock Exchange composite index slipped 0.99 percent or 79.36 points to close at 7,974.72. The American Stock Exchange composite index shed 0.84 percent or 19.04 points to settle at 2,260.78.
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Fedora
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Final Thoughts: I think Fedora 15 is a decent distribution. Because of the projects philosophical stance on Free Software, there are certain features that are not expected to work out of the box. However, there are other features that have nothing to do with that philosophical stance that did not work as expected. I am referring, of course, to the state of Amarok, the default music player, but also to printer configuration. On many of the top distributions, a connected printer is automatically configured, but not so on Fedora 15 KDE and the other Fedora 15 Spins that I have reviewed. I am yet to review Fedora 15, the main Fedora 15 version, but judging from how a connected printer is configured on Fedora 14, I do not think it will be anything like the situation on these Spins.
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If you fancy a distro that strives for stability and giving you the best cutting-edge software and tools Linux has to offer, Fedora is well worth a test.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical beat the odds with Ubuntu. The fan-base became so large, so fast that Universal Awareness of Ubuntu can be credited to a simple grass-roots effort that expanded across the globe.
It wasn’t television or radio advertising.
It wasn’t billboards.
It was good old fashioned proselytizing.
Gimmee that old-time religion any day.
And if you take some time to really look back at the process, many of us would admit it was a thing of beauty…almost a force of nature.
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Certification is a generic level of functionality to be expected for hardware running on an Ubuntu Release. Part of the challenge is to identify what hardware components should be included in the test.
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This month:
* Command and Conquer.
* How-To : Program in Python – Part 24, LibreOffice – Part 5, Ubuntu Development – Part 2, and Use KDE (4.6).
* Linux Lab – Gnome Shell -vs- Unity.
* Review – PAM Facial Recognition.
* Top 5 – USB Installers.
* I Think – Should Ubuntu keep it’s current schedule, or switch to a rolling release?
plus: Ubuntu Games, My Story, and much much more!
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The following article will list some of the most important panel applets, also called indicators, for Ubuntu 11.04′s Unity interface.
The Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) operating system introduced a different user interface, designed by Canonical, called Unity. The default indicators are nice, but many people complained that they miss their usual applets on the panel.
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It’s been a very long time since I did an in-depth distro review here, but today I’m going to write about my experiences of Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal. I’ve been running it as my main desktop for about a month. The last version I properly reviewed was Ubuntu 9.10 and though I’ve used the other releases in the meantime, there’s still a lot of changes to talk about with Natty. Most notably the complete shift to the new Unity interface which feels very different to Gnome. I’d heard a lot about it but how would I fare? Let’s find out…
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I know this reads a lot like a review of just Unity and not Ubuntu, but in this release Unity really is the story.
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With two recent releases of Linux operating systems, Ubuntu and Fedora, new age of desktop environments began.
These two operating systems bring you new user interfaces: Unity in Ubuntu 11.04 and GNOME 3 in Fedora.
Are these new interfaces good or evil for Linux community? Let’s try to analyse.
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We have featured a number of really good Ubuntu Unity concepts before, here is another one which supposedly deals with the trash button in Unity more efficiently.
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Flavours and Variants
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nD is a new indie handheld gaming device currently in prototyping phase. nD is a brainchild of Robert Pelloni, creator of Bob’s Game. Many of you who follow Nintendo DS news will be familiar with Bob’s game and Robert as there has been quite a bit of history between him and Nintendo. I won’t get into details about this but you can just search for Bob’s Game on the web or hit Wikipedia for more info.
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Phones
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Nokia has finally announced the long-anticipated N9 handset, the culmination of Nokia’s five-step plan to deliver a mainstream Linux-based smartphone. The N9 is an impressively engineered device that is matched with a sophisticated touch-oriented interface and a powerful software stack with open source underpinnings. It’s a worthy successor of the developer-centric N900, but it provides a user experience that is tailored for a mainstream audience.
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Huzzah! The Nokia N9 has finally arrived in a genuinely consumer-oriented package. Granted, it is not step-five-of-five given the February 11th announcement to abandon Meego as Nokia’s smartphone future, but it is getting rave reviews even from the likes of engadget – usually the first to take a pop at Nokia’s hubris in pursuing alternatives to Android/Apple.
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Android
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In fact, sales of Android tablets have been quite good and share of page views from Android tablets are nearly on par with iPads. iPad + iPhone gets 3.93% of page views on Wikipedia compared to 1.19% for Android. Surely Lawrence Latif and others should know that iTunes soaks up lots of megabytes and megabytes do not trounce page-views as usage. In fact, Gartner shows Android is expected to have a 20% share of tablets shipped in 2011, up from 14% in 2010. They project Android will catch iOS after 2015. I think Gartner is way off on that. The Android tablets released lately are spectacular compared to iPad 1 or 2 and the Android tablets produced in 2010. The Android tablets are being widely promoted by heavy hitters and many smaller operations. The exposure of Android tablets to the market is huge. Android tablets are not being “trounced”.
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The Barnes & Noble Nook Simple Touch Reader is more than merely a worthy competitor to the Kindle, as I wrote when I saw the e-book reader demonstrated late last month. Now that we’ve tested the device in our labs, it actually scores a few points above the Kindle in our tests. [To clarify: The Nook scores 1 point above the Kindle below it in the 6-to-7-inch category. But it ranges from 4 to 5 points higher than other Kindles.]
That marks the first time since the Kindle launched that Amazon’s e-book reader hasn’t been the top-scoring model in our Ratings (available to subscribers). It also continues the steady improvement in Barnes & Noble’s e-book devices since the company rushed out a glitchy first version of the Nook during the holiday season of 2009.
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OpenShot is a free, simple-to-use, feature-rich video editor for Linux. The brainchild of programmer Jonathan Thomas, OpenShot has garnered a large and enthusiastic following for many reasons, one being Thomas’s responsiveness to user feedback. To quickly see the best uses of OpenShot, check out the beautifully created music videos of Verity and Gersom de Koning-Tan, from the Netherlands. Several of their videos have had more than one thousand video views. These videos have much going for them, not least their musicality and playfulness.
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Thecus is opening the floodgates for new open source modules. With the release of the Thecus software development kit (SDK), third-party developers and adventurous users can get involved in writing their own modules to fit even the most specific needs. This competition is the beginning of building a vibrant Thecus developer community with open dialogue, improved support, and an unlimited range of features that can only be supported by a grassroots society. Everyone will be able to get involved: commercial developers, computer savvy techies, and even basic home users.
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A digital company called The Echo Nest has launched a Shazam-style technology that is open source, and can therefore be used by any developers wanting to incorporate audio-based music identification into their product. There’s a tie up with 7Digital, which means the Echoprint system can identify the millions of tracks in their digital catalogue. As an open source technology it’s hoped that catalogue of identifiable tracks will grow as other developers use it.
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Web Browsers
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Tweet 2
The all-out web browser brawl has competitors throwing dirty punches in a below-the-belt free-for-all fight for market share.
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Chrome
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Google has begun work on the first step of rebuilding Chrome from the inside out on a more secure foundation called Native Client, CNET has learned.
That first step is the built-in Chrome module used to let Google’s browser read PDF (Portable Document Format) files. Linus Upson, vice president of engineering for the Chrome team, revealed the plan in May at the Google I/O conference, and now evidence is emerging that the first step is under way.
References to the Native Client version of the PDF extension have begun cropping up on the Native Client’s bug-tracking database. Programmers are encountering problems with scrollbar rendering, Gmail integration, loading PDF files, and displaying URLs when the mouse pointer hovers over a link
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Mozilla
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I have been using Mozilla Firefox 5 since Mozilla developer announced it, firstly when I decide to add this post I was not going to compare between Mozilla Firefox 5 and Google Chrome 12, just to check Firefox 5 enhancements. But when I used couple benchmarks for checking HTML 5, JavaScript, and CSS 3, didn’t expect this result.
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Mozilla has successfully released its first rapid release cycle version of Firefox. While Mozilla is proud, there has been criticism that the new version number cannot be justified given the new features in Firefox 5. The transition also screwed corporate users and there is mounting disapproval close to Mozilla that the current product plan is beneficial to Firefox. Should Mozilla roll back its release strategy?
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Business
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Openness/Sharing
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People sometimes ask me why I’m so adamant that Wikipedia must always use free software, even when in some cases it might be the case that proprietary software might be more convenient or better suited for some particular need that we have.
After all, the argument goes, our primary mission is to produce free knowledge, not to promote free software, and whlie we might prefer free software on practical grounds (since it is generally best of breed for webserving applications), we should not be sticklers about it.
I believe this argument is seriously mistaken, and not on merely practical grounds, but on grounds of principle. Free knowledge requires free software. It is a conceptual error to think about our mission as being somehow separate from that.
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Open Data
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The world is experiencing an unprecedented data deluge, a reality that my colleague Edd Dumbill described as another “industrial revolution” at February’s Strata Conference. Many sectors of the global economy are waking up to the need to use data as a strategic resource, whether in media, medicine, or moving trucks. Open data has been a major focus of Gov 2.0, as federal and state governments move forward with creating new online platforms for open government data.
The explosion of data requires new tools and management strategies. These new approaches include more than technical evolution, as a recent conversation with Charlie Quinn, director of data integration technologies at the Benaroya Research Institute, revealed: they involve cultural changes that create greater value by sharing data between institutions. In Quinn’s field, genomics, big data is far from a buzzword, with scanned sequences now rating on the terabyte scale.
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Programming
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The benefit to Perl 6 is obvious, in the same way that applying liberal amounts of lubricant to a mechanical joint producing an extended and incessant whining sound is an obvious solution.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Following the demonstration, we went to lunch up the street, and over drinks B. and I talked about the police fear-mongering that had gone on in the past few months. We wondered whether that would dramatically reduce the number of people on the streets in the week to come. I recall B. saying that despite the police media spin (remember the talk about the sound cannons, the special laws, the constant talk about the violence to come), people knew that the decisions made at these meetings would impact their lives and they would resist it.
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Finance
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he increased cost of oil and gasoline is damaging the American economy and is causing severe economic pain to millions of people, especially in rural America, who often have to drive long distances to work. Many workers are already seeing stagnant or declining wages and high gas prices are just taking another bite out of their paychecks.
People in Vermont and across the country are also worried about the high price of heating oil for the coming winter.
The price of oil today, while declining somewhat in recent weeks, was still over $95 a barrel today. That’s about $30 higher than it was two years ago.
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JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s deal to settle a U.S. regulator’s claims that the bank misled buyers of mortgage-linked securities before the housing market collapsed echoed a case brought last year against Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
JPMorgan agreed to pay $153.6 million to end a Securities and Exchange Commission suit. The SEC alleged that the New York- based bank failed to tell investors in 2007 that a hedge fund helped pick, and bet against, underlying securities in the collateralized debt obligation they purchased. In July, Goldman Sachs paid a record $550 million for failing to inform clients in 2007 that it allowed a hedge fund that also bet against housing to help formulate the CDOs.
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Gary Gensler, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, took his seat before a Senate appropriations subcommittee on May 4 to make his case for a $106 million budget increase.
Without the money, Gensler said, his agency wouldn’t be able to perform its new job of policing roughly $300 trillion in U.S. over-the-counter derivatives, a market that includes the credit-default swaps that helped push the U.S. economy into the worst recession in 70 years, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its August issue.
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DRM
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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A federal judge ruled Monday that publishing an entire article without the rights holder’s authorization was a fair use of the work, in yet another blow to newspaper copyright troll Righthaven.
It’s not often that republishing an entire work without permission is deemed fair use. Fair use is an infringement defense when the defendant reproduced a copyrighted work for purposes such as criticism, commentary, teaching and research. The defense is analyzed on a case-by-case basis.
Fedora 14 vs Ubuntu 10.10: Death Match
Credit: TinyOgg
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