Summary: Rusty, Tim, and Roy get together for a discussion about the latest news, in particular about GNU/Linux
THE LATEST show spoke about a range of subjects, mostly distributions, desktop environments, and the situation Ubuntu is in. Update: the show notes are up.
The show’s tracks are “Rise Up”, “Free Software Song” by Jono Bacon, and “Solo Un Poco Mas” by Debayres. We hope you will join us for future shows and consider subscribing to the show via the RSS feed. You can also visit our archives for past shows. If you have an Identi.ca account, consider subscribing to TechBytes in order to keep up to date. █
For those of you who’ve followed along on my virtualization posts, you’ve noticed that I’m a fan of certain types of virtual desktop infrastructure implementations. This was not always the case. In fact, if you Google my name and VDI, you’ll find that for most of the past three years, I’ve come out strongly against it. So, you’re probably asking, “Why the change of heart?” The answer is simple, it’s a matter of timing and technology. VDI really was not an option before but it is now.
A weird little meme is squiggling through the Internet this week, one which I feel obligated to squash because it’s just plain wrong.
It’s this notion that somehow Ubuntu is losing its popularity because it’s slipped in the rankings on DistroWatch. That seems just about the silliest thing I have read in a while.
First, there’s the whole notion of how the rankings on DistroWatch work. They don’t count downloads or boxes: they count page hits for each distro’s page on the DistroWatch site. “Only one hit per IP address per day is counted,” the site explains.
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This is where Linux is: thousands of developers and contributors have poured their skills and hearts into creating this operating system, and sometimes it’s hard not to fall into the old habits from the days Linux is young. But to help Linux, we have to look towards a new future, one where the desktop may not be the primary platform, but one where Linux may yet be the most important operating system the world will ever use.
Twice a year, the Top500 Project publishes its list of the fastest supercomputers in the world. In the last announcement, we continue to see Linux dominating the list. This is nothing new since Linux has been dominating since the mid-2000s. In fact, Linux share in supercomputing looks a lot like Microsoft’s historical share of the desktop market. I thought it would be interesting to take a step back and look at the performance capability of these computers as a whole and also how the rise of Linux is mirroring the geographical expansion of supercomputers.
Everybody tends to watch the number of Linux systems on the top500, but there’s a fascinating story being told by the Rmax performance numbers (Rmax is the maximum performance of a computer (measured in Gflop/s) achieved in the HPL benchmark. In many ways, this is a much more enlightening statistic, because it shows us the overall nature of performance on this list, instead of just focusing on individual computers. (This time around, five Linux systems were actually bumped off the bottom of the list, even though Linux’s *total* computing power grew by 38%.)
After supporting online meeting on Windows and MAC, Banckle Online Meeting now allows you to participate and collaborate in web conferencing, eLearning and webinar activities on Linux as well. It can work on both 32-bit and 64-bit machines.
Alexander Zubov from Kot-In-Action the developers of the Steel-Storm games loves the GNU/Linux users and want as many of them (us) to buy his game.
But he is very disappointed from the sales, only 3% of the consumers are GNU/Linux users.
Both GNOME and KDE recently underwent massive redesigns. GNOME 2 morphed into version 3.0 with a radically different look and feel. KDE 4 is also graphically much different from the KDE 3 lineage. Meanwhile, Ubuntu has added Unity to the mix. The future of all will depend on ease-of-use perceptions and end-user hardware.
Linux world is huge. Seems like there are more different distributions then stars in Debian galaxy. Some of them are generic, some of them are not. I have already made couple of reviews of Linux-based Operating System specifically created for creative people. They are brothers in blood: Dynebolic and Puredyne. It would be incomplete set if I just stopped at number 2. Number 3 is much more appalling. That’s why today’s review will be also dedicated to creative Linux.
This Tux was born far-far away from many of you: in country of football, beef and tango. Do you know which country I mean? Yes, that is Argentina.
Considering that I reviewed Zenwalk 7.0 not too long ago, I must be going on a Slackware-derived binge or something. Yes, both Zenwalk and Porteus are based on Slackware. Maybe my subconscious is trying to make up for the terrible review (not my assessment of Slackware, but my skill level and writing in that post) of Slackware 13.1. Maybe. I don’t know. Anyway, Porteus 1.0 came out yesterday, so I decided to review it.
When I first heard about Mageia I was not too bothered, if anything it was just going to be another Mandriva. Buggy, random crashes, poor 64-bit support and useless.
Today, it’s not difficult to find a ‘great’ distro, one that makes it easy to get up and running with a fully functional and robust desktop, fast. Even just five years ago, though, finding a ‘do it all’ distro was a little more difficult, and it was for that reason that I found myself loving Sabayon Linux (pronounced Sah-by-yon (silent ‘n’)). Despite being built on an intermediate distro, Gentoo, it made things easy on the layman user – and I know this to be true as I’ve had many Linux novice friends use it and enjoy it.
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Sabayon 6 was my first foray into testing out the Entropy package manager though, and I do have to say that its command-line component, equo, is quite nice.
Whitehurst’s comments about cloud deployments generally using open source have been echoed by Canonical, which claims that Ubuntu is the most popular operating system installed on Amazon’s EC2 cloud service.
Fresh off the glow of its first quarter earnings showing double-digit growth, Red HatbizWatch Red Hat Latest from The Business Journals Atlanta in running for 1,000 Time Warner jobsRed Hat CEO: Sales to triple to BRed Hat beats earnings estimates to start off the year Follow this company Inc. announced on Thursday that 65 new companies, including Dell Inc.bizWatch Dell Inc. Latest from The Business Journals DBJ Tech Watch for Friday 6/24: News of Apple, Yahoo, Facebook, Google and moreDell joins alliance to compete with VMwarebizWatch VMware Latest from The Business Journals DBJ Tech Watch for Friday 6/24: News of Apple, Yahoo, Facebook, Google and moreDell joins alliance to compete with VMwareTerremark, Verizon to integrate services Follow this company Michael Dell to bid .45M for Seattle TV station Follow this company (NasdaqGS: DELL), have joined the Open Virtualization Alliance.
The alliance, established a month ago, is a consortium of tech companies in favor of an open virtualization technology — which is used to move systems to cloud computing. Red Hat, the Raleigh-based open source company, is a co-founder of the alliance along with IBMbizWatch IBM Latest from The Business Journals Federal Contracts: Big Wins for June 23, 2011Meet the Young and the BoldSAS links with Japan’s Fujitsu to open up revenue stream Follow this company (NYSE: IBM), Intel Corp.bizWatch Intel Corp. Latest from The Business Journals Intel plays role in Obama manufacturing initiativeTop 7 Bay Area Patent Recipients – No. 1Feds OK Intel, Rockstar bids on Nortel patents Follow this company (Nasdaq: INTC) and Hewlett-Packard CobizWatch Hewlett-Packard Co Latest from The Business Journals Toolbox: Week of June 24, 2011Oracle’s Safra Catz: Growth ‘with almost no help from acquisitions’Terremark, Verizon to integrate services Follow this company . (NYSE: HPQ).
As part of Red Hat’s wide ranging cloud briefing today, its middleware division announced that JBoss Application Server 7 will be delivered in July.
Execs provided a brief preview of the forthcoming application server, which will incorporate a full implementation of EE 6, including support for web profiles, a tenfold improvement in startup time, enhancements in operational management and ease-of-use in management, monitoring and configuration.
Sam Hartman is a Debian developer since 2000. He has never taken any sort of official role within Debian (that is besides package maintainer), yet I know him for his very thoughtful contributions to discussions both on mailing lists and IRL during Debconf.
Until I met him at Debconf, I didn’t know that he was blind, and the first reaction was to be impressed because it must be some tremendous effort to read the volume of information that Debian generates on mailing lists. In truth he’s at ease with his computer much like I am although he uses it in a completely different way. Read on to learn more, my questions are in bold, the rest is by Sam.
This was an expected move but it’s still a bit weird because there are quite a few features available in Synaptic which are still missing in Ubuntu Software Center, like upgrade/downgrade functionality, lock packages to the current version and so on. But of course, there are 4 months till Ubuntu 11.10 is released so Ubuntu Software Center might get some (or all) of these missing features.
Ubuntu 11.04 – codenamed Natty Narwhal – sports a new graphical user interface. This popular Linux distribution’s interface is now an opinion divider but worth investigating to see how the free OS compares to Windows and Mac operating systems.
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the classic Ubuntu is readily accessible and more polished than ever.
The default file manager for Xubuntu is Thunar 1.2 which has seen many great improvements recently. The default Thunar interface is quite typical for standard file managers. The left side of the main Thunar window is the shortcuts panel. New items can be dragged into the shortcut panel at any time. The right side of the mian window is where files and folders will be displayed. Above that is a path bar and a menu bar where you can find other ways of interacting with Thunar. Thunar now has improved support for connecting to external devices or networks. Thunar is also lightweight and very fast.
Is it even fair to pit MeeGo against the market that iOS and Android rule at the moment, some may ask. But, since it is here now, the new kid in town will have to face the music from its other big brothers who rule the locality at the moment.
Soon the premium class passengers of the American Airlines will experience the magic of Android powered tablets on their journey. Samsung and American Airlines announced they will provide Samsung’s new Galaxy Tab 10.1 to travellers in seated in premium cabins for a select number of transcontinental and international flights.
American Airlines, a founding member of the oneworld Alliance, plans to deploy 6,000 of the new Galaxy Tab 10.1 devices onboard select flights beginning later this year.
This was always Microsoft’s plan since they first were cold-cocked by the sudden explosion of customer interest in netbooks. When netbooks first came along, they almost all ran Linux. Microsoft, which was then stuck with the resource pig known as Windows Vista, simply couldn’t compete. So, reluctantly, Microsoft gave Windows XP Home a new lease on life and sold it below cost to OEMs to kill the Linux desktop on netbooks.
They were successful. Mind you, the last thing Microsoft wanted was for people to keep using XP. They wanted, oh how they wanted, users to turn to Vista. But, they also didn’t want to turn over the low-end to Linux. So, instead they dumped XP Home to OEMs at below cost to chase Linux off netboooks. It worked.
The way things were going to go was clear in June 2009 when, I kid you not, Asus’ chairman, Jonney Shih, after sharing a news conference stage with Microsoft corporate VP, OEM Division, Steven Guggenheimer, apologized for showing an Androd-Linux Eee netbook the previous day.
Mission accomplished, Microsoft finally shut down the XP production line on netbooks on October 22nd, 2010. Today, you can still get XP via the downgrade route from some versions of Windows 7, but you can’t do it for netbooks.
Mozilla and the community of developers behind the SeaMonkey Internet application suite have released the first beta of SeaMonkey 2.2 just over a week after issuing a major update with SeaMonkey 2.1.
Business intelligence (BI) software is all about deriving value from data. It’s a goal that commercial open source BI vendor Pentaho is aiming to expand upon with the Pentaho BI 4 Enterprise Edition release this week.
The Pentatho BI 4 release includes new tools like an enhanced visual interface and report designer that are intended to help make it easier for users to fully leverage the power of BI.
FreeBSD is a UNIX-like operating system, designed to be super stable and super secure. As such, it is probably not the simplest one to tame and run on a daily basis. Unfortunately, reliability and robustness do not always fully align with the mass-usage model of friendliness.
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While the virtual machine test is far from being a real-life example of how simple or difficult or well-integrated a desktop is, VirtualBSD is a pleasant, refreshing diversion from the mainstream of free operating systems. It is an excellent technology demonstrator. The appliance testdrive proves that BSD is not a monster. Far from it; it’s a witty, charming, highly useful platform that anyone could use.
Even if you never intend on using BSD on your machine as the primary desktop, VirtualBSD could shatter some of your fears and misconceptions about the dreadful UNIX. It may not eclipse the Linux just yet, and probably never will, and it does not have to. What it can do is become another alternative should you need it, should you seek it. Overall, VirtualBSD delivers a handsome punch of good quality in all aspects of the desktop usage, aesthetics, availability of programs, codecs, everything. Quite a surprise and a breath of fresh air.
Looking back at my flirtations with the BSD family, things are getting better, significantly. The critical turning point is not there yet, but in time, this operating system might stir the flames of competition in the software world. For the time being, you have the perfect appliance to play with and sharpen your UNIX skills.
AVM Computersystems, a manufacturer of DSL routers including the popular FRITZBox, is trying to stop Cybits, a maker of web-filtering software, from changing the code which is present in the firmware of its routers.
The code comes partly from the Linux kernel; given this, the terms of the GPL would extend to the entire codebase giving users the freedom to modify it and use the changed version if they so wished.
I first heard of Bitcoin when the Free Software Foundation announced they would start accepting it for donations. Before long another story about Bitcoin appeared in my news feeds. Then another. And another. Then the new currency got a black eye, and finally, the Electronic Frontier Foundation stopped accepting donations of it. You know something is on very shaky ground when a non-profit will no longer accept donations of it.
Bitcoin began life just two short years ago as what some may characterize as an experiment in a new currency. It was to be one that wasn’t tied to any country currency and demonstrated the characteristics of rising or decreasing in value somewhat like a stock on an exchange. Perhaps the best advantage of using Bitcoin currency was the ability to conduct purchases anonymously.
Society is on the cusp of major advances in exposure science. These advances will have the effect of generating large amounts of information about what chemicals we are all exposed to (and what gets into our bodies), democratizing the collection and availability of that information, driving improvements in chemical toxicity testing and changing regulatory policy.
A few years ago, monitoring equipment was labeled “terrorist gear” and confiscated by the US DHS.
One regulatory failure follows another. Eventually all of the asbestos polluted homes of the last century will have to be demolished. Half a minute of reflection demonstrates that hose wetting is futile.
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 DMCA is an injustice because it says that you can’t make your hardware work the way you want it to or tell your neighbors the same. Vista era hardware, particularly monitors, come with keys that can be remotely revoked. This case would extent the DMCA to replacement parts, something that was denied to Lexmark when they tried to block ink cartridge makers by courts instead of software and legitimize behavior that’s simply anti-competitive. ACTA would be even worse.
the chair of the IIA is in reality working for AT&T. If you look a little deeper at the alliance’s Website, you’ll find that AT&T is also a major sponsor of the supposedly independent IIA
The details have not been made public, but Consumer Focus said the rights holders were proposing that the Applications Court of the High Court issue permanent injunctions against copyright-infringing websites on the basis that a “council” and “expert body” believed the evidence submitted by copyright owners showed blocking a site was appropriate.
[hiring managers are looking to Facebook to find dirt on prospective employees] the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, Social Intelligence Corp. has been given the legal thumbs up to archive seven years worth of your Facebook posts. These archives will be used as part of their background checking service for job applicants
The author mentions Facebook’s privacy settings but these are changed at whim by the company and the founder called users, “dumb f***s” for trusting him. Betraying users is the company’s business model.
Proposed “Lawful Access” bills would require telecom providers in Canada to hand over personal information to authorities without a warrant or judicial oversight, says OpenMedia.ca. The bills go beyond violating the civil liberties of Canadians, says OpenMedia.ca – it will also hurt their pocketbooks.
We are releasing hundreds of private intelligence bulletins, training manuals, personal email correspondence, names, phone numbers, addresses and passwords belonging to Arizona law enforcement. We are targeting AZDPS specifically because we are against SB1070 and the racial profiling anti-immigrant police state that is Arizona
This report examines changes in the patenting behavior of the software industry since the 1990s. It finds that most software firms still do not patent, most software patents are obtained by a few large firms in the software industry or in other industries, and the risk of litigation from software patents continues to increase dramatically. Given these findings, it is hard to conclude that software patents have provided a net social benefit in the software industry.
most of the claims are centered around three ordered-steps of: 1 administering the drug to the subject; 2 determining the amount of drug in the subject’s blood; and 3 re-calibrating the drug dosage based on step-2. A broader claim (claim 46 of the ‘632 patent) eliminates the administering step of claim 1 above.
The Mayo clinic and other practitioners would like to use this obvious procedure without having to pay fees to a patent troll.
Apple defenders and patent promoters are lambasting Microsoft boosters and patent promoters for not getting their facts straignt over another insane software patent.
They claim the patent is more narrow than some make it out to be [2]. The arguments are specious because any software patent, especially one on GUI methods, is an injustice and both Apple and Microsoft are extorting OEM in a way that denies useful features to all of us.
A group of UK copyright lobbyists held confidential, closed-door meetings with Ed Vaizey, Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries to discuss a plan to allow industry groups to censor the Internet in the UK. The proposal has leaked, and it reveals a plan to establish “expert bodies” that would decide which websites British people were allowed to see, to be approved by a judge using a “streamlined” procedure. The procedure will allow for “swift” blocking in order to shut down streaming of live events.
a Firm’s ability to make news-by issuing a Recommendation that is likely to affect the market price of a security-does not give rise to a right for it to control who breaks that news and how
Eric, stop making up random letter combinations that make sense to NOBODY but you. Ok?
If you can’t be bothered to write a few more letters and make things readable, why would you expect anybody else to bother spending the time looking at your emails?
The XFS filesystem has taken a beating for being a big, complicated, foreign filesystem since it’s introduction, and there is no doubt that there is a fair bit of code in there. But an interesting thing happened on the way to the Linux Kernel v3.0.0 – XFS developers have steadily reduced lines of code, while other up and coming filesystems such as Ext4 and BTRFS are steadily growing in LOC and complexity. And XFS has been under constant improvement at the same time as well.
The open-source developers working on the drivers for AMD/ATI Radeon and NVIDIA (via the Nouveau project) graphics hardware have tossed all their weight behind the Gallium3D driver architecture. The Gallium3D drivers have surpassed the “classic” Mesa DRI drivers in terms of capabilities, performance, and stability. The only strong holdout to Gallium3D has been Intel since they aren’t convinced that it’s the appropriate choice and they aren’t interested in overhauling their Linux driver stack once more with the large upfront investment that’s required in rewriting their user-space 3D driver in moving from classic Mesa to Gallium3D.
Every year or so, I need to convert a printed page to text. It’s not oftener, because, while I do have a collected letters project that would benefit from optical character recognition (OCR), I only work on it sporadically. When I have to sign a publisher’s agreement or some similar document, I can generally just send a scanned image.
But every year or so, only OCR will do for one need or other, and I plunge into a quick survey of the available free software tools. The results have always been fairly dismal and more trouble than they’re worth. However, with the 2.0 release of KBookOCR, a base-level reliability and convenience is now available.
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BleachBit quickly frees disk space and tirelessly guards your privacy. Free cache, delete cookies, clear Internet history, shred temporary files, delete logs, and discard junk you didn’t know was there. Designed for Linux and Windows systems, it wipes clean 90 applications including Firefox, Internet Explorer, Adobe Flash, Google Chrome, Opera, Safari,and more. Beyond simply deleting files, BleachBit includes advanced features such as shredding files to prevent recovery, wiping free disk space to hide traces of files deleted by other applications, and vacuuming Firefox to make it faster. Better than free, BleachBit is open source.
Photographs are wonderful. Digital photographs are even better. We can take, archive and share as many of them as we want, at the smallest possible cost… if we pay the right price. A digital archive of many thousands images (which takes surprisingly little time to happen!) doesn’t tolerate carelessness. If you don’t build and manage it properly from the beginning, it will be worse than not having it at all. Here are a few quick tips to keep normal Jpeg digital photographs under control, with GUI or command line tools that work in any Gnu/Linux distribution. If you generate and store high quality raw pictures you’ll have to follow some extra steps, but that’s stuff for another article.
Adobe is preparing to supplement its popular-but-proprietary Flash product with a standards-based animation tool based on HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS. Supporting imported bitmap and vector graphics, Adobe Edge produces output compatible with browsers including Firefox, Internet Explorer 9, and the Safari versions used in Apple’s iPad and iPhone, the company says.
About 4-5 days back, I came to know about this awesome project Indie Game : The Movie, a documentary movie about indie games and life of developers. The project had reached $12,000 goal out of $35,000 fund raising target, so I thought I would write about it. But, then I was not able to finish it on time due to office work.
During the past weeks, we’ve been kind of silent around Plasma Active. This doesn’t mean we’ve just been sitting on our lazy bums, but that we’ve poured a lot of work into various aspects of the Plasma Active user experience. Let me details these changes to give you some idea of where we are. But first off, …
If you’re using Fedora 14 and want to switch to BlueBubble, there’s currently no easy way to do this. I recommend you proceed with the regular upgrade, try Gnome 3 for a few days and if you’re not convinced, follow the guide below.
Nothing like seeing a reddit post, saying you’ll spend a few minutes looking into something, and then realizing you spent multiple hours on it. Today that time sink was Gephi, a pretty cool desktop application for generating graphs from a variety of data sources. It is available in the AUR if you are an Arch Linux user.
We spoke about this some weeks ago, it’s now done! Thanks to Arnaud Patard (aka rtp) the Mageia ARM port is available for a first preview. The port’s code name is “arm eabi”, as a future port should be “arm eabihf”. It will use the hard float feature of Cortex family processors.
How serious is Red Hat about pushing beyond Linux? Take a look at Red Hat’s latest quarterly results, disclosed yesterday, and a cloud seminar that’s set for today. You’ll get a feel for how the open source company is striving to reinvent its business amid a march toward $1 billion in annual revenues.
American Linux distributor Red Hat has announced that the Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA) has gained 65 new members, a nearly ten-fold increase in membership since it was first established last month. Brocade, Dell, EnterpriseDB, Fujitsu Frontech, FusionIO, Gluster, Groundwork Open Source, MontaVista Software, Univention and Vyatta, for example, are among the group’s new members.
Joining the ever-growing list of Linux distributions jumping the sinking OpenOffice.org ship for the safety of LibreOffice is the irreplaceable Debian. LibreOffice has been in testing since March, but as of today it’s available for stable 6.0 as well.
For years, Nokia had been working on Linux as a future operating system for its smartphones and mobile devices. Then, the firm did an about-face and chose Windows Phone. Having had no luck with the penguin, the recent release of the N9 smartphone marks the end of an era.
In 2005, Nokia was a pioneer when it produced the 770 Internet Tablet: the first mobile device in its regular product portfolio with a Linux operating system. The unit was a small 5.5 by 3.1 inch tablet computer that would just fit into your trouser pocket; the touchscreen had a sufficiently large diagonal of just over four inches, with a resolution of 800 by 480 – quite high at the time. Linux developers who bought the 770 Internet Tablet, which normally cost €350, received a €250 discount with no strings attached.
Archos announced two high-end Android 3.1 tablets that use Texas Instruments dual-core 1.5GHz OMAP4 processors. The eight-inch Archos 80 G9 and 10.1-inch Archos 101 G9 are both offered with a 250GB hard disk drive option, available 3G, as well as standard Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, and HDMI.
Google has selectively released Google TV 2.0 “Fishtank” beta code based on Android 3.1, featuring the ability to run an Android app and stream TV at the same time, says a Geek.com report. The company is said to have sent out a Fishtank developer’s system to about 50 developers, while another report says Logitech will offer a 2.0-based system in late summer.
More details have surfaced about Android 3.2, including support for seven-inch screens and Qualcomm processors. The release may appear on Amazon.com’s Android tablets, which are rumored to be arriving in August bearing Texas Instruments processors and could hasten the fall of the monochrome Kindle.
Google and its Android tablet vendor partners face a double-edged sword in their epic struggle against the almighty Apple iPad. Android 2.x is both functionally and aesthetically lacking on larger screens, especially beyond seven inches. Meanwhile, Android 3.0 solves this problem and introduces some cool features not found on the iPad, but is widely criticized for being buggy and complex.
The Eclipse Indigo release train is now officially available, delivering 62 projects covering 46 million lines of code. According to Eclipse, there were 408 developers and 49 organizations that contributed code and collaborated for the Indigo release.
“We’re continuing to refine the release process and it’s already quite scalable,” Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, told InternetNews.com. “Even though we’re getting more and more projects and code, we’re finding that we’re able to leverage our history in moving the release train forward each year.”
Milinkovich noted that from a Java developer perspective the Indigo release offers a number of interesting new projects. One of them is the WindowBuilder GUI project, which just became part of Eclipse this year. Google donated the technology to Eclipse in December of 2010, after first acquiring the technology from developer tools vendor Instantiations in August of 2010.
In a clear challenge to Web calling clients like Skype, Google is building its open-source voice and video chatting software into its Chrome browser, according to CNET.
Google acquired the open-source technology, known as WebRTC, last year when it bought out VoIP software provider Global IP Solutions. The search engine giant is now looking to hand the royalty-free software over to developers for browser-based applications.
Three months ago, when we saw the Firefox 4 release, there was a hell lot of buzz surrounding it, and the news trended in Twitter for hours as people felt that, it had been quite a while since they got a new Firefox, unlike the case with Chrome(the direct competitor). Some may admit that, a huge release with a lot of new features is better than frequent releases with not so important features!
Acquia’s Commons 2.0 community management tool provides Facebook-style activity feeds with like and share buttons for the open source content management system.
Yesterday I wrote about how WordPress has evolved into a first rate platform that can be easily customized. One of the ways that WordPress is customized to meet the unique needs of a site is through the use of plugins that add functionality. Most of these functions are visual and offer visitors a richer experience while on your site. Others are never even seen by the visitor and only indirectly affect his or her experience.
BatteryMonitor for GNUstep now has support for NetBSD acpi too now! Support languished because decent acpi support in NetBSD is relatively recent and reading it requires checking a property list (which is of course more complex, but at least consistent and clean compared to the maze of files linux provides). To manipulate it libprop sports handy functions, yet I always had some problems here and there, until I realized something very cool. Property lists are familiar to GNUstep and Cocoa users.
As one of the country’s leading open source outfits had abandoned Bristol, one might begin to question the City Council’s commitment to open source. Indeed, your correspondent, cunningly disguised as a member of the public, emailed council leader Barbara Janke about the council’s commitment to open source, highlighting the reliability, lack of licensing fees and lower support costs of open source. Another point I raised with Barbara Janke was the fate of Cllr Mark Wright, the cabinet member with responsibility for IT in the last council and a firm open source advocate, as he did not feature in the new cabinet after the May 2011 council election.
Barbara Janke’s reply is reproduced below.
You are correct that Mark was not re-elected to the Lib Dem cabinet this time. In the current cabinet I have responsibility for ICT in the current cabinet. The commitment to open source remains the same. Mark continues to advise me on this. The council is also heavily engaged with the external digital media and creative sector and this area lies within my area of responsibility.
So there you have it. Bristol City Council remains committed to open source. Perhaps someone less trusting of the City Council than your ‘umble scribe should file a FoI request to ask the council just how far their commitment stretches.
As regards the fate of Mark Wright, Mark Ballard of Computer Weekly has done some fine investigatory work and discovered that Wright’s ousting from the cabinet was a result of internal party politics, not part of a conspiracy to do down open source wherever it reared its head in the public sector.
Bristol City Council’s seven year campaign to use open source software has been sent reeling after the shock departure of two lead architects of its ICT Strategy.
Councillor Mark Wright, the computer expert who pushed Bristol’s pioneering ICT strategy through the council chamber just last September, was voted out of his post as ICT portfolio holder a month ago, after a private vote of Liberal Democrat members.
William Theaker recently started working at the FSF as this summer’s licensing intern. In this post, he writes about what brought him to free software, and the goals for his internship.
Hi! My name is William Theaker; I’m a college student from Connecticut interested in free software and copyright law. This summer I will be interning with the FSF; I will be working on various free software licensing issues by answering questions about licensing, investigating possible GPL violations, and working on my biggest project this summer, organizing the drafting archives for the GPLv3. My first interaction with free software was when I started using “Linux” in 2003, though I was unaware of the actual origins of the software in my computer. What I referred to as “Linux” is, in fact, GNU/Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system, made useful by the GNU core libraries, shell utilities, and vital system components comprising a full operating system as defined by POSIX.
The maturing Web development industry is inextricably intertwined with a constant companion: complexity. Gone are the days of assembling a few simple database-backed PHP-driven pages and calling it a website; these days clients expect rich JavaScript-based user interfaces, cloud-backed data stores, and tight integration with third-party APIs. To accommodate such challenges, developers have put a great deal of time and effort into devising tools and techniques which help to identify, track and resolve bugs. One such technique is continuous integration, which facilitates the merging of code changes made by various members of a development team by automating tedious processes such as testing, documentation generation, and deployment.
AMD has publicly announced it is withdrawing its support from BAPCo, a non-profit consortium which develops and distributes a benchmarking program called SYSmark, refusing to endorse the latest version of the suite because its results are allegedly unrepresentative of the workloads used in everyday computing. The company also believes there’s a bias in favor of Intel.
The suite uses a number of application-based benchmarks to recreate usage patterns in the areas of office productivity, data/financial analysis, system management, media creation, 3D modeling and web development. Among the applications used in SYSmark 2012 are Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite, Adobe Acrobat, WinZip, Autodesk AutoCAD and 3ds Max, and others. But AMD argues that BAPCo is not taking advantage of GPUs for general purpose computing tasks, despite the fact that many applications support it, and instead solely relies on performance of CPUs.
Paris, June 23rd, 2011 – The Mexican Senate approved a resolution calling on the government not to sign the anti-counterfeiting agreement ACTA. La Quadrature calls on French and European Members of Parliament to do the same.
Summary: The Pirate Party of New Zealand stands up for the interests of New Zealand (NZ) and commends Simon Power for disowning foreign interests
New Zealand’s patent law is under attack by companies from America. They want NZ-based companies to have NZ-hostile laws. Microsoft in particular is trying to colonise and subjugate NZ-based companies by changing the law of this distant foreign country, using lies, lobbyists, and subversion of political processes. We gave a lot of evidence before. Microsoft does not always do this behind proxies.
According to this new press release from the Pirate Party of NZ, “Pirate Party condemns pro-patent spin on software patents” and its co-leader Bruce Kingsbury “condemned the suggestion that software patents may be required in New Zealand law.”
“There is no ‘inventive step’ in software development,” he wrote, “as would be required for patenting.”
He then names Microsoft’s role in the lobbying. “Microsoft’s attempt to spin this as a change of position or some insurmountable problem with the select committee’s decision is little more than a last-minute attempt by them to subvert the democratic process to their own advantage” (Microsoft uses allies and lobbying groups to do this too).
He ends with some kind words for Mr. Power, whom we mentioned some days ago (EN | ES). “We congratulate Commerce Minster Simon Power and the Government for continuing to support the select committee’s recommendation and doing what is best for New Zealand software developers and the wider IT community. We hope the Government will continue to resist this unwelcome pressure from foreign interests’ lobby groups,” concludes the press release. Thanks to the Pirate Party of New Zealand for these constructive words. █
Innovators are not businessmen and businessmen are not innovators
Summary: Distortion of language and euphemistic spin/lies are being devised in order to harm innovation and promote monopolisation (with stagnation) instead
The words that receive bad reputation are often essential to explaining key ideas. By ruining those words, those who wish to impede particular lines of operation or thinking may succeed. Hollywood likes using the word “pirate” and the mainstream press loves making use of the word “conspiracy” (as in, one company colludes or conspires with another, e.g. price-fixing) to become a loaded term and thus its use discouraged.
As we explained here several times before (although not with sufficient emphasis), the big people with big money and big monopolies have been co-opting the word “innovation” to promote “monopolisation”. They try to sell to people the illusion that patent monopolies are required for the industry to move forward. It’s one of those patterns of deception — those talking points that go along with “job creation” and “free market” (meaning freedom to corporations, i.e. deregulation). To counter the spin we must realise and recognise the truth, which does not at all agree with those talking points, neither theoretically nor empirically. A glance at history helps resolve these false dilemmas and call the lobbyists “liars”. They are paid to deceive politicians as well as the public (although the public cannot write legislation directly).
According to this new article, something called “declaration of innovation” (euphemism-gasm!) turns out to be a Trojan horse for — you’ve guessed it — lobbying:
Gary Shapiro, president and CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), announced the launch of the Declaration of Innovation, an online pledge for Americans to sign in support of policies that ensure innovation remains the strategic advantage of the United States of America.
CEA’s Innovation Movement urges lawmakers to support policies that promote innovation. The Declaration of Innovation specifically states:
“We believe American innovators should be able to buy and sell their products around the world.
“We believe that more spectrum must be available for wireless broadband.
“We believe in welcoming the best and brightest minds to the United States.
“We believe in cutting the federal deficit.”
It is a great call which I think will remain incomplete as long as monopolies and messy Software Patent Laws exist in the US.
Conspicuously missing from many such petitions are discouragements of patents. When the lobbyists push for something called “innovation” they usually beg for more patents to be granted and their funding sources (to which they are a front) turn out to be big businesses that want to erect fences around themselves, to essentially stifle competition. We recently wrote about the SME Innovation Alliance, which is actually against SME interests. They are talking utter nonsense and the latest debunking comes from Mr. Masnick, who notes that they are just lobbyists for software patents, even in the UK where these are not permitted (and rightly so):
[T]he UK does have a software industry. Apparently Mitchell just doesn’t know where to look. Furthermore, plenty of countries that don’t recognize software patents have a software industry. Why would he argue otherwise? Either way, I would think this seems like good evidence for why innovative companies should not want to be a part of the SME Innovation Alliance, as the organization’s views seem woefully out of touch on actual innovation.
It is out of touch with SMEs as well. Based on its site we cannot even tell who is funding this thing. A disclosure would be nice.
Over the past week we found and shared 3 headlines that celebrate innovation in the context of Free software. This is good. We are taking back the word innovation and not allowing it to just become synonymous with patents. The likes of the lobbying groups (that sometimes put “innovation” in their name or events they organise) would like people to believe that Free/open source software is a threat to innovation, despite the fact that a lot of today’s innovation comes from academia, where scientific findings and code are largely shared. Innovation is a dog whistle that can affect politicians, so we must make an attempt to take that back and associate innovation with sharing. As we showed last year, the word “innovative” (or “novel”) is used interchangeably to mean “patent-encumbered” (or “patent pending”) and the same word is currently being misused by US-based companies that try to change NZ’s patent law (Intel for example). This will be the subject of our next post. █
Summary: Microsoft’s zone of Microsoft boosters ostracises a ‘closet’ GNU/Linux user
THE SOURCE may be a Microsoft booster, but nonetheless we’ll bite. The Registercalls it a “mystery suspension” although it does shed some light on what seems to suggest more intolerance and Linuxphobia from Microsoft. To quote this article about the echo chamber known as TechNet (more like .NET Tech): “Confused about why your subscription to Microsoft’s TechNet has been suspended? So is Microsoft, judging by the experience of one Reg reader.
“Our reader, who wished to remain anonymous, has been in touch to say how his TechNet account was abruptly suspended without warning by Microsoft.
“A lot of people use GNU/Linux for real work and then use Windows just to test some stuff.”“The reason given by Microsoft when he contacted them was he’d abused the terms of his membership.”
“His only sin,” notes the Microsoft-loving journalist, is that “he confesses his main computer is a Linux PC but uses his TechNet sub with a bonafide Windows machine.”
A lot of people use GNU/Linux for real work and then use Windows just to test some stuff. Whether his GNU/Linux usage triggered the suspension or not, it is nice to learn how some British businesses leverage the power of GNU/Linux. █
Posted in Site News at 9:39 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Some businesses find limited freedom (or GNU/Linux) on the so-called ‘cloud’
Summary: GNU/Linux-based services continue to devour Microsoft’s share in the office suites space; downtimes lead to erosion of Microsoft’s brand
“Office 360″ is a joke we started a few months back because whether one calls it Office Live or BPOS or even Office 365, it is just about as reliable as Xbox 360. It goes MIA far too often and there is no contingency either due to the ‘merits’ of so-called ‘clouds’ (Fog Computing) that suck up users’ data. As we noted before, executives associated with this initiative were leaving Microsoft while we covered many downtimes that made Microsoft a laughing stock in this area [1, 2, 3, 4]. Here is the latest:
Microsoft cloud execs are crossing their fingers that Office 365, the pending successor to the Business Productivity Online Suite, is a safer bet for customers following yet another crash in North America.
Customers across the region and in London reported problems logging into the hosted service – Exchange Online and SharePoint Online – from yesterday morning for three hours as Microsoft tried to resolve the outage, which transpired to have been caused by network hardware failure.
Microsoft insists on not using BSD as well as not using GNU/Linux (see Hotmail and FAST) and this is why Microsoft is failing to catch up in terms of uptime. As a Microsoft booster has just put it, there is a new “Microsoft Horror Story” as “Newspaper Chain Is Switching 8,500 Employees To Google Apps” (and it is not the first). They probably require decent uptime, which Microsoft cannot deliver. And in the newspaper industry every minute counts. To quote:
One isolated case doesn’t make a trend, but Microsoft should be worried about cases like the McClatchy newspaper chain.
A loyal Microsoft shop today, McClatchy is shifting its 8,500 employees over to Google Apps.
Google Apps is proprietary (people should use LibreOffice or something similar instead), but it runs on top of GNU/Linux
Isn’t it funny that on the Web, Microsoft Office is just a poor man’s Google Apps and Hotmail is a poor woman’s Gmail? █
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