It’s looking more and more likely. Linux is everywhere, creating jobs, lowering IT costs, and serving as poster child for the open-source business and development movements.
This momentum isn’t lost on Microsoft, which has revived its anti-Linux charm offensive. Speaking at CES, Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft’s entertainment and services division, overlooked Windows Mobile’s dismal market performance to sneer at mobile Linux, claiming that Linux in its current form is not “really sustainable.”
In 2009, we heard a lot about Nehalem and Telsa. AMD and AMD/ATI were not taking a nap. Their efforts are paying off and as the following video will illustrate, they have some great technology to offer the HPC crowd. Indeed, AMD has been a big supporter of OpenCL and has now released the ATI Stream Software Development Kit with OpenCL support. The promise of OpenCL is portability across processors and GP-GPU’s (not cluster nodes, however). The SDK from AMD/ATI has beta support for both x86 processors and ATI video cards. As you can see in the second half of the video, OpenGL has arrived.
Chrome OS is supposed to be about speed and ease of use. “We want Google Chrome OS to be blazingly fast,” says Sundar Pichai, Google’s VP of product management. It should be so fast that it will be able “to boot up like a television,” according to Pichai.
The eighth annual KDE PIM developer meeting in Osnabrück, Germany started out with an extended snowball fight among the Scottish, German and Dutch contingencies. That actual work was being done was evidenced by enhancements to Akonadi, KDE 4.4 and 4.5, and planned further development of the Kontact groupware client.
The eighth annual meeting of the KDE groupware faction was all in the spirit of mobile devices. KDE Kontact is to be ported as fast as possible on mobile platforms such as Maemo 5 and Windows Mobile, if things go according to the plans of the Kolab Consortium under the auspices of Intevation and KDAB. Kolab has recently been releasing repeated new versions of the Windows port of KDE Kontact, the latest with a one-click installer.
The open-source Amazon-like compute cloud under development at NASA’s Ames Research Center could become a means of hosting websites across the US government.
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Nebula is based on Eucalyptus, an open source project meant to mimic Amazon EC2 inside private data centers. Eucalyptus is bundled with the latest version of Ubuntu. That’s why Ubuntu chief Mark Shuttleworth calls it Karmic Koala.
This past year I’ve had the good fortune to review an eeePC powered Netbook, the Fit-PC, and the Plug Computer. All were new, capable, and progressively smaller Linux machines. Readers may also recall my increasing interest in the Arduino micro-controllers. Although the Arduino doesn’t run Linux, its development environment is easy to use and particularly well suited for Linux notebooks.
We are currently looking for two contractors to come and work at Canonical to write some upstream code to help GNOME applications fit into the full Ubuntu desktop experience. This is an awesome opportunity for talented GNOME developers and a a great way to dip your feet into the Ubuntu development team.
The Ubuntu development community announced today the availability of Ubuntu 10.04 alpha 2, a new prerelease of the next major version of the Ubuntu Linux distribution. This alpha is the first Ubuntu release to completely omit HAL, a Linux hardware abstraction layer that is being deprecated in favor of DeviceKit.
If any community within the open source realm lives and breathes outreach, it’s Ubuntu. There are days that teams devote solely to bug triage (today, incidentally, is gnome-power-manager hug day), along with the obligatory launch parties, a community-building Open Week and the more technical Ubuntu Developer Week.
At CES, OpenPeak unveiled a prototype of its Intel Atom- and Moblin Linux-based Home Energy Manager (HEM) energy monitoring device, and announced partnerships with Direct Energy and GE. OpenPeak also announced that the OpenFrame IP phone upon which the HEM is based was certified with the ZigBee Alliance’s Smart Energy Certification.
PLX Technology announced a Linux-ready NAS 7800 system-on-a-chip (SoC) family for home network attached storage (NAS) devices. The low-end NAS 7820 and NAS 7821 and the high-end NAS 7825 offer dual ARM11 processors clocked to 750MHz, network security engines and a variety of hardware acceleration engines, says the company.
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A Linux-based SDK (see farther below) is said to support connections to multiple computers, smartphones, digital photo frames (DPFs), Internet radio sites, and more.
The EETimes Group says ESC Silicon Valley 2010 will add to the show’s already extensive bevy of instructional tracks with a new one called “Designing with open source software, including Linux and Android.” The track includes separate “Jumpstart” sessions on Linux, Android, and device drivers in general, as well as sessions on debugging Linux device drivers, real-time development with Linux and Android, using Android beyond handsets, and building a connected device with open source software.
Touch Revolution is shipping an Android-driven touchscreen subsystem that OEMs can “drop in” to microwave ovens, washing machines, printers, IP phones, and more. The Nimble NIM1000 module comprises an embedded board with a Marvell/ARM PXA310 clocked to 806MHz, and a 7-inch, WVGA projective capacitive touchscreen, says the company.
The Android community released the SDK for Android 2.1, which ships with Google’s new Nexus One phone, and the Motorola Backflip phone is rumored for a March AT&T launch. Meanwhile, the Linux kernel that drives Android, as well as numerous devices, desktops, and servers, was released in a WiFi-focused Linux 2.6.33-rc4.
Open source appliance maker Vyatta has unveiled the 3500 networking appliance family, which combines routing, firewall and VPN functionality. Vyatta claims the appliance offers 10 Gbps networking capability at 1/20th the cost other ‘name-brand’ networking appliances. But are solutions providers and their customers really ready for open source network?
Virginia Tech Intellectual Properties, an affiliated corporation of Virginia Tech, has announced that it has licensed the source code of GenoCAD to the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB).
Google, on the other hand, has done wonders with its Android OS which is now right up there with the likes of the iPhone and is getting better all the time. Android will, without a doubt, be in the headlines throughout the coming year as Google takes other mobile makers on head-to-head.
But open source will also start appearing on devices other than just mobile phones. Google’s Chrome OS and the Moblin OS are just a couple of the viable, Linux-based, alternatives for netbooks that will start to become important in the coming year.
A couple of years ago Linux look poised to take over the netbook market but Microsoft managed to claw back its dominance in this market with Windows XP.
This time around Microsoft may not be as lucky. There are indications that Linux now has its second wind and, together with a strong mobile phone presence, is ready to give Microsoft a serious fight in the ultra-portable space.
In the past I’ve started my Firefox with many open Tabs. The negative Side from that, is that this eats many RAM. But now I’ve found the ultimate Firefox Extension for that. The Name of this Extension is “TooManyTabs”. First of all you have to define Categories.
The striking thing about the exercise was that an easy majority have moved the database for this to MySQL on Linux with holdouts on Solaris (mostly also MySQL), HP-UX, and various Microsoft configurations – but the unexpected thing was that none of the Unix people had any difficulty either understanding it or doing it; while the Wintel people equally unanimously wanted meetings, paperwork, “a better understanding of the requirements”, and in something like three out of four cases additional monies from their bosses before they could see about getting it done.
Every clone of a Mercurial repository can act as a consistent, fully functional repository itself. This is a very useful property of a DVCS; one that you can take advantage of to make development a lot easier, especially for teams that are dispersed in multiple places of the globe.
It’s interesting to compare the interest over time in various software development methodologies and practices. Google Trends is a great tool for this, although it’s not without limitations, especially since so many programming terms have other meanings.
The fourth Javaday – the Italian technical event for Java developers organized on a volunteer basis directly by members of the Java community in Rome – will take place in Rome on Saturday 30th of January.
Today’s adversaries are different. There are still governments, like China, who are after our secrets. But the secrets they’re after are more often corporate than military, and most of the other organizations of interest are like al Qaeda: decentralized, poorly funded and incapable of the intricate spy versus spy operations the Soviet Union could pull off.
Editor’s Note: A blogger with the PBS’ NewsHour asked former CIA analyst Ray McGovern to respond to three questions regarding recent events involving the CIA, FBI, and the intelligence community in general.
Marc Hall, a junior member of an infantry unit, wrote the song in protest at the US army’s unpopular policy of involuntarily extending soldiers’ service and forcing them to return to Iraq or Afghanistan.
The average American consumes more than his or her weight in products each day, fuelling a global culture of excess that is emerging as the biggest threat to the planet, according to a report published today. In its annual report, Worldwatch Institute says the cult of consumption and greed could wipe out any gains from government action on climate change or a shift to a clean energy economy.
It has been more than a year since all hell broke loose on Wall Street and, remarkably, almost nothing has been done to prevent all hell from breaking loose again.
In fact, close your eyes and you could be back in the wilds of 2007. Bankers are still making wild bets, still devising new derivatives, still piling on debt. The big banks have access to money almost as cheaply as in 2007, courtesy of the Fed, so bank profits are up and bonuses as generous as at the height of the boom.
The Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America have an established love-hate relationship with the Internet. Perhaps more hate-hate. The recording and motion picture industries are still struggling to find their footing and adapt to a world where MP3′s replaced CD’s, and where streaming movies are replacing DVD’s.
Dating back to the early days of Napster, the RIAA and MPAA have lobbied for legislation and leveraged the court system to combat online piracy. In its filing on net neutrality with the FCC, the RIAA wrote “we encourage the FCC to stay its course and explicitly support, encourage, and endorse ISP efforts to fight piracy.”
EFF
On the opposite end of the spectrum, the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) is urging individuals to join its petition to convince the FCC to remove language from the proposed net neutrality guidelines which provide a legal loophole for the entertainment industry to “hijack the Internet.”
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission should avoid adopting strict net neutrality rules that would limit broadband providers’ flexibly to “address” illegal online file sharing, the Recording Industry Association of America said in comments filed with the FCC on Thursday.
Internet service providers should have authority to block subscribers from sharing music and other files without permission of the copyright owner, the RIAA said. “ISPs are in a unique position to limit online theft,” the RIAA said in its comments. “They control the facilities over which infringement takes place and are singularly positioned to address it at the source. Without ISP participation, it is extremely difficult to develop an effective prevention approach.”
Why is an intellectual property treaty being negotiated in the name of the US public kept quiet as a matter of national security and treated as “some shameful secret”?
Solid information on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has been hard to come by, but Google on Monday hosted a panel discussion on ACTA at its DC offices. Much of the discussion focused on transparency, and why there’s so little of it on ACTA, even from an administration that has made transparency one of its key goals.
Well, Ambassador, a lot of Canadians don’t think U.S. Intellectual Property Laws are in the best interest of Americans or Canadians either. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 comes to mind. Do you have any proof (specifically peer reviewed studies) proving that the DMCA has any benefit to the citizens of the United States? And if you don’t have any proof, when do you intend to provide it?
The Linux Foundation says that the market for Linux-related jobs has grown 80 percent over the past five years. In response to this trend, the foundation is launching a Linux job board to help connect employers with potential candidates for Linux-related jobs.
An anonymous Best Buy customer told us in December that the Geek Squad refused to honor his extended warranty on his laptop because he had installed (horrors!) Linux.
I have been busy installing an operating system to the repaired Laptop.
Firstly I went with Ubuntu as I already had that installed to an external harddrive and could just boot it up but it needed about 2 days of upgrades added to it.
The 2 days were for the amount of downloads needed.
I upgraded and left it overnight only to find my installation was scuppered next morning.
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I think you need to be prepared to look through forum posts to get the most from Linux as it is a learning curve but once you have your internet set up looking how you want, a few handy programmes, one or two small games and have personalised your desktop, it is very satisfying and ofcourse, free.
So now we have an older computer that, if formatted with a less process intensive operating system, can last 2-3 more years. We have access to Ubuntu Linux as a free download with installation guides. We have the comprehensive OpenOffice application that will let users perform office functions like a professional. What do we do now? Obviously, the standard computer user cannot install and configure an operating system they have never even heard of, much less used. This is where a geek becomes a super hero. The equation is an easy one:
Old Computer + Ubuntu Linux + OpenOffice + Geek Super-Hero = A Win for the Environment and the Less Fortunate
The newest member of the Ext file system, Ext4, became an official part of Linux last year with the release of the Linux 2.6.28 kernel. Since then, it’s become the default file system in some popular Linux distributions such as Fedora, and it’s now available on all distributions.
Ext4 enables faster disk performance and better drive space management than its predecessors. While it also includes journaling, you can turn that off for a modest speed boost. I’m sure Google was also interested in it because even without disabling journaling, Ext4 is a very fast file system, and it supports file systems of up to 1 EB (exabyte) and up to 16 TB (terabyte)-sized files.
There hasn’t been a whole lot to report on in regards to LM_Sensors, the main sensor monitoring package and its kernel drivers for thermal/fan/voltage polling on Linux. It was nearly a year ago that LM_Sensors 3.1 was released, but since then we have run into plenty of new hardware (such as the ASRock ION 330HT-BD and ASUS Eee PC 1201N) that is not yet supported by drivers for LM_Sensors. While this does not improve the hardware support, a new sensor configuration utility has been unveiled for LM_Sensors.
As is often the case, one purchase often begets another. So, on to buy a decent, but relatively inexpensive condensor mike (after shelling out too many $$$ on the mixer). I end up purchasing an MXL 990 condenser microphone with a shock mount for $49.00US. Then a proLine desktop mic stand, model MS112 ($29.99US). Finally, I purchase assorted cables and adapters.
Currently, Ubuntu developers are planning to ship Ubuntu 10.04 with PiTiVi, a different editor. I wouldn’t bet any money on this decision changing before April, but I’ve read good things about OpenShot and thought it would be worth a try, even if won’t be included in Lucid by default.
I should also make clear that I’m no video-editing professional. The extent of my work in this realm has mostly been limited to stringing clips together in Windows Movie Maker back when I was still using XP.
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Overall, OpenShot is a highly usable and stable application for basic video editing. I’ve yet to try PiTiVi to see how it measures up, but hope to do so in the near future.
So, after a couple weeks break, it’ll be on to a new feature cycle! I already have some ideas for what new features to work on, but if you have more ideas feel free to pipe up. I won’t be able to commit to adding any and everything thrown my way, but who knows, something might pop up that wasn’t on my radar. I’ll put up a target feature list on the gitorious wiki when I’ve narrowed them down to something manageable. (There will be periodic 1.0.x releases containing bug fixes and translation updates till the next feature release.)
A significant part of the IT expense of most businesses comprises the cost of acquiring and running enterprise applications. Would it not be better to have the same applications your business relies on at a much reduced cost but with higher productivity? Read on to find out 5 powerful open source enterprise applications you could try in your business establishment today.
One of the many great things about using UNIX or a UNIX-like operating system is the ability to tailor your environment to your liking. If you want a full-fledged GUI with all the bells and whistles then Gnome, KDE, or LXDE are probably for you.
But, if you want something less resource intensive that offers a greater degree of control then Fluxbox Window Manager is what you’re looking for.
I’ve been using the GNOME Shell preview available in Fedora 12 this week and I’m really enjoying it. I was testing out some candidates for updates to the free drivers for my ATI Radeon HD4850 (and the stuff that went with them) already, and decided to see what happened when I picked GNOME Shell. At F12 release time, my graphics card wasn’t quite ready for GNOME Shell use. But now I get the whole kit and kaboodle!
Gnome Shell recently introduced a new notification system. Sadly it seems like GNOME Shell is going to duplicate a lot of the efforts from Canonical. Besides the notification system the application indicators also have similarities.
I’ve been using Parted Magic to work on my disks, and after recently replacing my old 1.x live Parted Magic CD with 4.6, I’m enjoying the little things that PM brings to the project.
For instance, when you turn networking on with DHCP and the DHCP server to which you’re connecting doesn’t transmit nameserver info, Parted Magic uses OpenDNS to supply you with DNS lookup so you can actually use the Internet while in the live environment.
By the end of 2004, I’d been running Debian ‘testing’ on my laptop since around early 2003. For almost two years, I’d lived with periodic instability — including a week in the spring of 2003 when I couldn’t even get X11 started — for the sake of using a distribution that maximally respected software freedom.
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Twelve days in, I am very impressed. Really, all the things I liked about Ubuntu are now available upstream as well. This isn’t the distribution I left in 2004; it’s much better, all while being truly community-oriented and software-freedom-respecting. It’s good to be home. Thank you, Debian developers.
But having been an Ubuntu user for several years, I don’t think I could ever go back to Windows and be happy. As for OS X, I’m too frightened away by Apple’s high prices and obsession with controlling users to consider that route.
The Ubuntu developers have announced the availability of the second alpha release of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, code named “Lucid Lynx”. The latest development milestone is the second of three planned alpha releases, which will be followed by two beta releases and then a release candidate.
A few minutes ago, the Ubuntu development team unleashed the second alpha version of the upcoming Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx) operating system, due for release in late April this year. As usual, we’ve downloaded a copy of it in order to keep you up-to-date with the latest changes in the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS development.
“HAL” unfortunately isn’t the heinous supercomputer from Kubrick’s film 2001, but Ubuntu’s Hardware Abstraction Layer between Ubuntu’s hardware and software. It has now disappeared entirely from the current Ubuntu 10.04 test version, it’s function being taken over among other things by DeviceKit. The advantage to this, according to the official announcement, is that Ubuntu has a faster boot and startup from hibernate time.
Overall, there are both good and bad performance improvements for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Alpha 2 in relation to Ubuntu 9.10. Most of the negative regressions are attributed to the EXT4 file-system losing some of its performance charm. With using a pre-alpha snapshot of Fedora 13 and the benchmark results just being provided for reference purposes, we will hold off on looking into greater detail at this next Red Hat Linux update until it matures. You can run your own tests though if you wish using our open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking platform.
Finally, appointment of a team leader is an unusual request for a team to make to the Community Council, but as a team we found ourselves in the unique position of being a four+ year old team that never had a formal leader and having largely been organically grown with no formal “membership ranks” or process for voting for a leader. A huge thanks to my fellow Community Council members for their consideration and support during this process.
OpenWrt Kamikaze 8.09.2 is released. This is a Linux distribution for network routers, like the Linksys WRT54G, or the Asus WL-500g and a lot of other routers. This distribution adds a lot of new functionality to routers, like improved ipv6 functionality.
This YouTube video chronicles some experiments I did using a low-cost Fresnel lens and a homemade cardboard container. My goal in this experiment was to find a way for people to comfortably and portably view the outstanding Inkscape screencasts by Richard Querin and HeathenX which they generously distribute for free. Inkscape is a free vector drawing program that is equivalent to Adobe Illustrator. It runs on all major platforms: Linux, Macintosh and Windows. Here is why I love Inkscape and why you’ll love this program, too. (Thanks, TogrutaJedi)
The Jordanian Government announced the first ever agreement between an international company and a government to promote open source adoption.
Jordan’s Ministry of Information and Communication Technology and Ingres Corporation have entered into a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to achieve the widespread use of information technology and communication, particularly open source technology from Ingres, throughout the local software infrastructure in the country.
Matt’s statement suggests, and he confirmed in a follow-up, that it is harder to build a community with a restrictive license. The obvious argument against that statement is the number of community projects based around GPL code: the Linux kernel, the GNU project, Samba, Drupal, Gnome, and KDE for example.
Clearly the GPL does not prevent vibrant community development projects. The important point about those projects is that they are the result of true development communities, however, rather than a vendor-initiated effort to create a community.
# Is it good code and is it well architected?
# Who are the founders, contributors, and users?
# What are the motivations and behavior of each?
# What is the form and governance of the community?
Started by Richard Stallman in 1983, the GNU Project is a mass collaboration project for open and free software that has flourished even to this day. Stallman followed up the GNU Project with the creation of the Free Software Foundation in 1985 to further support the free software community.
The GNU Project has resulted in a huge amount of open source software over time and gave birth to the GNU General Public License (GPL), arguably the most popular open source license model out there. And when the Linux kernel arrived, GNU software made it into a complete OS.
For the last few months, the Open Source Society has been facilitating a project called the Public Sector Remix. This involves a number of public sector agencies investigating use of a free software stack on the desktop and understanding the barriers preventing its more widespread adoption. As the project has run out of money, my involvement is at an end, so it’s a good time to reflect on what the project has achieved so far.
The new version 1.0 from OpenOffice.org Thumbnail plugin has been released. OpenOffice.org Thumbnail plugin is a plugin for KDE file managers (Dolphin and Konqueror) to preview OpenOffice.org files (Open Document Format) as Thumbnails. You do not need to install OpenOffice.org for it to work (it only uses KDE API).
Norway’s national broadcasting and TV facility NRK is intent on using the Open Document Format as a standard and is therefore changing its clients over to OpenOffice.
Norway appreciates free standards. After the government a year ago recommended Ogg Vorbis, FLAC and Ogg Theora next to their commercial alternatives MP3 and H.264 as standards for audio and video files, this year it focuses on ODF as the standard document format. According to the governmnent’s Reference Catalog for IT Standards, the recommendation should become binding in January of 2011.
Open Solaris is getting better and more refined by the release, there’s no doubt about that. Small problems are gradually yet persistently solved. This is extremely encouraging.
On the other hand, compared to most Linux distros, Open Solaris is still about 2-3 years behind when it comes to usability and hardware support. More programs would be nice, as well as the ability to solve common desktop usage problems more easily. 64-bit architecture would also be great, considering the fact Sun pioneered the 64-bit usage.
Like most folks these days, I practically live in my Web browser. After completing the Week in the Life of a Browser Test Pilot project last week, I found that I spent more than 45 hours using Firefox actively in the span of seven days. And that includes the weekend, when I didn’t touch my primary workstation (where the test ran) at all.
When spending that much time in a program, you want to use it as effectively as possible! Here’s how I make Firefox work for me.
Firefox has made changes to the way it develops the world’s most popular browser. Instead of providing incremental updates after every few days, for a change the guys at Firefox have decided to release the next stable release of Firefox as a major release, not a minor one.
If you’ve been following the development of Firefox, you know that Mozilla separates security updates, which usually happen every couple of weeks, from feature updates, which are usually separated by months.
The good news is that it looks like the Obama administration is looking to go in the other direction. The EFF points us to the news that the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) is looking at ways to have this requirement go beyond just NIH and require public access for all federally funded research, including from organizations like the National Science Foundation (NSF). OSTP is asking for comments and input on the idea — and it’s an idea that makes a ton of sense. It seems likely that journal publishers will protest, but hopefully common sense will prevail and federally funded research will become open, accessible and available to everyone.
We’ve heard a lot of feedback around supporting HTML5 and are working hard to meet your request, so stay tuned. We’ll be following up when we have more information. We’re answering this idea now because there are so many similar HTML5 ideas and we want to give other ideas a chance to be seen.
As part of FCC’s Open Internet tour, I got invited into one of the many group meetings the FCC has been holding, along with Nicholas Reville of Miro and Cara Lisa Powers of PressPassTV.org.
Nicholas talked about how difficult it would be for Miro to attract video producers if they had to worry that carriers might block or slow their traffic. Why not instead go to one of the Big Brands that can afford to pay the tariff? Miro — an innovative, public-spirited non-profit — would be unable to compete.
That is the question currently puzzling the Department of Health. Back in May the government signed contracts with two suppliers – GSK and Baxter – to supply 90 million doses of H1N1 pandemic vaccine.
For anyone paying attention to the larger trends in the video game market, this could hardly have come as a surprise. A few days ago, Gamestop, a key packaged goods distributor for EA, announced a similar miss. While Activision was setting sales records with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, EA had no major hits — although, in fairness the COD:MW2 revenue was probably just filling in a sinkhole at Activision created by a music game business that has fallen off a cliff. EA is in the wrong business, with the wrong cost structure and the wrong team, but somehow they seem to think that it is going to be a smooth, two-year transition from packaged goods to digital. Think again.
Civil libertarians hoped that the Obama era would see a renewed commitment to privacy protections. But their dreams are being dashed. Congress seems likely to recess without adjusting aspects of the Patriot Act set to expire at the end of the year, which means that the existing law will be temporarily extended. Elements up for reconsideration include roving wiretaps in foreign intelligence investigations that are not targeted to a specific communication mode or person and “section 215” ability to seize business or other records in a presumptive terror investigation.
Different bills to reform these and other powers have come out of the Judiciary Committees of the House and Senate. The House version is slightly better in terms of demands it makes on law enforcement and intelligence agencies to have defensible reasons for their searches and seizures. But the controversial provisions will survive, even if slightly circumscribed.
The policy of random laptop searches and seizures by U.S. government agents at border crossings is under attack again, with a pair of civil rights groups seeking potential plaintiffs for a lawsuit that challenges the practice.
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Last year, a document surfaced on the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Web site that authorized U.S. agents to seize and retain laptops indefinitely. Government agents belonging to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which is a part of DHS, were also authorized to seize electronic devices including portable media players and cell phones and inspect documents in them.
Stories of poor TSA security screenings are not new – several days ago we wrote about a man who passed through a Milwaukee checkpoint with shotgun shells. In this “TSA screw-up of the day”, we head to Gallatin Field, serving Bozeman, Montana.
Blair was determined to disarm Saddam, Campbell said. Blair’s message to the US in April 2002 was he would try to do it through UN resolutions. However, “if the only way is regime change through military action then the British government will support the American government”, Campbell said, describing Blair’s view.
Global warming is causing climate belts to shift toward the poles and to higher elevations. To keep pace with these changes, the average ecosystem will need to shift about a quarter mile each year, says a new study by scientists at the Carnegie Institution at Stanford University and at the University of California, Berkeley.
For some habitats, such as low-lying areas, climate belts are moving even faster, putting many species in jeopardy, especially where human development has blocked migration paths.
Advances in agricultural technology—including, but not limited to, the genetic modification of food crops—have made fields more productive than ever. Farmers grow more crops and feed more people using less land. They are able to use fewer pesticides and to reduce the amount of tilling that leads to erosion. And within the next two years, agritech companies plan to introduce advanced crops that are designed to survive heat waves and droughts, resilient characteristics that will become increasingly important in a world marked by a changing climate.
Unfortunately, it is impossible to verify that genetically modified crops perform as advertised. That is because agritech companies have given themselves veto power over the work of independent researchers.
The health dangers from nuclear radiation have been oversold, stopping governments from fully exploiting nuclear power as a weapon against climate change, argues a professor of physics at Oxford University.
The ancient Nazca people, who once flourished in the valleys of south coastal Peru, literally fell with the trees they chopped down, new research has concluded.
The Nazca caused their own collapse when they cleared their forests in order to make way for agriculture, thus exposing the landscape to wind and flood erosion, according to a study published in the journal Latin American Antiquity.
Iceland was plunged back into crisis after its president refused to sign a bill promising to repay more than €3.8bn (£3.4bn) to Britain and the Netherlands after the collapse of the country’s Icesave bank in 2008.
Let’s sum it up. There was massive fraud and criminal activity for self enrichment led by the very people that are testified at the FCIC hearings. Leading the cartel and earnging the most amount of money over the past three years was Lloyd Blankfein.
Blankfein faced tough questioning during the hearing from former California State Treasurer Phil Angelides, who heads the commission. Angelides, at one point, asked Blankfein whether a practice of betting against some of the subprime mortgage securities Goldman was selling to investors was a conflict of interest.
He replied that Goldman didn’t have a legal obligation to disclose when it was betting against the securities it was selling.
“We are not a fiduciary,” he said.
A simple brief summary of the financial and banking crisis explained for the lay person:
1. US Government encourages an unprecedented build up of private sector debt by promoting asset price bubbles in residential and commercial real estate thru artificially low interest rates and reduced Capital Requirements. US Government underwrites loans by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
2. Banking Industry creates complicated security bond investments (CDO) to spread the risk of default on the loans to multiple parties. Essentially the US Government, thru the Wall Street Banks, provided the credit for the loans and then packaged the loans into Bonds to be sold to other institutions sold worldwide such as Hedge Funds, Pension Plans, Governments, and other large Financial Institutions.
3. Banks then created Insurance to protect against a drop in value of these bonds called Credit Default Swaps (CDS). These unregulated Insurance Policies were bought by varies institutions that held the bonds to protect them in case the bonds dropped in value.
4. SEC ignores risks building in system.
5. Ben Bernanke is named Federal Reserve Chairman in October 2005.
6. Hank Paulson resigns from Goldman Sachs and is named US Treasury Secretary in July 2006.
Nearly 45,000 people die in the United States each year — one every 12 minutes — in large part because they lack health insurance and can not get good care, Harvard Medical School researchers found in an analysis released on Thursday.
The Florida Bar has a new attorney advertising rule that aggressively regulates attorney speech on the Internet. Florida Bar Rule 4-7.6 Indeed, the new rule regulates attorney speech so aggressively that it might even apply to this blog post. Until recently, the Florida Bar considered all attorney websites and web communications as information provided upon the request of a prospective client and did not apply its attorney advertising rules to them. But now the Florida Bar has extended its substantive advertising rules except for its filing requirement to all “Computer-Accessed Communications” by Florida attorneys.
As Google considers withdrawing from China, the BBC looks at the highs and lows of internet access and freedom in the most populous country in the world.
More comments on the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) proposed net neutrality rules rolled in before the midnight deadline Thursday night, and while there were no major surprises from companies like Comcast and groups like the Open Internet Coalition, Google and Verizon once again joined forces to submit a filing that outlined the points on which they agree.
Three US universities have agreed not to use Amazon’s e-book reader the Kindle until it is easily usable by blind people. A fourth settled a complaint from blind people’s advocacy groups by saying that it will strive to use accessible devices in future.
VOICE OVER IP AND CHAT OUTFIT Skype has been pressing its case in favour of net neutrality to the US Federal Communications Commision (FCC).
Skype, which is based on its own proprietary technology, depends on net neutrality to survive. If the telcos and some ISPs get their way, Skype punters will probably be identified as filesharers and get throttled to within an inch of their lives.
Skype told the FCC that net neutrality was “about growing the broadband ecosystem and preserving a borderless, open Internet” and that it would “promote investment, jobs and innovation.”
Two recurring points that Metalitz raised were that the secrecy in the treaty was a requirement of foreign negotiating partners, and the US’s hands were tied; and that the treaty wouldn’t require any of the “advanced” nations to change their law (he repeated the oft-heard unfounded slur that Canada is a rogue nation when it comes to copyright law).
Both of these points are simply wrong. The country demanding that ACTA be kept secret is the good old US of A, whose strategy for this is being driven by former entertainment industry lawyers who have found new homes as senior officials in the Obama government (the Democrats are terrible on copyright, sadly — we can thank Bill Clinton for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act). These lawyers are Metalitz’s old pals, his colleagues in the decades he’s spent winning special privileges and public subsidy for his rich clients.
The lobbying group for the top four recording companies wants to make sure that when regulations on Net neutrality are adopted, they don’t impede antipiracy efforts.
That’s why the Recording Industry Association of America on Thursday asked the Federal Communications Commission to “adopt flexible rules” that free Internet service providers to fight copyright theft.
We were just explaining why it appeared that Alan Ellis, the admin for OiNK had not actually violated any UK laws, and it looks like the jury agreed. Ellis has been found not guilty. I have to admit that I’m really surprised by this, but it is certainly a good thing.
“M$ is already beginning to compete on price with the netbooks and XP,” he told LinuxInsider. “In another year or two they will be competing on price for any PC, and their prices and share of units sold will be drastically reduced.”
The share of GNU/Linux reached the tipping point in 2009, Pogson asserted.
“The avalanche has started to move slowly down the mountain, and it will pick up speed by the end of 2010 with thin clients and netbooks/smartbooks taking over the landscape,” he predicted. “M$ has made a billion dollars a quarter less than is their ‘natural right of a monopolist’ in the client lately. Let us watch that continue as GNU/Linux grows share.”
Do u know which is the worlds smallest Linux computer? Its the picotux 100 !! As of yet,the picotux 100 is the world’s smallest Linux computer, only slightly larger (35mm×19mm×19mm) than an RJ45 connector.
The major Linux distribution providers — Red Hat, Novell and Canonical — are preparing to attend IBM’s Lotusphere 2010 conference (Orlando, January 17-21).
Once again, The VAR Guy’s sources were right. Canonical, as our resident blogger expected, is set to announce some Ubuntu news at IBM’s Lotusphere conference in Orlando the week of January 18. The effort — which includes channel partners — will involve Canonical countering Microsoft’s Windows 7 push.
An anonymous reader writes “Google is in the process of upgrading their existing EXT2 filesystem to the new and improved EXT4 filesystem. Google has benchmarked three different filesystems — XFS, EXT4 and JFS. In their benchmarking, EXT4 and XFS performed equally well. However, in view of the easier upgrade path from EXT2 to EXT4, Google has decided to go ahead with EXT4.”
In a day’s worth of testimony, no one took issue with this happy scenario presented by the grateful bankers until Julia Gordon, a housing expert from the Center for Responsive Lending, took the stand and dove straight in.
“The bankers touched upon their sleepless nights at the height of the crisis. Today, 6.5 million American are suffering sleepless nights, every night, wondering if they will have a home tomorrow.” And it is not over: “our data shows that by the end of 2014, 13 million Americans will lose their homes,” she said. Gordon testified that the banks were failing to modify loans at any meaningful rate and that they pursued modification procedures in parallel with foreclosure procedures. The result is that hopeful homeowners are often surprised at the door by sheriff’s deputies ready to kick them to the curb.
To many, geek = math && nerd = math. To others school = math && math = calculator. During my stint as a computer science major, the very idea of differential had me running scared back to my calculator. It was a must, and for many a symbol of intellect and power.
In ratpoison and stumpwm, there’s a ‘banish’ command that exiles the mouse pointer to a corner of the screen. It’s quite useful when you don’t want the mouse to distract you or clobber the text you are writing.
Thankfully, I’m not the guy in charge of things worldwide, because the folks over at www.supergamer.org have created a bootable, dual-layer DVD full of native-running Linux games. Yes, I said native. Check out the impressive list of preinstalled games you’ll get when you download the ISO:
The Elive Team is proud to announce the release of the development version 1.9.56
* 3G Phones: More than 300 new operators added
* Internet Module: If you connect with a 3G phone, the configuration will be saved and you can set it to automatically connect at the boot
* Icedove: When installing icedove, it contains by default a very nice elive-style looking template
* Flash updated to 10.0.42.34
o based on Debian testing (squeeze) instead of stable (lenny). This means that most packages have newer versions. In particular, the kernel is at 2.6.30 and Open MPI is at 1.3.3.
o has new MPI bindings for GNU Octave, developed mostly by R. Corradini, building off MPITB. The new MPI bindings allow use of Octave 3.2.x instead of 3.0.x, which gives some important performance gains. The new bindings are less complete than MPITB, but they provide all MPI calls used in the examples for GNU Octave. The Monte Carlo and kernel examples have been adapted to use these new bindings, the other examples of MPI usage within Octave still need to be updated.
o Open MPI is now the only MPI implementation installed.
o the Ganglia monitoring system is installed and pre-configured for up to 4 hosts. It is easy to add entries for larger clusters. Visit http://localhost/ganglia after having set up the cluster (pelican_setup). The ksysguard monitor is still available, too.
Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) has never looked like a no-brainer winner among tech stocks, but its business story is getting better by the day.
The latest? The CIO of the state of California, Teri Takai, last week said in a policy letter that using open-source software has been sanctioned as “acceptable practice.” Shocking, right? Open-source is typically cheaper than licensed software, and the Golden State faces a multibillion-dollar fiscal crisis. I’ll be surprised if more states don’t follow California’s lead.
It’s one thing to try software for free, it’s another to shell out the dough and buy it. New pricing reported in the InfoWorld article suggests they have come down quite a bit from previous years, but why pay anything if you can get the functionality you need for free or a very reasonable fee?
Last week Christoph Noack from the User Experience (UX) community took time out of his busy schedule to visit Hamburg and the Sun office for face to face (f2f) discussions on UX topics. Be sure to see his blog post on “day one” to hear what went on. Be watching for “day two” as well.
As countless crafty upstarts have learned time and again in the IT racket, it’s tough to get a server vendor who makes a living peddling boxes to get excited about server appliances that get rid of banks of servers. But IBM has inked a deal with upstart Schooner Information Technology to resell its web-caching and MySQL-boosting appliances starting in early March.
The workshop promotes Free Software as one of the main pillars for a sustainable framework for providing e-health and education for the developing and least developed countries.
There will not be parallel conferences. All delegates will be able to assist and participate in the workshops that they find of interest. Communication among delegates is key.
IWEEE is a non-profit event organized by the GNU SOLIDARIO association
Wired.com checks out MakerBot’s Cupcake CNC 3-D Printer. Using PLA, ABS, or HDPE plastic, this open source, $950 kit allows the user to fabricate small objects of virtually any shape.
… The… current, interrelated crises in finance, the economy, nutrition, energy, and in the fundamental ecological systems of life … are sharpening our awareness of the existence and importance of the commons. Natural commons are necessary for our survival, social commons ensure social cohesion, and cultural commons enable us to evolve as individuals. It is imperative that we focus our personal creativity, talents and enthusiasm to protect and increase our social wealth and natural commons. This will required an eye on the goal to change some basic structures of politics, economics, and society.
The TIOBE index for 2009 says that Google’s new Go programming language experienced more growth in popularity than any other language in 2009. The growth is quite remarkable given that the language became available late in the year. Is it all just hype? The Google brand certainly carries a lot of power and marketing capability with it. Based on TIOBE’s system, Go and Objective-C had the biggest gains in 2009 with Java taking a slight hit, but remaining at the top. TIOBE calculates its index based on search engine hits.
Go – Because of it’s remarkable growth, Go was named “TIOBE’s Programming Language of the Year.” Go has been compared syntactically to Pascal, Python, and C. Although Go is a new language with its own share of critics, many people are interested in its concurrency capabilities and fast compilation. Erlang is another concurrent programming language that grew this year from 29 to 24. One thing’s for sure, Google’s Go is getting a lot of attention.
I was glad to see Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York university publish on Twitter: “Rob Glaser steps down as head of Real Networks, and story after story fails to note he ran one of the most invasive malware companies ever.”
This afternoon, the Supreme Court put the final kibosh on video streaming of the Prop 8 trial to five federal courthouses around the nation. The Court stayed U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker’s order permitting the broadcast. The stay will remain in force for the foreseeable future, putting an end to the controversy for practical purposes. The Court did not address the recording and dissemination of the trial on YouTube, viewing it unnecessary because Judge Alex Kozinski, the Chief Judge of the Ninth Circuit, had not approved Judge Walker’s decision to allow Internet dissemination when the petitioners sought a stay.
It took only a few weeks of research for Romanian entrepreneur Emi Gal to decide where to base his digital media firm, and his choice confounds a fairly enduring set of stereotypes about Britain’s global appeal.
The £8.1 billion rollout of smart meters in Britain could be knocked off course unless the Government and Ofgem, the energy regulator, act urgently to convince the public that the information provided by the meters will be held securely.
The officer, to be employed in the West Midlands, will also search for criticism of the police and use Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Bebo to promote the force.
With recent trends in police abuses being a topic of no small concern at BoingBoing as of late, I thought perhaps his little known broadcast should be remembered and shared, as it strikes a chord of similarity which is at once chilling and inspiring. Welles gives us a glimpse into a time and a setting in which a mere radio broadcaster spoke out in a fervor of disgust and revulsion against a terrible injustice, and was instrumental in bringing those responsible to bear for their crimes. If nothing else, it serves to remind us of what has come before, and what we can once more do and be again.
With recent trends in police abuses being a topic of no small concern at BoingBoing as of late, I thought perhaps his little known broadcast should be remembered and shared, as it strikes a chord of similarity which is at once chilling and inspiring. Welles gives us a glimpse into a time and a setting in which a mere radio broadcaster spoke out in a fervor of disgust and revulsion against a terrible injustice, and was instrumental in bringing those responsible to bear for their crimes. If nothing else, it serves to remind us of what has come before, and what we can once more do and be again.
The Transportation Security Administration, under scrutiny after last month’s bombing attempt, has on its Web site a “mythbuster” that tries to reassure the public.
Here at BanksterUSA we are thrilled that the Obama team has joined our “Repo the Dough” campaign and urge it to apply a financial transaction tax to destructive stock market speculation.
The independent Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission got underway this morning in Washington. The commission was authorized by Congress to get to the bottom of the causes of the financial crisis and produce an independent report, much like the 9-11 commission.
The commission sent a strong message by first putting under oath the titans of Wall Street. They didn’t pick the subprime mortgage lenders or Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. They didn’t pick the credit rating agencies. They didn’t even pick the big housing or investment firms that failed. Instead, they chose the largest firms that survived the crisis and now are profiting off of it due to the extraordinary interventions of the U.S. government.
Cass Sunstein, a Harvard law professor, co-wrote an academic article entitled “Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures,” in which he argued that the government should stealthily infiltrate groups that pose alternative theories on historical events via “chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine” those groups.
What a difference partisanship makes now that Obama is president. In the Gruber scandal prominent liberals including New York Times columnist Paul Krugman have attacked the messenger, Marcy Wheeler and Firedoglake, rather than criticizing the lack of disclosure and the money changing hands, and digging further into the relationship between Obama and his paid health care advocate Jonathan Gruber. Who else is receiving convenient Administration funding while flacking ‘independently’ for Obama policies? In a democracy, we need to know and we have a right to know, no matter which party controls the White House.
Google’s stand against Chinese censorship and surveillance – triggered by suspicions that China had been trying to hack activists’ accounts – will be rightly lauded by defenders of human rights. But when it comes to upholding Google’s vow not to “do evil” by its users, China is by no means the company’s only headache. Before those of us in western democracies get too high on our horses about Google and China, we should remember that the Chinese are not the only ones putting pressure on Google in ways that are arguably harmful to freedom of expression, even when intentions are honorable. A growing number of governments – many democratically elected – share an attitude that internet companies should be expected to act as “net nannies” for their citizens.
A Paris court of appeal has ruled against Google in a defamation case lodged by the Centre National Privé de Formation a Distance (CNFDI) in a suit which claimed the search engine’s ‘Suggest’ feature linked the organisation to the word ‘scam’.
Tim from the Electronic Frontier Foundation sez, “Last fall, the Federal Communications Commission proposed rules for “Net Neutrality” — a set of regulations intended to help innovation and free speech continue to thrive on the Internet. But is the FCC’s version of Net Neutrality the real deal? Or is it a fake? Buried in the FCC’s rules is a deeply problematic loophole. Open Internet principles, the FCC writes, ‘do not… apply to activities such as the unlawful distribution of copyrighted works.’ For years, the entertainment industry has used that innocent-sounding phrase – ‘unlawful distribution of copyrighted works’ — to pressure Internet service providers around the world to act as copyright cops — to surveil the Internet for supposed copyright violations, and then censor or punish the accused users. Please visit RealNetNeutrality.org to learn more and sign EFF’s open letter asking the FCC to remove the copyright loophole.”
An antitrust suit alleging price fixing by Sony BMG Music Entertainment and other producers, licensors and distributors of music on the Internet has been reinstated by a federal appeals court.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday said the pleadings of music purchasers were sufficient for plaintiffs to pursue their Sherman Act claim against companies who control more than 80 percent of music sold as digital files.
Now that the trial is ongoing, Ellis is explaining that he didn’t believe that what he did in running OiNK directly was copyright infringement, even if users of OiNK may have infringed on copyright (he does admit to downloading works via OiNK, however — but that’s separate from his admin role, and he claims that he only used it to sample new musicians, and bought the albums of those he liked).
This is what we worry about. It’s great that the EFF is catching this particular loophole, but as more lobbyists get their hands on net neutrality regulations, they’re going to slip in more and more loopholes like this that will turn what may have great intentions into something else entirely.
My initial feeling is that they actually have a case. They have a product (see http://www.americanreading.com/products/…) called “100 Book Challenge” and they sell it. They have a registered trademark for it. Groups on LibraryThing with the same name, and somewhat similar conceptual domains, could be a potential problem.
Is there a need for MSPs to remotely monitor and manage Linux devices? Apparently yes. For the second time in recent days, a major managed services software supplier says it’s making Linux moves. The latest example involves GFI Software disclosing a two-step Linux strategy. I’m not suggesting Linux will rule the world. But the trend is clear: MSPs need to push beyond their Windows heritage and must now support mixed customer environments.
According to The Job Thread Network, demand for Linux-related jobs as jumped 80% in the last five years. Linux.com plans to roll out a new section of its Web site tomorrow, called Linux Jobs Board, as a way for job seekers with Linux experience to connect with prospective employers.
Linux is starting to catch the eyes of many, many people who normally wouldn’t go there! Finding the best Linux operating system is not hard at all. I want, in this article, to point out a few things that I’ve learned since starting to use the Linux system 4 or 5 years ago.
After reviewing more than 190 submissions for talks for the eighth annual Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE 8x), the SCALE 8x board has submitted a list of speakers and have named the keynote speakers for the first-of-the-year Linux event.
While the talks and keynotes for SCALE 8x have been chosen and submitters notified, the call for papers for the Women In Open Source (WIOS) and Open Source Software in Education (OSSIE) programs is open until Friday, Jan. 15.
If you are planning to get some information about the desktops that are offered by Linux then you should explore the World Wide Web. You must know that websites that are offering downloads for Linux desktops will be able to offer you the require information. At the same time, exploring the internet will allow you to look at some tutorials as well. Some tutorials will be a great help, when it comes to gaining knowledge for Linux desktops. On the other hand, if you have a question to ask then discussing with experts will be a great idea. You must know the internet forums are always based to help you. You can be a member of a form that is specifically created to discuss about Linux. Over these forums, you will be able to get the best knowledge about the different options that are available with Linux desktops.
This all started a couple of weeks ago when I finally got around to putting the tv capture card I had picked up a year or two ago into my computer. Happily like most things in Linux, it just worked, that was a great plus. Sadly the software packages in existence that I ran across were either too much or too little, nothing was just right.
Oracle is a big world wide database company. They produce large and complicated ERP systems whose size, just for the applications side, number in the range of sixty plus gigabytes. Naturally a software solution of such a large scale needs to be maintained and patched every now and then. Heck, any software project, no matter what size, needs the same thing.
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What Oracle should do is standardise it’s patching procedures so it is the same procedure no matter what patch, be it one off or cumulative update, needs to be installed. Then they need to have a package manager developed which will download and install those patches from a specified repository. I believe that the type of package management used by Linux will scale up to Oracle’s size quite well and work for all supported operating systems in applying and maintaining patches.
Oracle is now out with its first quarterly critical patch update (CPU) of 2010, fixing 24 flaws spread across Oracle’s product portfolio. Affected products include Oracle’s namesake database server as well as the Oracle Application Server, E-Business Suite, Secure Backup, PeopleSoft Enterprise and WebLogic Servers.
If you are interested in web design or development you should have some local test place where you can check and debug websites. If you are doing this professionally you will probably invest in a real web server. But if you are doing this for fun or the reliability and speed is not a problem then you can have a simple solution with minimal investment–own Linux server. There are also some simple and effective solutions with applications like WampServer or EesyPHP. You can use them and have a good testing environment. However, having a dedicated Linux computer offers many opportunities for additional functions. In addition to this, a physical web server running Linux is a very close approximation of the real hosting environment. To install and use such server you need no special knowledge or skills. All you need is access to the internet and computer with web browser.
I have my own opinion regarding the IETF’s decision to meet in Beijing, since as we’ve seen with the Search Engine industry’s attempt to accommodate the Chinese, engagement doesn’t necessarily always lead to openness and goodness.
Theodore “Ted” T’so has moved to Google, leaving his position as Linux Foundation’s Chief Technology Officer. The news came in a blog posting from T’so entitled “Proud to be a Googler” where T’so said “Although I obviously had nothing to do with Google’s decision vis-a-vis China, having only started working there for a week, I was definitely glad to see it and it made me proud to be able to say that I work there.” He is well known within the Linux community as one of the core Linux developers and maintainer of the Ext3 and Ext4 file systems.
This week in the Mesa world Gallium3D feature levels came about and a new EGL state tracker was released. The week though is not over and there are more announcements coming out for this free software OpenGL stack used on Linux and other operating systems.
One editing software that has seemed to finally achieve that feat is OpenShot 1.0. With their newest version of editing software for Linux, Openshot has finally given those who want to do some simple editing with good flexibility a viable option. They claim it is their most stable version ever. In fact, they go so far as to dare their users to crash the program. As for features, OpenShot has finally implemented a frame number time format rather than a millisecond format. Additionally, it has titles at both 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratios, 28 new video transitions, and one of the best chroma key plug-ins for Linux. Best of all, the software comes at a great price of 0 dollars and 0 cents, making it quite the deal for anyone looking for video editing software on Linux.
You may think that word processing is all about WYSIWYG and GUI, but WordGrinder is living proof that a word processor that runs in a terminal does make sense. Thanks to its small and efficient code base containing only 6300 lines of code, WordGrinder will happily run on older machines, and you can even use it on GUI-less setups.
The Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase is an opportunity to bring the best of two great worlds together by showing off high quality Free Culture content in Ubuntu. At the heart of Ubuntu’s ethos is a belief in showcasing Free Software and Free Culture, and with each development cycle we present the opportunity for any Free Culture artist to put their work in front of millions of Ubuntu users around the world. Although the space restrictions are tight, and we are limited to how much content we can include, the Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase is an excellent opportunity for artists everywhere. I am always hugely inspired by the wonderful entries that we recieve in each competition and I am excited about the opportunities we have to ship awesome Free Culture content with Karmic!
The first unit based on Marvell’s Sheevaplug always-on microserver platform, the Plug Computer 3.0 looks bulky, but impressive.
A networkable computer built into a standard electrical outlet plug – we take a look at the Plug Computer 3.0. It’s an intriguing idea – and not far-fetched given we have full computers in our pockets (we call them cell phones). Marvell introduced at CES 2010 its third-generation Sheevaplug, which is the basis for the Plug Computer 3.0. We got our hands on the first unit from one of Marvell’s six contract manufacturing partners.
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Other specs of the Plug Computer 3.0: USB 2.0 port and gigabit ethernet port. The Ionics Plug Computer 3.0 was running Linux (Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope).
OpenWrt Kamikaze 8.09.2 is released. This is a Linux distribution for network routers, like the Linksys WRT54G, or the Asus WL-500g and a lot of other routers. This distribution adds a lot of new functionality to routers, like improved ipv6 functionality.
Sigma Designs and MIPS first demonstrated an Android on MIPS implementation in August, displaying 1080p video on an unnamed MIPS processor from Sigma Designs. The processor is likely the Sigma Designs SMP864x system-on-chip (SoC), which is also being used in an upcoming Linux-based IP STB from Syabas, called the Popbox.
Debuting at CES this week was a device that takes Android to the next level. Over the past few weeks we’ve seen developments in Android that show how Android could be powering everything in our lives one day. With The enTourage eDGe Dualbook(TM) from enTourage Systems our education can now be powered via Android. Forget your netbooks, your laptops, and even your tablets.
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In regards to how it takes advantage of the Android operating system, you will see many of the same apps you are currently using on your Android devices available on the eDGe. Although you will not be able to access Google Market directly, the device can download apps from any other 3rd party stores available on the internet. The device also includes the extremely comforting feature of backing up all of your documents to enTourage Systems servers if for whatever reason you may lose your data. No longer will you be able to say to your professor, “My computer crashed and deleted EVERYTHING!”
In a humorous article from David Pogue of the New York Times, it seems that the “Android Army” is rising to meet any naysaying about the Nexus One or the Android platform with fanboyesque flames of their own. It seems Pogue wrote a review of the Nexus One and pointed out a few of the flaws that he saw in the phone, and IMMEDIATELY started receiving feedback from people that did not paint him in a great light.
Our friend Taylor of AndroidAndMe spotted this strange looking device from Motorola (HS1001) while in Vegas the other day. Upon closer examination, he found that it’s actually a cordless home phone running Android.
Check out this new take on the traditional Android soft keyboard. Rather than just changing the color or general shape of the buttons, qwerted changes the actual size of them based on the probability that they’ll be hit next. For instance, if you type a ‘c’, the letter ‘h’ will be larger than say, a ‘z’. All Android users will be happy to know that it was designed for 1.5 or higher.
The majority of Android application development takes place within the Eclipse environment.
Eclipse is a proven platform for not only Java application development, but also for Android applications thanks to the flexible and capable “plug-in” environment which provides sophisticated functionality for Android developers.
An intergroup on “New Media, Free Software and Open Information Society” was established in the European Parliament with the support of a wide range of political groups (EPP, ALDE/ADLE and Greens/EFA). Free Software promoters April (FR) and Associazione per il Software Libero (IT) welcome this decision that opens up the European Parliament to embracing the digital revolution.
I wonder what those embroidery machine firmware people were thinking. No diagnostics, no nothing. If a design is too large for the hoop of the machine, the machine accepts it (no “Data Error”), but doesn’t actually show or use the design – it just silently ignores it.
Whee. Undocumented formats, bad firmware, lack of sane error messages. And did I mention crazy interfaces? The embroidery machine itself shows up as a USB storage device when you connect it, except it for some reason takes about half a minute to calm down enough to be mounted. And forget about the embroidery card reader/writer – that one needs some magic USB driver too.
Google Engineering Director David Glazer has announced that registration for this year’s Google I/O developer conference is now open. Google I/O 2010 will take place on the 19th and the 20th of May, 2010 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. The organisers say that, in addition to various Google products, such as App Engine, Google Web Toolkit, Android and Chrome, the Google I/O developer conference will focus on “pushing the boundaries of web applications through open web technologies”.
First, an admission: after using MythTV for nearly two years, I succumbed to the lure of a blazingly fast fiber optic internet and television bundle, and I’ve been using the provider supplied DVR. I have some regrets about this. Though the multiple high definition tuners are great, the actual software on my proprietary DVR is sometimes less than intuitive.
FOSS developers are also moving up the stack. I strongly believe that real SaaS software also needs to be free and open source to drive the ubiquity up the stack, enabling the next step of development — free and open data in the cloud.
When Lisa covered some open source recipe tools last year, I figured Taco Recipe Manager was my speed, and I’d be stuck with suggestions like “ramen, capers and jelly.” I just didn’t have great expectations for the Gourmet recipe manager. I’ve never found online services terribly useful, and like cookbooks, I usually end up writing information down and missing critical bits.
Of course one can decide to build its own distro from scratch.
Moving to open source does not alleviate typical development functions s.a. coding, testing and qa, builds and packaging, not mentioning the governance (licensing issues) requirements.
Best of all, Teambox is a free and open source project. The app is built using Ruby on Rails, and while the web version of the app is perfect for small- or medium-size teams, larger companies can host Teambox on their own servers – which might also be good news for users and admins concerned with data security.
Sun Microsystems may be in a PR muzzle until sugar daddy Oracle gets permission to buy it from European antitrust regulators, but the coders who maintain Sun’s myriad software products are still banging away on their keyboards in an effort to not only look useful to keep their jobs, but be useful.
Eucalyptus is an open-source project that gives you the Amazon cloud API for non-Amazon clouds. In this interview, we chat with Rich Wolski, CTO of Eucalyptus Systems, about the project and the company.
* Eucalyptus as a technology-neutral abstraction layer for cloud computing
* Enabling utility pricing models for compute resources
* Toward the ability to mix and match platform services with infrastructure services
* Open source significance and strategy in Eucalyptus
* The evolving role of community in the Eucalyptus project
* Real-world implementations and usage scenarios
But now that JavaScript performance has come so far, Beltzner says, it’s time to look for other ways of boosting browser performance. “JavaScript performance for the longest time… was the most noticeable thing that made the web slow, and it was one of the most noticeable things that prevented web developers from being able to really interesting interactive applications,” he explains.
Nearly 16 months after the release of version 0.9, the Mozilla developers have announced the availability of the first beta for version 1.0 of their Lightning calendar extension. Lightning integrates Mozilla’s popular Sunbird calendar application into the Thunderbird email client and into the SeaMonkey internet application suite. According to Mozilla, the latest release includes nearly 500 bug fixes and improvements.
The list goes on, but at some point it’s just not worth bothering with responding point by point. Lanier’s trying to sell a book, and it’s yet another in a long line of people who don’t like the newfangled thing the kids are using because he doesn’t understand it. The fact is, it doesn’t matter. The internet is a huge success because people actually like the way it works and they get tons of value out of it, even if it’s not the value Lanier wanted.
When Tim Berners-Lee created the Web in 1991, it was with the aim of better facilitating scientific communication and the dissemination of scientific research. Put another way, the Web was designed to disrupt scientific publishing. It was not designed to disrupt bookstores, telecommunications, matchmaking services, newspapers, pornography, stock trading, music distribution, or a great many other industries.
Helping researchers access and exploit over 1.7 million full-text, peer reviewed biomedical research articles and over 19 million other life science research papers, on 12 January the British Library will showcase a whole range of new search and data mining tools designed to unlock the scientific knowledge held by UK PubMed Central.
The open education community today is only a small subsection of those involved in education worldwide, but some great initiatives and projects have already come out of it. An initiative like Peer 2 Peer University is a prime example of the social change that can happen in education when you start building on the concepts of open. P2PU is teaching and learning by peers for peers, and it is organized learning that is taking place outside of any institution. It’s what can happen when the default changes, when open educational resources scale. CC helps make that scale possible, which is what will ultimately transform the social landscape of education.
The good news is that there seems to be a lot of support for both HTML5 and open video formats, judging by this page. So if you agree with the call to “Support HTML5 open web video with open formats” you might like to add your vote there (you need to log in to Google to do so).
This fear of even minimal openness suggests that the institutional rot is now so deep at the NHS that nothing less than a complete revolution will ever sort things out. I’m not holding my breath.
New York City officials destroyed tons of new, unworn clothing and footwear last year that had been seized in raids on counterfeit label operations, abandoning a practice of giving knockoff garments to groups that help the needy.
Who has the ear of the White House when it comes to tech issues? Judging from the White House visitor logs, President Obama and his team have a soft spot for FCC Chair Julius Genachowski, who visited 48 times between June and September. Not that it was all business; Genachowski checked in to use the White House bowling alley and to attend a poetry reading.
Pete logs onto his desktop computer. It’s a “dumb” netbook built by Google and called Google Chrome Superbook 5, with a fast startup time of 0.3 seconds, the point at which the Google engineers figured further optimizations were not useful, in terms of limitations of human perception. The mouse next to the computer is also made by Google. It includes some technical wizardry that Pete was happy to wait for when he ordered it online in the Google web store: the mouse automatically logs him into his Google account based on his fingerprint, skin color and more, falling back to a password prompt if anything’s off.
As Olympic organizers in Whistler, B.C., gear up for the 2010 Winter Games in February, the area’s homeless are being forced to relocate.
Whistler’s homeless usually live in their cars or find shelter in the village’s parkades and parking lots. But with the Games around the corner, Olympic organizers are taking over roads and parking lots, displacing them.
In April 2008, The Orange County Register published a bombshell of an investigation about a license plate program for California government workers and their families. Drivers of nearly 1 million cars and light trucks—out of a total 22 million vehicles registered statewide—were protected by a “shield” in the state records system between their license plate numbers and their home addresses. There were, the newspaper found, great practical benefits to this secrecy.
Call me a cynic, but I suspect that effective privacy protection will only come about if the political classes find themselves exposed to the same risks as the rest of us.
Two computer servers containing the records of almost 1m patients were stolen from the Children’s University hospital in Temple Street in 2007 and have never been recovered.
The data were far more than that lost on stolen bank laptops in recent years. The theft was investigated by the data protection commissioner (DPC) and the gardai after being reported by the Dublin hospital in February 2007. The organisations had decided that there was no need to inform the public, believing there was little chance of the thief being able to access the data.
WHEN a defendant’s DNA appears to match DNA found at a crime scene, the probability that this is an unfortunate coincidence can be central to whether the suspect is found guilty. The assumptions used to calculate the likelihood of such a fluke – the “random match probability” – are now being questioned by a group of 41 scientists and lawyers based in the US and the UK.
The abuse of private data by Facebook employees was pretty much inevitable; the simple act of amassing data tends to lead to corruption. What’s sad is how lightly the social network reportedly controls its employees.
The government missed its deadline to respond to European allegations arising from the Phorm controversy that UK internet users are not protected against commercial wiretapping.
Police officers could find themselves on the wrong end of a citizen’s arrest if they follow advice issued by Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, after the European Court of Human Rights slapped the UK’s stop and search laws.
According to government lawyers, however, so long as officials are “only obeying orders”, there is little the ordinary citizen can do to resist them.
Officials in the Middle East and Europe questioned tighter U.S. airline security measures Tuesday, saying increased body scanning and inspections of Arab passengers would be discriminatory and overly intrusive.
The advantage of terahertz technology in resolving the privacy debate over body scanners seems in little doubt. What remains unproven are the benefits of body scanners themselves for counter-terrorism*.
How has it done one single thing to “fight against terrorism”? How many “terrorists” have they caught as a result of using “stop and search”? Zero, I’ll be bound. All it seems to be used for is to oppress opponents of the government. Words fail me.
As governments around the world – but particular in the UK – increase the surveillance of their hapless citizens, one argument above all is made in favour of doing so: “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.”
It shows Mr Duckett and his huge steer, Field Marshall, with the caption “a little man with big bulls.”
Mr Duckett received a letter from Council enforcement officer David Crowle, stating: “It is the council’s view that the adverts are detrimental to the amenity of the area and as such will seek their removal.”
It asked whether Mr Duckett woud be prepared to take down the “hoardings” without the need for formal action and warned that failure to abide by regulations could lead to a £400 fine or two years’ imprisonment.
City council leader Carl Minns has criticised Hull Trinity House School for installing a biometric fingerprint system for pupils to get their school meals.
Councillor Minns says it goes against guidance issued to schools by the council.
The school, in Princes Dock Street, city centre, started using the system this week. Cllr Minns told the Mail: “My principal objection is on the grounds of information security.
“At some point the school will have to store a child’s data on a computer and if it is subject to hacking or proper security is not there, then once the data is out there, it is out there for life and you can’t get it back.”
Simon Glik, a lawyer, was walking down Tremont Street in Boston when he saw three police officers struggling to extract a plastic bag from a teenager’s mouth. Thinking their force seemed excessive for a drug arrest, Glik pulled out his cellphone and began recording.
The TV presenter and Marks & Spencer model Myleene Klass has been warned by police for waving a knife at teenagers who were peering into a window of her house late at night.
Self-confessed hacker Gary McKinnon has been granted a reprieve from extradition to the US where he faces up to 70 years in jail for hacking federal and Pentagon computers.
In his 1865 book “The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of our Coal-Mines,” English economist William Stanley Jevons made the observation “Of the Economy of Fuel” that when improvements in technology make it possible to use a fuel more efficiently, the consumption of the fuel tends to go up, not down.
In what is being called an “awful” and “horrible” move for for one of the word’s top conservation priorities, Madagascar’s interim authority, which seized power during a military coup last year, will now allow rosewood illegally logged from national parks to be exported. The move is expected to trigger a spasm in new logging in the country’s remaining rainforest reserves, especially in Masoala National Park.
People here have one thing to thank Somali pirates for: Better fishing.
In past years, illegal commercial trawlers parked off Somalia’s coast and scooped up the ocean’s contents. Now, fishermen on the northern coast of neighboring Kenya say, the trawlers are not coming because of pirates.
“There is a lot of fish now, there is plenty of fish. There is more fish than people can actually use because the international fishermen have been scared away by the pirates,” said Athman Seif, the director of the Malindi Marine Association.
A major Antarctic glacier has passed its tipping point, according to a new modelling study. After losing increasing amounts of ice over the past decades, it is poised to collapse in a catastrophe that could raise global sea levels by 24 centimetres.
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York may be forced to deliver documents related to American International Group Inc.’s government bailout after the chairman of a House oversight committee said he would issue a subpoena.
Edolphus Towns, the New York Democrat who runs the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said yesterday in a statement he would issue a subpoena for New York Fed records concerning the decision it made to fully reimburse AIG’s partners. Banks including Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Societe Generale SA were among beneficiaries of AIG’s rescue, called by lawmakers a “backdoor bailout” for financial firms.
Today, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which Congress established last year to investigate the causes of the financial crisis, is scheduled to question the heads of four big banks — Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, John Mack of Morgan Stanley and Brian Moynihan of Bank of America. The Op-Ed editors asked eight financial experts to pose questions they would like to hear the bankers answer.
Leading Wall Street bankers said today they underestimated the severity of the financial crisis and apologised for making mistakes as a US government commission began its inquiry into the root causes of the banking meltdown.
Ultimately Lehman was let go for political reasons (Paulson not wanting to be labeled Mr. Bailout) and because the British government prevented Barclays from saving the bank. Lehman was stunned that they weren’t saved. It existed before, it exists now (yes, Mr. Blankfein), and it will exist next year if real financial services reform isn’t passed in Congress.
Lloyd Blankfein, the head of Goldman Sachs Group Inc., failed to own up to his firm’s role in selling mortgage securities that helped trigger the global credit crisis, said the chairman of the panel investigating the financial meltdown.
“Mr. Blankfein himself never admitted that there was any responsibility of Goldman Sachs to make sure the products themselves were good products,” Philip Angelides, chairman of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, told reporters after a hearing in Washington today. “That’s very troublesome.”
But the foundation tells Reuters that Goldman informed it that it would ask the SEC to block the proposal from appearing on the proxy ballot sent to shareholders — effecting stopping the plan dead in its tracks.
For years, Wall Street whispered that Goldman Sachs profited handsomely by trading ahead of — or even against — its own clients.
On Tuesday, a Goldman executive made an unusual admission that, in some cases, the rumors were true.
In an e-mail message to select clients, Thomas C. Mazarakis, the head of Goldman’s fundamental strategies group, acknowledged that his unit often provided investment ideas that the firm had already traded on. Sometimes Goldman has even taken the opposite approach, betting against particular instruments that the group has recommended.
An executive from Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N) said the company in some cases profited by trading ahead of or against its own clients, the New York Times said on its website.
Thomas Mazarakis, who heads Goldman’s fundamental strategies group, told select clients in an email that his unit often provided investment ideas that the firm had already traded on and the firm sometimes took the opposite approach, betting against particular instruments recommended by the group, the Times said.
“We may trade, and may have existing positions, based on trading ideas before we have discussed those trading ideas with you,” the paper quoted Mazarakis as writing in the email.
How should a program be structured? Do not think for a second that Wall Street will not look to pass along any costs to their customers. In fact, Tim Ryan said as much in a Wall Street Journal article, Banks Brace for Bailout Fee:
“In our industry, costs are typically passed along to institutions and individual investors, so the burden will likely fall on them,” said Timothy Ryan, president of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association. Major banks declined to comment.
Thanks Tim. Are hundreds of billions of dollars “typically” injected into the industry, as well? I think not.
A levy on bank liabilities would get the industry squealing, especially if it approached $120 billion. But the Obama administration isn’t crazy to float the idea. A well-crafted tax could help recoup bailout costs while also giving banks an incentive to behave more sensibly. It doesn’t have to apply just to the United States, either.
Investment banking giant Goldman Sachs has become perhaps the most prominent symbol for everything that is wrong with the U.S. financial system, but most Americans cannot even begin to explain what they do or how they have made tens of billions of dollars from the economic collapse of America. The truth is that what Goldman Sachs did was fairly simple, and there may not have even been anything “illegal” about it (although they are now being investigated by the SEC among others).
Goldman Sachs’ fraudulent financial speculating was at the core of inflating and bursting the housing bubble that created the financial crisis of 2008. the results: university endowments and state education funds have dried up resulting in higher fees and tuitions for students, fewer loans are available and job markets for graduates is almost non-existent. Add to that the fact that young people will ultimately be on the hook for paying back the billions in bailouts and loan guarantees that the government paid out to the banks, and you can start to see how Goldman Sachs has hamstrung the generation that Simmons is supposed to be looking out for in academia.
Formerly secret records suggest a tobacco company drove changes to how European policy is made, claim Katherine Smith and her colleagues at Bath University in the UK. They sifted through over 700 recently released emails, reports and presentations from British American Tobacco (BAT).
Proposed European Union policy is subjected to so-called “impact assessments”. Smith’s team says the BAT documents suggest the company recruited food, oil and chemical firms and a think tank to successfully lobby the European Commission to change the focus of these assessments away from health impacts and towards economics.
Watson has applauded Google’s plans to stop censoring the internet in Chinaafter it discovered evidence of Chinese cyber attacks and surveillance of human rights activists.
He said in a blog post: “We should all applaud them for this brave corporate move. And we should also use their lead to put pressure on other technology companies to stop all this nonsense once and for all. Apple should go next. They should refuse to censor the Dalai Lama applications from their App store.”
In a democratic society, the decision to ban an organization when it is not directly responsible for violence is deeply controversial. Any such decision is surely not taken lightly. However, the Home Office proscription of the group Islam4UK announced today will only serve to undermine the government’s effort to prevent violent extremism.
Australian painters and photographers may soon need to watch their step, as an overhaul of child pornography laws in New South Wales looks set to remove the defence of “artistic merit” from the statute books.
A federal appeals court is reversing a lifetime internet ban imposed on a child sex offender also handed a 15-year prison term.
The outcome highlights the appellate courts are all over the map when it comes to internet bans often imposed on defendants, especially sex deviants, once they have served their time. What’s more, the courts appear to be accepting the internet as a basic freedom to which convicts, even the worst of the worst, usually should not be denied permanent access.
A new study warns that abandoning network neutrality could transfer billions of dollars from the most competitive sector of the Internet (online content) to the least (Internet service providers).
Net neutrality is not just the fairest way to organise the internet but the most economically effective, according to two US academics. Their economic analysis of the policy claims that it is the best way to encourage investment in online services.
Three U.S. universities will stop promoting the use of Amazon.com’s Kindle DX e-book reader in classrooms after complaints that the device doesn’t give blind students equal access to information.
It is another change of tactics in a war that has been going on for 50 years. This week, consumer electronics companies led by Apple, HP, Sony, Panasonic and Research In Motion, broke off the latest round of talks to reform the Europe’s convoluted system of private copy levies.
Historically, what it’s been is the entertainment industry putting together a list of countries that don’t have draconian enough copyright laws, and it gets the USTR to complain about them and put them on a “watch list” of sorts. Pretty much everyone who understands these issues knows it’s a complete joke, but unfortunately there are lots of people who don’t understand these issues, and it lets diplomats and politicians make laughable claims like saying that Canada is a hub for piracy — and the press almost never questions where that information came from because it sounds all official.
Hadopi, the French agency charged with handling file-sharers’ copyright digressions, has just made a huge infringement faux pas of its own. Last week the group unveiled the logo which is set to represent this bastion of copyright righteousness, but embarrassingly it was designed with unlicensed fonts.
The problem, of course, is that if you are at all familiar with the subject, you would realize that unauthorized file sharing is not a societal problem like “drug use,” but is a business model issue.
The two were granted an appeal little over a month later, but the record labels do not intend to wait and are going after their money. They have sent the District Court a letter where they ask the authorities to collect the fines.
According to a new SEC filing, Warner Music Group’s two top executives, Edgar Bronfman Jr. and Lyor Cohen, earned a combined $14 million in salary, bonuses, stock and stock options in 2009. That’s down $2 million from their combined 2008 compensation, but twice what they earned in 2007. This chart via paidContent details for WMG’s four top execs:
It’s beginning to appear that some of the major labels’ strategy for dealing with the changing structure of the music business — in which overall money is up, but has shifted away from the record labels’ bank accounts — is to simply bleed the old market dry.
A federal appeals court reinstated on Wednesday an antitrust lawsuit accusing major record labels of conspiring to fix prices for potentially millions of people who download their music over the Internet.
A group of leading record companies face court proceedings in the US over accusations they conspired to fix the prices and terms under which their music would be sold over the Internet.
The first speaker is Pat Aufderheide, director of social media at American University’s School of Communications. The purpose of copyright is to promote culture, with “limited” monopoly and provide balance with exemptions to make new culture. Copyright holders created imbalance in copyright. At this point, fair use which was “dinky backwater” is now escape hatch from copyright holders. It’s the most flexible copyright exemption in the world. Best Practices movement is about education. AU has published best practices guides, with filmmakers as first one. Eight weeks after guide, three films went to Sundance and got picked up. Biggest evidence that Best Practices guide, eight pages long, is that every insurer of errors and omissions (required for broadcast and cablecast) accepts guide.
Of course, the concessions appear to be rather minor, and my more cynical view is that they knew they were going to do this all along. The idea is simple. Introduce one section that’s even more ridiculous and outrageous than the sections you really want passed, and then let all the complaints and press coverage focus on that more ridiculous section. Then, after people get all worked up about it, “concede” just a little bit, and notice that most people no longer have the energy to fight about the other provisions.
There has been much speculation around clause 17 of the Digital Economy Bill, the part that would give the unelected Lord Mandelson powers to rewrite copyright law whenever he chooses, grant powers to others at a whim, or impose duties or fines on anyone who offends him.
A U.S. lawmaker today warned of attempts to roll back a provision in copyright law that has become a cornerstone of posting and sharing content on the Internet, pledging to fight to preserve the doctrine of fair use in the face of an array of challenges.
How do you request it? Very simple, fill out the form and enter the document number 17779/09 as the document you request. Then the Council secretariat has 15 days to respond, either it would grant you access and submit the reasons for refusal.
Here is stops for most persons. You have against 15 days for a confirmatory application. When the confirmatory application is denied you can complain to the EU-Ombudsman or sue the Commission.
Why does DG Trade want criminal sanctions from third nations when these instruments are not adopted in the ‘acquis communautaire’ yet? Unfortunately we cannot find out in their negotiation mandate from the Council because it is not disclosed.
It was very interesting to talk to Mr. Velasco. He said the negotiations could be understood, in a very very simplified way, as you basically could get cheap cars in exchange for IPR enforecement laws.
Interestingly enough, his materials published on the interenet also provided some kind of explanation to why people are afraid of having their iPods searched. Under “What is new” in a presentation about Enforcement of IPR Mr. Velasco says:
[it] “No longer excludes from the scope of the regulation counterfeit or pirated goods in a traveler’s personal baggage where such goods are suspected to be part of a larger-scale traffic.”
Quebec consumer protection group the Union des Consommateurs has joined the mounting storm of outrage levelled at the entertaiment industry’s ACTA plan.
According to this faq-like post on the official Nvidia Tegra developer site, Ubuntu Linux is supported as an operating system for Tegra 2 based devices.
At CES, Nvidia demonstrated tablet-PC prototypes incorporating its Tegra 250 processor, including a Linux-based model from Foxconn, and Android-based models from ICD and Notion Ink, the latter using Pixel Qi display technology. Meanwhile, an Android version of HP’s Windows-based “Slate” computer is on the way, say several reports.
The Linux Box is partnering with Opsera Limited to become an official Opsview reseller in the United States, with the goal of expanding the national presence of this award-winning network and infrastructure monitoring software suite.
Opsview provides comprehensive system management capabilities used to monitor the health of today’s most complex data centers. It enables IT managers to identify and fix issues with their systems before they impact system availability. Opsview enhances the widely used Nagios® monitoring framework by adding many additional configuration, graphing and management capabilities, while remaining 100 percent compatible. Opsview earned the Product Excellence award for Best System Management Tool at LinuxWorld Expo in 2008.
You know what stories perform the worst on Linux Today? Anything that pertains to freedom- software freedom, the GNU Foundation, the Software Freedom Law Center, civil rights, and law. Technology is front and center on the big issues of the day. If we didn’t have FOSS we would be in an even worse mess as a society, because then technology would all be centralized and controlled by a very few people who have proven their hostility to civil liberties, privacy, and basic decency.
I don’t believe it is exaggerating to say that Linux/FOSS is all that stands between technology tyranny, corporate tyranny, and the hope of something better.
I’ve sampled a variety of podcasts about Linux, including FLOSS Weekly and TuxRadar, but the Outlaws are by far and away my favourite. At first blush an excitable German University student and baritone Liverpudlian might seem like an odd choice to host such a thing, but you’ll quickly realize that both share an equal passion for all things open. They also put on a great show.
Here’s a quick tour of the Outlaw universe to get you up to speed:
One of my favourite recent episodes of the podcast featured an extended interview with Bradley Kuhn & Aaron Williamson from the Software Freedom Law Center. Did you know that a whole whack of television and set-top box manufacturers are using GPL code without giving back to the community? The lesson to be learned here is that open-source has deeper pockets than you might think.
There is an effort that some of us have started for the purpose of bringing GNU-Linux to low income benefits groups. We have made contact with one of the largest charities in San Francisco. This is an organization that feeds thousands of people every month. They also have a jobs program. In connection with that jobs program, they have a computer lab. We are in the process of rolling out GNU-Linux in that context because we feel that Linux computers could do so much for people who are trying to lift themselves up off of the street.
Lately, I’ve been noticing stories about how to use Linux you need to know half-a-hundred Linux shell commands and the like. Ah, what century are you from? Today, if you can see a window and handle a mouse you’re ready to use Linux.
And, no, I’m not talking about how we’re all already using Linux in devices like the TiVo or the Droid smartphone and through Linux-powered Web sites like Google. I’m talking about using Linux on the desktop.
There is nothing, I repeat nothing, that requires any special knowledge to use Linux on the desktop today. If you’ve already mastered Windows XP, you’ll have little more trouble moving to a Linux desktop like Red Hat’s Fedora 12; Novell’s openSUSE 11.2; or Canonical’s Ubuntu 9.10 than you would in switching over to Windows 7.
Hmm. Odd release. Something like 40% of the patches are in DRM (mostly nouveau and radeon, both staging, so it’s a bit less scary than it sounds. But there’s a noticeable i915 component too). That’s all pretty unusual, afaik.
The other part of this work is the new protocol requests for DRI2 2.2 and they include DRI2SwapBuffers, DRI2GetMSC, DRI2WaitMSC, DRI2WaitSBC and DRI2SwapInterval. These requests are used for supporting the SGI_video_sync, SGI_swap_interval, and OML_sync_control GLX extensions. It was back in October that we originally talked about these DRI2 sync and swap extensions.
The last time we talked about Gallium3D work being done by Zack Rusin was just before the holidays when he was hacking on new geometry shader support. Zack’s latest work on Gallium3D though is for defining “feature levels” that provides a table for what features can be supported by a given driver / graphics processor.
The latest work by Chia-I Wu is a new EGL driver / state tracker (named “egl_g3d”) that has just been pushed into Mesa. For those unfamiliar with EGL, as described by the Khronos Group, “EGL is an interface between Khronos rendering APIs such as OpenGL ES or OpenVG and the underlying native platform window system.”
Linux comes with a virtue of different software about Mathematics. Computers are very good on Math because after all. To some people computers are like super-calculators on steroids.Whether you want to program or plot, prove theorems or create asthestically appealing graphs or charts, there is something for everyone in this compilation of top 30 math packages available in Linux.
I thought I would give our readers the heads up about the soon to be released CrossOver 9.0. CodeWeavers CrossOver 9.0 is slated for launch sometime towards the end of January beginning of February 2010 and represents a major step forward for the CrossOver product. At this time no definite release date is scheduled, but it should be within the next month or so.
Today the version 2 of DivX Converter has been released. DivX converter is a simple Mencoder frontend to Produce DivX Player Compatible AVI video format with the ability to merge subtitles . It support many video and audio filters and many presets.
One of the best ways to protect sensitive computer data like credit card numbers and social security information is to use encryption software. Encryption software executes an algorithm that is designed to encrypt data in such a way that it cannot be recovered (decrypted) without access to the key. It is a main component of all aspects of file protection and computer communication. Files on hard drives and other removable media, email messages, and packets sent over computer networks can be made secure by encryption software.
Ripping a CD or DVD is one of the most basic tasks for a PC user. But you need the right tools if you want to automate the process. Current ripping programs incorporate video encoding, tagging, and subtitles management. There’s no single app that will do everything, so here are our picks for the best Linux apps for ripping audio CDs and video DVDs.
After putting in all of the time, and perhaps money, into your WordPress website or blog, its now time to secure and protect it from outside enemies and general bad guys: hackers, spammers and all round tossers.
There is no doubt that Joomla! is one of the best content management system (CMS) in the world. It has a large set of extensions to meet almost any type of application need ranging from content management, photo gallery, multimedia streaming to e-commerce and social networking. It has great flexibility in changing designs and customizing the code. With Joomla, you can build any kind of website and dynamic web application. For example, this step-by-step tutorial by Suhreed Sarkar describes how to build custom form applications in Joomla! using CK Forms component without delving into any PHP code.
In this article by Reynante Martinez, we’ll cover everything from modeling a tin can from scratch, giving it some basic shading, adding appropriate textures, finalizing the lighting schemes for the scene to lastly compositing it for a better feel.
Mandriva, Europe’s leading Linux publisher, offers clients recyclable, environmentally-friendly packaging for its latest distribution: Mandriva linux 2010.
At a time when bringing in sustainable development policies is imperative for business, Mandriva has gone for entirely recyclable packaging for its latest distribution to meet customer wishes.
Conclusions: This is hands-down one of the most user-friendly distributions I’ve tried. This long-term test drive had a few relatively minor bugs, and they were far outweighed by Zenwalk’s overall friendliness and ease of use. The distro is bright and well-designed, and is backed by strong documentation and a newby-friendly community. In my installation it had a very high “just worked” factor, although obviously individual results may vary for other users and machines. If XFCE isn’t your cup of tea, Zenwalk is also available in a GNOME version.
The Raleigh-based Linux provider’s stock purchases were made as part of a previously announced repurchasing plan that was last amended in November 2008. The program authorizes the repurchase of up to $250 million worth of common stock. The program expires Oct. 31, 2010, unless the company’s board and executives discontinue the program sooner.
Shockingly, Ubuntu dropped wvdial and gnome-ppp — the command-line and GUI ppp connectors, respectively — from the distro years ago. In order to connect to the Internet, most African users must therefore connect to the Internet (see the problem?), download the appropriate packages, and configure their dial-up or 3G connection. Just about anyone who has used Ubuntu knows that it’s not particularly capable out of the box without Internet access.
Boxee Beta is now open to all. Even its alpha release was rock solid, so one could think of the kind of expectation everyone has for Boxee Beta. From the first look, I have to say, Boxee beta has pretty much lived up to the hype.
Lots of fascinating new devices were showcased during past week’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. In addition to marketing new products events like the CES serve as an opportunity to demonstrate what technology can do. Naturally, some of those feats may not prove particularly useful, but they are fun to watch anyway.
Atmel announced a version of its ARM926EJ-based “SAM9″ line of industrial-focused system-on-chips, this time integrating a video decoder and graphics acceleration. The SAM9M10 ships with a Linux evaluation board and BSP, and supports video at up to 720 x 576 pixels and 30 frames per second, says the company.
One of these Windows-oriented devices — the Viliv P3 PMP (portable media player) — also runs Android, and offers an 800MHz ARM Cortex-A8 processor, WiFi, and a 3.7-inch AMOLED display.
The Android 2.1 SDK includes APIs for creating animated wallpapers, as well as some additional telephony functions and a couple of improvements to interaction with the WebKit browser, all of which are used by Google’s own Nexus One applications and are now available to other developers too.
At CES, Innovative Converged Devices (ICD) demonstrated two Android-based touchscreen computers based on Nvidia’s Tegra 250 processor — a 15.6-inch Vega kitchen computer and a seven-inch Ultra tablet. Also at CES, ICD and T-Mobile UK announced that the latter will launch the Vega later this year in the U.K.
One Laptop per Child Association will be gathering 300 MBA, graduate and undergraduate business students to develop innovative business cases for XO laptop deployment under the auspices of the Global Case Challenge. But I wonder why.
Every year, for the last couple of years, FOSS community Nepal has been getting a small stall to showcase whatever they have to the unusually large mass that come to witness the event. Not that FOSS is going anywhere in Nepal, but still that opportunity to try and create awareness existed. From this year onwards FOSS community is not going to be able to do that too as they have been told that due to lack of space they will not be able to put up a stall.
A big concern with the modern JVM languages like Scala and Clojure is the ability to scale out from the single JVM address space into distributed environments. Different approaches include a distributed JVM (terracotta), distributed actors (akka), message queues (AMQP/rabbitmq), or solutions for specific computational models, like hadoop.
The arrival of a new year is often viewed as an opportunity for self improvement. According the US government, some of the population’s top new year’s resolutions for 2010 include plans to lose weight, improve finances, and reduce stress. I imagine that our audience of super-geeks have a few goals that aren’t on the list. This year, I decided to finally fix up my personal Web site. An open source lifestream framework called Storytlr made my goal easy to accomplish.
The Web browsing world is exciting again. Google’s Chrome browser is faster than fast and there’s serious thought that Internet Explorer may actually lose its top spot in the browser market-share wars. But for all the excitement, it would be a real mistake to overlook Firefox; with the forthcoming release of Firefox 3.6, which is now available as a release candidate, Mozilla’s flagship browser is looking better than ever.
The Firefox Add-on platform is the most vibrant source of browser innovation in the world, with over 1.5 billion downloads and tens of thousands of add-ons. There’s been a lot of speculation over the past couple of days around the future of Firefox Add-ons, and how Jetpack fits into that future. There’s currently a lot of misinformation swirling about this topic and it’s making people very unhappy. We’re going to attempt to clear things up below…
A recent pitch from the folks opposing Oracle’s ownership of MySQL via acquisition of Sun Microsystems got me thinking. The plea, ‘Oracle can have Sun, but not MySQL’ may make sense to some, but to me it speaks to the irony of closing out Oracle or any company or anyone from open source. Upon further reflection and given 2010 is off to a roaring pace of M&A, I also began to wonder what the impact of the ‘Save MySQL’ campaign could be on open source in M&A, particularly if it was to successfully derail the acquisition or somehow decouple MySQL from Sun under Oracle?
Now, obviously I’m delighted to see Jordan aspire to become the open source “hub” for the Middle East, as the press release puts it: we sorely need a focal point for free software there.
Acquia will also offer a seminar series for U.S. federal, state, and local governments to discuss adoptions and best practices for government use. This is definitely a smart move, as risk-averse government agency IT decision makers will take comfort in the successes of their peers with Drupal Social Publishing.
Acquia appears poised to take advantage of the growing interest in open source and social media. Increased use of Drupal will open the door further to open source adoption within governments in the United States and worldwide. In doing so, Acquia is definitely playing its part as a founding member of Open Source for America.
The PHP development team recently introduced the latest version of the new PHP 5.3 branch, PHP 5.3.1. This version essentially does not change the essential core 5.3 PHP engine, but by focusing on stability and security, the PHP team has introduced more than 100 bug fixes and tweaks to the overall framework.
FSF volunteer and GNU Generation member Osama Khalid just launched a great tool: TinyOgg. TinyOgg takes in a link to a Flash video (boo!) and spits out a link to an Ogg video (hooray!).
Somebody made a comment the other day about computers being a commodity item. It was stated that computers are thought of as no different to a television or radio. This comment sort of alarmed me because I do not think of computers in this manner. I don’t think that computers should be classed as a commodity item and below I say why.
A solution to the TLS renegotiation vulnerability discovered in the design of the SSL/TLS protocol early last November is on the horizon. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has ammended the RFC 5246 specification (Transport Layer Security [TLS] Protocol Version 1.2) and introduced a new renegotiation_info TLS extension which will store a connection’s cryptographic information. The problem was caused by a flaw in the TLS protocol design that affects the parameter renegotiation of an existing TLS connection. Previously, the TLS protocol offered no conclusively authenticated associations between the client requests before and client requests after a TLS renegotiation. The new extension stores additional information to describe the state of a TLS connection (“secure_renegotiation”, “client_verify_data” and “server_verify_data”).
As the smoke clears following the case of Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab, the failed Christmas Day “underpants bomber” of Northwest Airlines Flight 253 fame, there are just three simple points for us Westerners to take away.
First: It is completely impossible to prevent terrorists from attacking airliners.
Second: This does not matter. There is no need for greater efforts on security.
Third: A terrorist set fire to his own trousers, suffering eyewateringly painful burns to what Australian cricket commentators sometimes refer to as the “groinal area”, and nobody seems to be laughing. What’s wrong with us?
Consider that on this very day about 6,700 Americans will die…. Consider then that around 1,900 of the Americans who die today will be less than 65, and that indeed about 140 will be children. Approximately 50 Americans will be murdered today, including several women killed by their husbands or boyfriends, and several children who will die from abuse and neglect. Around 85 of us will commit suicide, and another 120 will die in traffic accidents.
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Indeed, if one does not utter the magic word “terrorism,” the notion that it is actually in the best interests of the country for the government to do everything possible to keep its citizens safe becomes self-evident nonsense. Consider again some of the things that will kill 6,700 Americans today. The country’s homicide rate is approximately six times higher than that of most other developed nations; we have 15,000 more murders per year than we would if the rate were comparable to that of otherwise similar countries. Americans own around 200 million firearms, which is to say there are nearly as many privately owned guns as there are adults in the country. In addition, there are about 200,000 convicted murderers walking free in America today (there have been more than 600,000 murders in America over the past 30 years, and the average time served for the crime is about 12 years).
Of some 84,000 chemicals being used commercially in the United States, some 20 percent — or 17,000 — are kept secret not only from the public, but from medical professionals, state regulators and even emergency responders, according to a report at the Washington Post.
It cautions, “The list includes only pundits and (supposed) experts. That means the list doesn’t include policymakers such as Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, because however wrong they may have been, policymakers and especially Fed chairmen are undeniably constrained in what they can say publicly. I strongly suspect that both Greenspan and Bernanke honestly believed that there was no housing bubble, but alas, we’ll never know for sure. The list also doesn’t include pundits/experts who were wrong only about the fallout of the collapse of the housing bubble that is, the extent to which the collapse of the housing bubble would harm the economy.”
Those who oppose smoking in movies aimed at young people planned to step up their assault on the science-fiction epic “Avatar” on Tuesday with advertisements in Hollywood trade papers that accuse the film of providing the equivalent of $50 million in free tobacco advertising.
The information about taxpayers subsidizing smoking in big-screen movies comes from a November, 2009 report by the University of California San Francisco titled “Taxpayer Subsidies for US Films with Tobacco Imagery” that examined taxpayer subsidies for youth-rated films (G, PG and PG-13).
Just as we cannot let the health insurance companies pretend they are “for reform” while secretly buying millions of dollars worth of attack ads against reform, we also cannot stand silent when newspapers outsource the writing of the “news” to groups advised by health insurance companies.
Currently, the Center’s website shows that Obama received $19,462,986 from the health sector, which includes health professionals ($11.7m), health services/HMOs ($1.4m), hospitals/nursing homes ($3.3m) and pharmaceuticals/health products ($2.1m). Miscellaneous health donations (from which Obama received $860,411) are also factored into the current total health sector numbers but are not accessible on the site.
14-01-10: Still conflicting reports coming out. It could be that Google has already lifted its own censorship measures. Or it could be that the censorship measures are still up, but because of the intense interest generated (and click-thrus) on sensitive subjects, small holes in the wall are being publicised and magnified.
It doesn’t matter any more: People are getting through the wall.
“In an update to Google’s withdrawal from China, there are reports that censorship has already been lifted. It’s probably taken a while to report because of Google’s ranking system.”
Last Friday, January 8, the University of Amsterdam (I’m with the competition) handed out an honorary doctorate to Harvard prof. Lawrence Lessig, known to you all (I may hope!) as one of the founding members of the wildly successful Creative Commons project. During the acceptance ceremony, he held one of his keynote presentations – and one that is required listening material for everyone. And with everyone – I mean everyone.
It is commonly supposed that, whatever its moral and theoretical standing, intellectual property is necessary for creators of written works to make a living and — even more importantly — to continue to create. Here, I will set aside the theoretical status of copyright, which is amply discussed in Stephan Kinsella’s Against Intellectual Property and Michele Boldrin and David Levine’s Against Intellectual Monopoly. I will focus on existing and emerging possibilities for writers to earn a living in a world where no copyrights exist.
Airwave 7 is available as a cloud-based Software-as-a-Service offering as well as a Linux-based software appliance. Wargo noted that Aruba uses the Red Hat clone CentOS as its underlying operating system for the Airwave software appliance.
Wow! Not only there are Ubuntu screenshots and big Wilber, no… The textbook explains what is Open Source, what are proprietary operating systems. You can even find words like FreeBSD, NetBSD, EXT2, EXT3, UFS They equally provide space for Microsoft Windows Vista, XP and Ubuntu Linux (no MacOSX). Granted, in the office section, they explain how to work with MS Office tools, but they acknowledge existence of OpenOffice.org, quoting ‘We were attracted by Microsoft Office 2007 and OpenOffice.org.’, providing links to OpenOffice.org (on each chapter about office tools) and manuals.
While the developers still work continuous on the next version of GIMP there comes, of course, the question of a release date. Will GIMP 2.8 yet reach us in 2010?
Note that three items I did not bring up are cost, stability or security. While Linux is obtainable for free, that has never been the feature that the FSF promotes (though many users and individuals will bring this up as an important point in their opinion). In fact, the GPL specifically provides for charging for distributing and copying Linux, and calls it out as a protected right under the GPL.
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Linux is strong in so many markets. Yet, the market most visible to the average consumer, the desktop, has eluded a Linux presence, for the most part. Is it because Linux is complex? No, not really. Using Linux is much like using Windows. My kids’ friends have no problems using my PC. Administering Linux is quite a bit different, though. And that is what people are really saying when they talk about “using Linux is complex”. But being different or new does not make it more complex. Alas, that is likely a topic for a different time and place.
When I went to install Linux, I found that HP and Microsoft have now found a way to use all four available diskpartitions – one for the Windows bootloader (don’t ask me why, I don’t understand), one for Windows 7, one for Recovery, and one for HP Tools. So the first thing I had to do was make a set of recovery DVDs, so I could delete the Recovery partition and create an Extended Partition to hold the Linux distributions. That took well over an hour, to create three DVDs. Once that was done, I was ready to install Linux…
World Programming’s WPS software has been approved as ready for IBM’s Linux on its system z mainframes.
World Programming (WP) is being sued because its software supports the American software giant SAS Institute’s Statistical Analysis System (SAS) programming language. The nod from IBM means that users’ programs written using the SAS language can be run under Linux on IBM system z mainframes.
We know that NVIDIA’s Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix (VDPAU) works very well for exposing PureVideo capabilities on Linux. We have benchmarked VDPAU and found it to perform very well in that under Linux it’s possible to play HD videos with a $20 CPU and $30 GPU thanks to this video acceleration method. VDPAU is the best video acceleration / decoding API on Linux and is widely adopted by various multimedia applications, which is all in contrast to AMD’s XvBA and their troubled implementation. But how does VDPAU work on mobile devices? With the ASUS Eee PC 1201N that is built on NVIDIA’s ION platform we ran a new set of VDPAU video playback tests.
The problem with corporate networks is they not only stop the bad guys coming in but also your users who want to work remotely, whether at home, at a client site or on the road. Here is where a VPN product comes in, and the simplest to deploy on Windows is a Linux virtual appliance called OpenVPN.
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However, Windows admins really ought to give OpenVPN a look. True enough it is a Linux product but this does not matter. In a stroke of masterful thinking, the product is available as a pre-packaged virtual appliance.
This means that all the work in setting up a Linux server and installing and configuring the software has been done for you. You don’t have to make the product fit onto an existing server, risking corrupting some other vital piece of infrastructure.
Based on the Quake 3 engine, Tremulous is a multi-player, open source (GPL), first person shooter and real time strategy game that runs on Linux and other platforms. Humans have to battle aliens in this game, with each team constructing and guarding a base, the most important of which is the spawn.
Based on Linux, the GP2X Wiz (nice name!) is a completely open multi-functional handheld entertainment device. The makers, GamePark Holding from Korea, say it’s different than other shanzhai video game consoles in that it uses a completely “open source” approach. Supposed to be released in late 2008 with a retail price of USD 179.99, there have been massive delays and troubles with the company, but now, finally, it is apparently ready to go.
Most comparisons of the KDE and GNOME desktops focus on usability and productivity apps. However, they often neglect what might be called the leisure apps — specifically, those used for image and music management.
But in the modern online culture, these leisure apps are often as important to users as any other aspect of the desktop. For many, especially at home, they are probably more important than a word processor or spreadsheet.
One of the coolest things about being a Linux user can be showing off your slick custom interface to your friends. With the maturing of Grub 2 and kernel mode setting, we’ll soon all have a beautiful boot from start to finish. The step we’re covering today is customizing GDM, the login manager you likely use if you’re running Ubuntu or any other system with Gnome as your desktop. Well those of you who don’t like the Ubuntu brown can brighten up because there’s no shortage of slick GDM themes available for download. Today, we’ll cover where to get them and how to use them.
Hub City Media, Inc. (HCM) today announced that it has been awarded Red Hat Premier Business Partner Status by Red Hat. The achievement makes HCM one of just two companies nationwide to be granted this elite status, adding to the company’s long list of advanced certifications related to open source and identity management technologies.
Open source solutions provider Red Hat has named its first advanced business partner in Algeria. IT services outfit Netsline – a company specialising in open source solutions – has picked up the advanced business partner status and will now look to promote its solutions even further across French-speaking North Africa.
Fedora 12 is a great Linux distribution with an impeccable pedigree. While it might not be the best distribution to throw at a total newbie, it definitely provides one of the more technically solid and stable platforms around. It draws on the bigger Red Hat community for the latest improvements to the core operating system and support for key components like graphics cards and network hardware.
Upgrading to Fedora 12 for users of previous versions is a no-brainer. There’s even a section in the installation guide to help you through the upgrade-in-place process. Fedora 12 should appeal to potential new users looking for a solid distribution with great community support and extensive hardware compatibility as well.
MEPIS LLC has released SimplyMEPIS 8.0.15, an update to the community edition of MEPIS 8.0. The ISO files for 32 and 64 bit processors are SimplyMEPIS-CD_8.0.15-rel_32.iso and SimplyMEPIS-CD_8.0.15-rel_64.iso.
The time finally came to upgrade my wife’s computer. She’s been running Xandros 4 Linux — based on Debian 3.1 “Sarge,” two releases out of date — and it’s been working just fine. But she now has a new HP printer, not supported by Xandros 4. And her old version of Firefox is starting to be rejected by some websites. Both Debian 3.1 and Xandros 4 are no longer supported — they still have functioning repositories, but no new or updated programs are being added to those repositories.
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For the first cut, I settled on three candidates.
Debian 5 “Lenny.” This is what I’m using on my desktop, and our full-size laptop. Its advantages are that it’s stable (new releases are infrequent), old releases are well supported, it has a huge software repository, it would make both our desktop PCs identical, and I’m familiar with it. Its chief disadvantage is that of all the distros I’ve tried, it’s the most difficult to configure — not a job for a new user.
I’ve read a lot about Google’s Chrome browser in the blogosphere, but have yet to see it being used in the wild. Given this observation, and my increasingly strained relationship with Firefox, I decided to give Chromium, the open-source browser on which Chrome is based, another try. Here’s what I found.
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All in all, Chromium is a very solid web browser, and I will probably stick with it for the time being as long as I don’t experience any major bugs. I’m not going to say Ubuntu should ditch Firefox and install Chromium by default, but Google’s browser is definitely worth checking out for those who have grown tired of the Mozilla world.
In the next Ubuntu release, 10.04 Lucid Lynx, there will be a comprehensive manual included which will cover a number of guides, how-tos, and everything a new user needs to know after installing Ubuntu.
Everything worked, and worked well. For a home machine Mint has real credentials. It adapted to our test home network easily enough and found our NAS drives with no hassle. It’s also efficient, comes with a wisely-chosen collection of software and achieves an admirable balance between power and lack of hassle. The best Mint yet, as you’d hope, but also a real temptation for Windows users looking to move across to Linux.
GoMo News reported on the release of the new mobile operating system from Qualcomm last week. Brew Mobile Platform (MP) is based on the mobile application framework from Qualcomm, but takes a step forward into being a true operating system for smartphones. Part of the PR push was about the fact that it is “open” – but that doesn’t always equate to “cheap”. But there’s some good news from Qualcomm…
The beta store will host apps for both Microsoft Windows and the open-source Moblin operating system, which target the popular netbook computer category powered by Intel’s Atom processor.
The Pixel Qi screen lets you view 1080p videos in direct sunlight with no difference in video quality and also has an e Book Reader built in. The tablet runs on Android and has whole host of apps built by Notion Ink on it. The company also plans to launch its own open source app store in the future. The full version of the prototype shown at CES will be unveiled later this year at the mobile conference GSM in Barcelona.
The first smartphones based on Intel’s Moorestown, the Mini 5 with Android and the Lenovo LePhone: the mobile Linux highlights from this year’s Consumer Electronics Show.
After Intel announced that it would optimize Moblin 2.1 as the mobile phone operating system, it was only a matter of time that actual devices hit the market. The CES in Las Vegas revealed that at least two companies announced such a device: the GW990 from LG and a smartphone from the Finnish startup Aava Mobile.
As well as Google’s open source OS it also runs Motorola’s own Motoblur interface which provides quick and easy access to all your social network contacts.
For those who use T-Mobile in the US, choosing a new, unlocked smartphone isn’t easy lately. The Nokia N900 and Nexus One both work on T-Mobile’s US 3G network and on 3G networks in Europe and Asia. Each runs a sparkly new OS and has high end specs. I personally have a T-Mobile account and with both phones in house, find it hard to pick a favorite. From emails I’ve received, I know I’m not alone, so I’ve compiled a comparison list that might help you decide between these two superphones.
The NorhTec Gecko Edubook is one of the most innovative netbooks around when it comes to hardware design. It runs on rechargeable AA batteries, making it easy to find replacements pretty much anywhere in the world. The OS and all the data is stored on an SD card, making it easy to upgrade. And the CPU and RAM are on a single chip which you can pop out and replace just as easily as changing a stick of RAM in most notebooks.
SANDcamp is a free, community-powered gathering to share our experience and enthusiasm about Drupal, an open-source content management system that is powering more and more of the web every year.
Researchers at the Univ. of Nebraska in Lincoln have addressed the issue of faulty software by developing an algorithm and open source tool that is 300 times faster at generating tests and also reduces current software testing time.
Meanwhile, open source software will be significant role in the industry. Major vendors such as IBM and Microsoft are going to convert to “commercial open source”, Manoo said, noting that nothing is “free of charge open source” today, because even though they open the source code, users have to pay for maintenance and a better level of security such as RedHat and Linux, and there will be a lot of applications and middleware coming out.
McGuire agrees that Indonesians can and should go completely legal, but does not think that simply forcing everyone to pay the manufacturers’ full price is a reasonable or effective strategy. He said he sees two good solutions: local pricing and open-source software.
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Open-source software is legally free. There are open-source equivalents of just about every type, from operating systems such as Linux to office software like OpenOffice.
Betti Alisjahbana, chairwoman of the Indonesian Association of Open Source, said that the migration to open-source software would save money, as compared to paying for proprietary products, such as Microsoft Windows.
OpenOffice.org 3.x is the leading open-source open software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. You can adjust openoffice to your needs by adding more functionality with the help of extensions. In this article we chosed for you some useful extensions for openoffice with installation guide.
Yahoo will announce the sale of Zimbra to VMware on January 12, according to All Things D. Why should solutions providers and VARs care? Here are five key points to consider.
RPG expert Aaron Bartell is spearheading a new open source development project called RPGUI that aims to radically simplify the development of Web interfaces for RPG programs and programmers. The project is only about a month old, and there is a lot of work to do. But Bartell is very optimistic about RPGUI’s prospects for eliminating the need for RPG programmers to become experts in Web languages such as JavaScript, and to provide a “no brainer” low-cost option for keeping RPG applications looking modern.
Web properties used to treat open source as a resource to be strip-mined. Increasingly, however, successful Web companies like Google and Facebook are giving back, helping to replenish the open-source ecosystem from which they derive so much value.
Facebook just announced that it has become a Gold sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation. According to Facebook’s David Recordon, the company wants to give back to the open source community that allowed Facebook to develop and contribute to projects like the Thrift framework, Hive, memcached and Cassandra. Apache Gold members donate $40,000 per year to the project.
The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) may stop releasing new versions of the older 1.3 and 2.0 series of its flagship Web server product with most development now focused on the 2.2 series.
The Apache HTTP server project is one of the most successful and popular (the most popular Web server on the Internet since 1996, say its makers) open source projects and has become an integral part of the technology stack for thousands of Web and SaaS applications.
Globally, open source BI solutions are in huge demand, with interest picking up in a huge way during the recession. Open Source BI products from vendors such as Pentaho and Jaspersoft have evolved from being community-driven tools to being backed up by support from professional service vendors. In India, awareness levels are low and the market is at a nascent stage. However, the potential for adoption is huge—especially among SMEs—a market that is made of over 6 million Indian enterprises, contributing to 42 percent of India’s total exports.
Jaspersoft made a good move at its founding. It openly espouses an “open core” model in which it reserves specific features or modules — along with their underlying source code — only to paying users.
For a long time, that went against the prevailing open-source vendor business model, in which even free users got access to all features and source code, and vendors relied wholly on support and maintenance fees.
Songbird (getsongbird.com), the open source, Mozilla-powered, supposedly iTunes-killing media player, has updated to 1.4.2, bringing a host of new features, including AAC metadata support, a new feather (skin), CD ripping and support for many mass storage devices.
That’s all well and good, but it raises the question: what should Mozilla be doing *after* it conquers the browser world – that is, once it has 50% market share? Because once that happens – and it seems to be just a matter of time – the dynamics that kept Internet Explorer on top for so long, despite its manifest weaknesses, will kick in for Firefox (although let’s hope its coders don’t get as lazy as Microsoft’s). That means the central challenge will have gone, and that’s always a problem, especially for a volunteer organisations like Mozilla, where motivation is a key aspect.
Today, Acquia, the enterprise guide to social publishing, announced a new ‘Social Publishing for Open Government’ program designed to give agencies a fast track to successfully meet the requirements of the new Open Government Directive (OGD). The Directive, sent by the Obama administration to the head of every US federal department and agency, instructs agencies to take specific actions to open their operations to the public, with the goal of fostering more transparency, participation, and collaboration between government bodies and citizens. Acquia’s new program is aimed at helping agencies implement Drupal to meet these objectives.
Alfresco have also expanded the deployment options available for the enterprise edition by including support for creating cloud based Alfresco installations, from the simple single instance of the server in the cloud, up to a high availability, fault tolerant cluster.
The Australian national Linux conference has received a boost, with three current and former government officials from New Zealand, the UK and Australia to speak at one of the mini-conferences being organised on day two of the LCA.
Yet, the open source software stack, with the Linux OS as its foundation, is proving to be a popular way of creating cloud environments, and a growing number of open source projects and tools are intended for that purpose. Eucalyptus, which turns server clusters into compute clouds, is one example. Others include the Nimbus toolkit, Deltacloud API and portal, and Simple Cloud API.
Ingres and the Ministry of Information and Communications Technology of Jordan (MOICT) have entered into a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to achieve the widespread use of information technology and communication, particularly open source technology from Ingres, throughout the local software infrastructure in Jordan.
As part of the MOU, Ingres will promote Jordan as a hub for the open source technology in the region; organize “boot camps” to address technical requirements for the community; offer free training to certify individuals from the IT industry; arrange executive calls to assist MOICT in understanding the world-wide open source market; provide software and support for a laboratory in one of Jordan’s leading universities; train a group of specialists to implement a specific government service project and support MOICT initiatives to promote open source through workshops, academic initiatives, and local partner support.
The title of the new journal is: Codex: the Journal of the Louisiana Chapter of the ACRL.
Codex is a completely free, open-access peer-reviewed scholarly journal focused on academic libraries and academic librarianship. Our inaugural issue features solicited articles that cover a variety of topics, from green renovations in special collections to the use of LibraryThing and Delicious in libraries to writing for publication, and more!
Jaron Lanier is a very smart guy. He’s a respected computer scientist, composer and artist. Now he’s turned his attention to the state of the internet in what appears to be a merciless attack on some very elderly straw men.
In an article in the Wall Street Journal to promote his book You Are Not A Gadget, Lanier attacks “Web 2.0″, “Open Culture”, “Free Software” and the “Long Tail”. These are, he says, “terms for a new kind of collectivism that has come to dominate the way many people participate in the online world”.
Leaving aside the fact that it’s taken Lanier six years to muster an attack on Web 2.0, a concept that has almost reached pensionable age in web terms, his critique is a mess.
In fact, there are many opportunities for open source or open data to help improve economies at the citizen level. There is movement towards “open data” which is the release of public data in usable formats (e.g. postal code listings) without charge.
Since the early days of the Java programming language, some have argued that Java’s being an interpreted language has made it inferior to the likes of C and C++ in terms of performance. Of course, C++ devotees would never, ever even consider Java a “proper” language, while the Java crowd always throws “write once, run everywhere” in the faces of the C++ programmers.
Wondering whether your browser supports the HTML5 audio and video tags? Check out the “Video for Everybody” test page, and the HTML5 <audio> and Audio() Support Tester page, linked off of Jägenstedt’s blog. The audio test page gives a full rundown of what audio encodings your browser supports, and provides tests. The video test page embeds a video using the video element from HTML5. If you’re using a modern browser, you should be able to see video there.
It’s no secret that celebrities get perks for being famous. Free clothes, cutting-edge technology, tickets to hot events.
Question of the day: Should the FTC give celebrities more latitude than non-celebrities in disclosing these perks?
Ever since the federal agency announced it would be cracking down on advertisers and endorsers who aren’t completely transparent in revealing in-kind payments, bloggers have been up-in-arms over the new guidelines.
While the debate rages on over how to properly count the “cost” of such failures, I’m beginning to wonder how useful such a number is. Isn’t a more useful discussion on how to prevent or minimize the impact of any such failures? The aggregate number may look good in being able to see some big number, but aggregate numbers can hide important details inside
So, today is a great day for freedom. Random stop and search powers were an abuse of our historic, hard-won liberties and it is tremendous that it has come to an end.
Mike sez, “‘The use by police of terror laws to stop and search people without grounds for suspicion are illegal, the European Court of Human Rights has ruled.’ The article goes on to refer to Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000, which is what has been used for random stop and searches such as this one.”
Protesting the imposition of full body scanners at airports (about which we’ve written before), a big bunch of our Germanic friends pitched up at Berlin airport in their undies. Video here.
You know those airport scanners that can see through your clothes, offering an intimate look at your junk and your lovehandles and every other part of you that you keep between you, your spouse, your doctor and the bathroom mirror? You know how the TSA swore up and down that these machines didn’t store and couldn’t transmit the compromising photos of your buck-naked self?
Had the detonating dervish hugged the metal wall of the wide body jet, he might have punched a foot wide hole in it, and the resulting explosive decompression could have brought about another Lockerbie. In response, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has banned late-flight restroom access. But even if the device had gone off in a restroom, the resulting closed-door thunder box explosion—though guaranteed to make hash of the bomber and anyone or anything directly across the aisle—would have been unlikely to rupture the hull several meters away (the shattering effect of an expanding, and thus cooling, explosion is an inverse-radius-squared sort of thing).
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The threat that merits constant vigilance is not an 80 gram explosive charge, but a jumbo jet that morphs into an 80 ton flying bomb. Why not deputize the top 10 percent of the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) standby army as air marshals to help deter a repeat of the 9-11 hijackings, and send the remainder abroad as America’s Foreign Transportation Security Legion?
Like many other well-known organizations, we face cyber attacks of varying degrees on a regular basis. In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident–albeit a significant one–was something quite different.
First, this attack was not just on Google. As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses–including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors–have been similarly targeted. We are currently in the process of notifying those companies, and we are also working with the relevant U.S. authorities.
Second, we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective. Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves.
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These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.
JUNIPER RESEARCH reckons that with the value of enterprise information rocketing almost three quarters of handsets will soon need to have added encryption technology.
As Wall Street added the last zeros to its bonus checks, New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo sent out letters to banks on Monday demanding descriptions of how the payouts were allocated.
Cuomo, who is rumored to be a gubernatorial candidate, held a conference call Monday afternoon saying banks would not have been in the position they are today if not for the taxpayers of this country.
“At the end of the day, I represent the people of New York and the tax payers paid a terrible price for this past economic recession,” Cuomo said.
The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission debuts Wednesday with the first round of public hearings into the causes of an economic crisis unmatched since the Great Depression.
The five of the largest banks that received federal taxpayer bailouts — Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley — reserved a total of about $90 billion for bonuses and other compensation during the first nine months of 2009, the newspaper said.
“There are legitimate conflicts between the firm feeling like it is performing well and the public’s prevailing view that the Street was bailed out,” an unnamed JPMorgan executive told the Times.
In the era of Watergate, what AIG and the New York Federal Reserve did was called a cover-up. People went to jail. President Nixon was forced to resign. It would seem that the AIG story could be bigger than Watergate. The amount of money involved is much larger.
Bankers’ bonuses ran into billions of euro and dollars during the credit boom and the practice has been blamed for blinding executives to the risky strategies pursued by their organisations.
Six of the country’s largest banks set aside $112 billion for compensation in the first nine months of the fiscal year, and that amount is set to rise when banks announce final earnings reports in coming weeks.
The former head of American International Group Inc is urging a closer look at the actions of Goldman Sachs Group Inc, claiming the investment bank contributed to the insurer’s near-collapse, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday.
It also claimed the company was on track to pay employees $22bn in 2009, despite previously requiring a $10bn injection from the federal government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program and receiving $13bn from insurer AIG after the government bailed it out.
The suits, filed by the Illinois Central Laborers’ Pension Fund and by an Illinois shareholder named Ken Brown, basically restate the case against Goldman that outraged nonwealthy people have been making all year: Goldman has paid out exorbitant bonuses (totaling 260% of the firm’s net income last year) while betting against the housing bubble even as it sold bunk CDOs to suckers and forced AIG into the arms of a federal bailout so it could reap billions in taxpayer dollars and continue to finance those enormous bonuses.
Another scandal is breaking on Wall Street. When AIG was bailed out by the taxpayers, Timothy Geithner’s New York Federal Reserve allegedly told it to alter a Securities and Exchange Commission disclosure.
Many executives are bracing for more scrutiny of pay from Washington, as well as from officials like Andrew M. Cuomo, the attorney general of New York, who last year demanded that banks disclose details about their bonus payments. Some bankers worry that the United States, like Britain, might create an extra tax on bank bonuses, and Representative Dennis J. Kucinich, Democrat of Ohio, is proposing legislation to do so.
The play stars the Federal Crisis Inquiry Commission in the lead role as protagonist with the four previously mentioned banks in supporting roles cast as the villain.
The creation of the Federal Crisis Inquiry Commission follows the reactionary tactics long utilized by the US government. Well after the crisis has passed, form a panel with limited power and authority, pretend to investigate, and issue a report that is so dense and filled with double-speak that it benefits no one. It will undoubtedly give panel commissioners, politicians from both parties, and the current administration the opportunity for grandstanding, soap box speeches, and publicly grilling unpopular banking CEOs.
To date, the American taxpayer has pumped $180 billion into AIG to spare it from becoming insolvent. A huge sum, especially in that many of these billions were used to pay down exotic derivatives to the likes of Goldman and a bevy of foreign banks.
If you big-bucks bankers at Goldman Sachs really want to show us how wrong we are to hate you, come to work Wednesday morning with some cans of food.
I will be out front with a box at the old headquarters, and then the new one, collecting for the New York Daily News “Readers Care to Feed the Hungry” food drive.
Bonus season is upon us, and it’s Halloween for the taxpayer, so Goldman Sachs is trying to keep the minions in line. Especially, since the firm stole billions from the taxpayer at the behest and the help from our Treasury Secretary, Timoth Geithner.
Right. Because if this crisis has taught us anything, it’s that it’s time to get rid of the cursed “bonus.” And replace it with the more traditional “huge-ass salary.”
According to Michael Greenberger, the University of Maryland law professor who headed Trading and Markets at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in the Clinton Administration, this was a case of “Goldman (Sachs) et al seemingly forcing the country’s biggest truck company into bankruptcy in order to get pay-offs under CDS, with 50,000 jobs at stake.
Unfortunately lawmakers are lining up the wrong target: Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. The White House has said that Geithner had nothing to do with the series of emails that hinted at hushing up the terms and the recipients of AIG’s counterparties in that federal bailout, and the Obama administration has again expressed confidence in Geithner. By contrast, the fingerprints of investment bank Goldman Sachs are all over the smoking gun.
The panel’s chairman, Philip Angelides, said he’s interested in hearing about the banks’ role in creating the crisis as well as finding out how they became “too big to fail.” The federal government stepped in to prop up the banks in fall 2008, creating the Troubled Asset Relief Program to help provide them with liquidity.
But that’s not all according to The New York Times. There’s potentially some good news in all of this. Goldman Sachs is contemplating the enforcement of a policy mandating all employees to donate a certain portion of their bonuses to charity. Lovely, but first let’s get a few things out of the way. At best this is nothing more than a PR tactic, and at worst, it’s an attempt to assuage the more than justified taxpayer outrage. (Go on, let it rip again. We’re pissed too.)
A senior Goldman Sachs executive sent an e-mail message to clients on Tuesday disclosing that the firm’s Fundamental Strategies Group might have shared investment ideas with the firm’s proprietary trading group or some clients before sharing them with others.
This company (along with its competitors) has helped to create the culture of “stock market capitalism” that fed ultimately resulted in a global financial crisis of unprecedented proportions.
It pretty well dooms any meaningful financial sector reform; although the Obama White House has been leaking hopeful sounding trial balloons this week, holding one’s breath is not to be recommended.
Memo to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner: If you want to survive another year in Washington, start channeling your inner Jimmy Hoffa.
Yes, Hoffa — James P. Hoffa, that is — the current Teamsters boss and the one man who has stared down Goldman Sachs and the big-money crowd on Wall Street and come out a winner. While our Treasury Secretary has been busy covering the friendly tracks he laid as NY Fed Chief, in recent weeks Hoffa has showed Lloyd Blankfein and Co. who’s boss — and did so without even breaking a sweat.
We have lots of very significant upcoming releases, significant in terms of bandwidth, but even more significant in terms of amount of labour they will require to process and in terms of legal attacks we will get. So we need to be in a stronger position before we can publish the material.
It’s such a silly notion that even Amazon can’t keep its story straight. Take this press-release in which Amazon trumpets that its “customers purchased more Kindle books than physical books.” Purchased, not “licensed.”
Record label trade association the BPI wants sweeping changes to UK online copyright practice in 11th hour amendments to the Digital Britain bill.
The amendments would grant copyright holders injunctions against websites and service providers similar to the US DMCA act – but with no ‘safe harbour’ provision to verify whether the claim is merited, according to documents seen by The Register.
Jack Kirby was a renowned artist instrumental in the creation and shaping of these characters, his family argues, and is thus entitled to profits like any other copyright-holder. Disney has maintained that Kirby’s work was considered for-hire and that his heirs are thus not owed any further profits.
Like other heirs to 20th century comic book artists, Kirby’s progeny have become more aggressive in seeking to recoup their share of the profits.
The proposed policy would include lesson plans, and states that any material written, created or developed with district support “shall be the sole property of the State College Area School District and is to be used only by students and staff of the district, unless otherwise reviewed and approved by the superintendent.”
But, still, they will try, and the way they try to do it is in backrooms and convincing governments that they must be right, and increased protectionism really is better for everyone — even though it’s really only better for a select group of middlemen.
Yesterday I attended a fascinating panel discussion about ACTA, hosted by Google at its Washington DC offices, as a lead-in to today’s World Fair Use Day event. The four participants each brought a different perspective to the panel, though only one, Steve Metalitz, a lawyer who represents a coalition of entertainment industry interests, was there to defend ACTA. Jamie Love of KEI was his main sparring partner, though Jonathan Band (a lawyer representing various tech and library organizations) made plenty of insightful points as well. The final participant was a legislative staffer from Rep. Zoe Lofgren’s office, Ryan Clough, who tiptoed the line of expressing some concern about ACTA, without fully coming out against it.
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On top of that, Band pointed out, within TRIPS and WIPO there are numerous developing countries who are recognizing — correctly — that strict IP enforcement is designed solely to benefit a small group of companies in developed nations at the expense of the people in developing nations. Thus, they’re starting to push back on IP expansion. Combine all that, and you get ACTA — an entirely new forum to take on these issues, which (conveniently) only includes developed nations and leaves out the developing nations who had become so pesky. Metalitz pulled out the “but this won’t really change US law” gambit, to which Band pointed out that the real goal here was never to make huge changes to US law, but to eventually force all those developing nations to go along. Basically, you get the developed nations to agree to ACTA, written by the big copyright players, and then you start putting pressure on developing nations about how they need to conform to ACTA as well to join the club.
Working on behalf of the MPAA and their Hollywood studio partners, anti-piracy outfit BREIN achieved a notable victory last year when it partially shut down Mininova. This success, however, appears to be just the tip of the iceberg. Did you know BREIN shut down 393 torrent sites in 2009? No? Neither did we.
A new study released by a German consumer advocacy group is estimating that entertainment and software companies sent roughly 450,000 cease-and-desist letters to local file sharers alone in 2009, yielding some $370 million in damages. That’s a steep jump from 2008, when the group tracked closer to 250,000 of such cases.
And are things as bad as you think? In 2009 theatre sales were at their highest ever, even in the United States, which was suffering a depression. And Hollywood has produced some damned good stuff. And delivered in in upgraded, more comfortable theatres, with better seating. So why the complaints? Your sales are better than ever, and you still whine? Really? Hell, I was planning on going to see Alice in Wonderland (Tim Burton is one of my fav directors), just to get 2010 off to a good start for you (because of the nerve damage, and the pain, I don’t normally go to theatres. I’ll put up with it to see Alice.
But what I find even more amusing is that if you look at the AP report, it’s basically just a quick blurb rewrite of the Albuquerque Journal story. It’s only 125 words, and just summarizes what the other paper wrote. Why is that amusing? Because that’s exactly what the Associated Press has been claiming bloggers unfairly do to it — insisting that others simply rewriting its stories in short blurbs are violating the “hot news” doctrine. Apparently, that doesn’t apply when the AP does it itself?
It’s been noticed that new Associated Press stories — hosted by Google itself — are no longer appearing in Google News. It’s true. Since Dec. 24, Google has no longer added new AP content, something the company confirmed with me today. I received this statement:
We have a licensing agreement with the Associated Press that permits us to host its content on Google properties such as Google News. Some of that content is still available today. At the moment we’re not adding new hosted content from the AP.
The LinuxFest Northwest organizing committee is pleased to announce the new LinuxFest Northwest website to kick off the countdown for the 2010 festival! Take a look around the site, as it is drastically different from years past. Attendee participation is a key theme for this year’s fest.
These was a company that – seemingly out of nowhere and rather contrary to its proprietary software business model before – began putting its considerable weight behind Linux when the open-source OS was still new and relatively unsupported by mainstream IT.
In December 2000, IBM was promising to invest $1bn into Linux in that following year. IBM’s then-chief executive Lou Gerstner was telling the world that he was “betting a big piece of IBM’s future on Linux.”
The company was raising eyebrows with a (now quite laughable) Linux wristwatch to prove the OS can go anywhere. It was vandalizing the streets of San Francisco with the slogan, “peace, love, and Linux.”
Summary:
· Announced Distro: SimplyMEPIS 8.5 Beta 4 Released
· Announced Distro: Toorox 01.2010 Goes 64-bit
· Announced Distro: First Beta of VLOS 2.0 Arrives
· Announced Distro: Elive 1.9.56 Has Support for 3G Phones
· Announced Distro: Download Mandriva Linux 2010.1 Alpha 1
· Other News: Ubuntu Manual and KDE SC 4.4 RC1
Ultimately, what I am seeing is proof that there is, indeed, plenty of places for Linux in the business. And not only on the server end. The argument that Linux is too difficult has washed away, and any member of the IT world who still believes Linux is too difficult, might want to return to Comp Sci class for a refresher course. In my current incarnation I have YET to come across a desktop operating system that was even remotely difficult. All desktop operating systems have reached a near-uniform level of simplicity.
As always we have lots of listener feedback. This time we say we’re sorry, we get corrected on a few things and receive some excellent links to videos, articles and websites that will be of interest to all. Larry makes an announcement about SCaLE 8x.
The NB205 does have a webcam that works well with Moblin. We tested it using the Tokbox.com video chat service. Other than these add-ons, the NB205 is not that different from other netbooks, but there were a few findings beyond the norm, and most of them are not positive compared with other models.
In this partnership, SteelEye Protection Suite (SPS) for Linux Multi-Site Cluster Edition (SLMSCE) will ensure the continuous availability of host software applications designed to support the Navy’s combat systems across its entire fleet.
WRT160NL is powered by Linux OS. This powerful open platform allows feature additions or enhancements by simply loading customized firmware into the router.
Desktop search is a software application which searches the contents of computer files, rather than searching the internet. The purpose of this software is to enable the user to locate information on their computer. Typically, this data includes emails, chat logs, documents, contact lists, graphics files, as well as multimedia files including video and audio.
During the final months of 2009 Linux audio developers and users were working overtime. If you feel that you didn’t get enough goodies in your holiday stocking perhaps you’ll find a few more stuffers listed here as another year closes in the world of Linux sound and music software.
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As I mentioned earlier, I upgraded my notebook to Ubuntu Karmic. Regular readers of this column may recall that I’ve had some harsh opinions about Ubuntu, but despite a few remaining annoyances – grub2 didn’t update, there’s still no audio group, shutdown was problematic – this upgrade was definitely worth the energy. Realtime performance with JACK is excellent, and this time all my hardware is recognized and supported. Overall I’m impressed enough with Karmic to upgrade my other Ubuntu-based machine.
If the title of this article sounds like something from Star Trek, you’re not far off. It’s a very geeky thing, which allows you to export X (GUI) applications as separate entities on top of your desktop. Indeed, Xephyr is an X server utility. As such, it allows you to manage your virtual consoles, without leaving the safety and comfort of your desktop.
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Xephyr is a very neat invention. Desktop users may not find too much use for it, but it should serve developers or geeks well. Regardless of its end use, it’s a very good exercise in Linux command line for any, as it includes playing with environment variables and helps understand basic concepts in networking a little better.
There is a new group in Chile (their websiteisn’t ready yet) and in Argentina (google translate), people are reorganizing the community. And for a better integration, a mailing list was created for the whole latin american KDE community (kde-latam).
Here in Brazil, besides the developers you may already know, guys from KDE-MG (MG = Minas Gerais, a Brazilian state) and KDE-BA (BA = Bahia, another state) are doing a great work in promotion.
Combine this with the recent Latinoware conference in Brazil, which had a visit from some KDE people who came away incredibly impressed – it seems the center of gravity is shifting
The plasma team is already experiencing this, as they have a few very active Brazillians on the team. And promo is being infiltrated as we speak
The Dimpress 3D consists in a tool for building presentations, almost like the ones created by softwares like PowerPoint or OpenOffice Impress, the main difference here is the final result, our software will generate animated, multi-directional and visual attractive content. To catch these goals, there will be used visual resources like 3D techniques, Physics Simulation and whatever the free software community can think, ’cause we are talking about a tool that will be free software and plugin-based, which means that, anyone sufficiently interested can improve its funciontalities by writing plugins.
The Dimpress 3D is a Work In Progress, and, the basics of the application is already done.
One of the great things about KDE 4 is how powerful the APIs for the central components are. In particular, Akonadi and Nepomuk have become very easy to use in custom software and third party applications. I recently discovered another very powerful set of libraries: the plugin API for Koffice. Using those libraries, I recently wrote a little “docker” that lets you attach the documents you are currently working on in koffice to a new calendar event which can be used by any Akonadi-enabled application. For instance, you could publish minutes of a meeting to korganizer so that they are easier to find . . . and then sync them to your Palm Lifedrive using kpilot.
I have not yet installed XBMC with the PCLinuxOS install yet, but I am not anticipating any headache with that.
If you didn’t know, Linux Distro’s have repositories of programs to download. No need to go to the internet, find something, download it and install it. You just open a “Package Manager”, look for what you want and install it. It downloads it, gets other programs or pieces that may be required to run that program and installs it all.
Back in the 1990’s I used to use Mandrake Linux as my preferred distribution. Back in the day it had great hardware support and looked good.Mandrake merged with Lycoris and Connectiva to form Mandriva Linux.
A few weeks ago, we asked for the OSNews community to help with some questions we were going to ask Aaron Griffin from the Arch Linux team, and the response was glorious and somewhat phenomenal. We added those questions to our own and sent them on over, and then we were surprised by receiving not only Aaron Griffin’s responses but answers from various individuals from the team.
BackTrack is a Linux-based penetration testing arsenal that aids security professionals in the ability to perform assessments in a purely native environment dedicated to hacking.
Overall, it appears to be a decent upgrade. Most things appear the same and a few things have changed. This is good – it’s how a mature desktop should be. Upgrades here and there, but no more radical changes.
Sidux is a distro I’ve never tried before. Its a Debian unstable based system with a rolling release. Basically, its based upon Debian ‘unstable’, and instead of having one big release that everyone works on, it just updates certain packages everytime a new version is released. Arch Linux uses the same system.
Interestingly, sidux bundles both the AMD64 and the i386 version on the same disk. While this does avoid the problem of installing an AMD64 OS on a i386 machine, and then fumbling for another disk, it also means you download pretty much everything twice: whether you use it or not. The Sidux DVD is 2GB in size, far too large to fit onto a CD. There is live CD’s available in ‘lite’ editions.
After blogging about my Ubuntu Release Schedule Video project, I received a lot of awesome feedback. Some of the feedback was received a bit too late in the process (like text suggestions) to make it in the video, but is still very much appreciated. Today I finally have something to show. Alan Pope have been so kind to provided me with the missing audio for the video. Although many people offered to help, I decided to go with Alan for various reasons. These include having English as first language, being a well known voice (UK Podcast and screencasts), having quality recording equipment.
The RIOLED-V is actually a netbook slash projector, featuring Linux, web apps (YouTube, Flickr and a few other ubiquitous ones like weather and email were mentioned) and Wi-Fi. It kind of reminded me of that MSI projector PC the CES guys spotted out in Vegas this week, albeit a smaller, half-baked version that did not look anything like a small space ship with 1080p.
Verizon Wireless announced Jan. 25 availability of two modified versions of Palm’s WebOS-based smartphones, the Palm Pre Plus and the newly WiFi-enabled Palm Pixi Plus. Meanwhile, Palm announced that its WebOS developer program is now open to all developers, and plans to launch a WebOS plugin development kit, says eWEEK.
It was way back in early 2006 when we read that ACCESS and PalmSource announced the ACCESS Linux Platform (ALP) that was initially intended to be the next Palm operating system. While Palm no longer has any ties to ACCESS, we heard in October that Emblaze Mobile Ltd. introduced the first ELSE mobile device running the ELSE INTUITION platform based on ALP. I had the chance to talk with Amir Kupervas, CEO, and Eldad Eilam, Chief Technology Officer, from Else Mobile and captured much of our conversation in the 20+ minute video you see below.
Lenovo unveiled a Qualcomm Snapdragon-based Android smartphone aimed for a 1H 2010 release in China, says eWEEK. Meanwhile, Dell officially announced a version of the Mini 3 Android smartphone aimed at AT&T’s U.S. network, and showed off a MID-like Android “slate” prototype.
The Nexus One, manufactured by HTC, costs $529 unlocked or $179 with a two-year T-Mobile contract. The phone itself, according to a new analysis, actually contains about $174 worth of hardware — five bucks less than the iPhone 3GS.
What’s going to happen with slates, the multi-touch-optimized successors to the stylus/digital-ink-dependent tablet PCs? Will Microsoft have to cut the price of Windows 7 that it offers PC makers so as to keep them from doing a Dell, which provided a quick glimpse of an Android-based, 5-inch handheld at CES? Or from coming out with a Chrome OS/ARM-based slate later in 2010? Competition is good for Microsoft’s partners: It provides them with a new bargaining chip to be used when negotiating the price per copy of Windows with Microsoft.
Again, it seems that a smartbook derivative should be able to play the role of an XO in an educational environment. Two of the huge advantages of smartbooks is availability and economies of scale. They are planned to be available from a host of sales channels, most notably from 3G service operators at subsidized prices. This means, that some of the smartbooks will likely come at zero initial price, only a 2 year data contract will need to be signed.
For one, H.P. has done away with a previous netbook model that ran the Linux operating system instead of Windows. Linux types, however, still have an option. Or put another way, everyone now has a Linux option.
H.P. has brought the QuickWeb software it developed with the start-up DeviceVM to its netbook line.
Although Android was the flavor of Linux for this device, Qualcomm also lets Lenovo do its own flavor of Linux for its Skylight smartbook, which premiered earlier this week.
The new AppUp Center apps will also be cross-platform, meaning that they can run on a Windows-based netbook or a Linux-based MID. This is important since the low-powered devices can struggle with Windows 7, and since many consumers are reluctant to embrace Linux and its unfamiliar applications. Intel is also using AppUp to lay the groundwork for Atom- and Linux-powered smartphones. By the time the processors become low-powered enough to be jammed into a handset, Intel hopes it will have built a sizable catalog of applications capable of running on its Moblin (or any other) Linux platform.
Some run Linux or Google Android while others appear to have custom user interfaces. Not all of these tablets are destined to be web-surfing buddies for the couch the way that netbooks and smartbooks are though. Some of the tablets are basically portable media players or even portable TVs, thanks to built in digital TV tuners.
While CES is choc full of companies showing off tablets using ARM-based chipsets from Qualcomm, Freescale, Marvell, and NVIDIA, the folks at Texet are taking a different approach. The Texet EZB890 is an 8.9 inch touchscreen tablet with a 500MHz MIPS-based processor. It’s running a custom Linux distribution, and it’s surprisingly snappy.
Most Linux distros don’t yet support multitouch screens out of the box, but that doesn’t matter, because France’s ENAC Interactive Computing Lab has put together a video demonstrating multitouch on a PC running Fedora 12 on what looks to be be a 10-inch touchscreen display.
While new Atom-based Windows netbooks did show up at CES 2010, the Wintel mobile PC platform so omnipresent only a year ago, got way overshadowed this time around in a blitz of announcements around Linux-based smartbooks, e-readers, and tablets running on ARM processors.
There was also a demo unit of the 8.9 inch netbook running Puppy Linux. While Windows XP and WattOS both felt pretty sluggish on NorhTec’s Edubook with its slow 1GHz XCore86 processor, Puppy absolutely flew. I’m looking forward to testing this light weight Linux distribution on the Edubook more once I get back to the home office.
Marc Hedlund sez, “Wesabe just open sourced a project called Grendel that makes it easy for web apps to encrypt data using the user’s login password, and only decrypt that data when the user is logged in. Let’s say you’re using a word processing web app and don’t want your documents stored plaintext — the web app could use Grendel to easily encrypt your docs for you, using OpenPGP. Log in and you can edit; log out and only you can get at the data again (since only you have your password). There are some hooks for encrypting with multiple keys if you want to share docs with selected other users on the system. Since people are throwing a ton of sensitive data in web apps these days I think having some tools to help make that safer would be a good thing.”
Yes, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has passed a budget plan which proposes inclusion of Open Source software in areas like health care, prison and many other to bring down costs by considerable amounts. A policy letter issued last week by CIO Teri Takai says ,
the use of Open Source Software (OSS) in California state government [has now been formally established] as an acceptable practice.
California reportedly faces a budget deficit of $20 billion, which Open Source software can hardly address but we can hope for something good to come out of this.
When I first started programming in high school at age 15 (on a mainframe), I was one of only two or three girls in the class of perhaps 20 students. At the time, I thought that was a pretty good ratio. God knows that I never lacked for a date. Ever since then, however, I’ve been doing my best to encourage more women to get into the field. Not because I believe that the computer industry arbitrarily needs to have a one-to-one ratio, but because I love computing so very much and I want to share that excitement. My enthusiasm extends to the open source community as well.
… every Free Software project should not only have developers, but also
* graphical artists
* usability experts
* user support specialists
* documentation writers/translators
* software translators
* bug triagers
* marketing ninjas
* community managers
* release managers
* website and wiki maintainers
* unlimited funds…
Amarok is very lucky to have most of those. No, not the unlimited funds, sadly, thats one of the reasons why we ask our dear users and Amarok lovers to support us with donations, it allows us for example to maintain our server, which in turn can host other Free Software projects of the KDE family like Konversation.
The new version includes Personas, which lets people customise the browser’s appearance; blocks third-party software from encroaching on its file system turf to increase stability; and perhaps most significantly, given the competitive threat from Google Chrome, it shortens start-up time and improves responsiveness and JavaScript performance.
Intel Corporation, the world’s largest semiconductor chip maker, is using Drupal for its Intel Atom Developer Program, a website for developers that want to create and sell software applications for netbooks and smart phones that are using the Intel Atom processor.
Whether the Unlicense will catch on widely remains to be seen, but public domain software may be more prominent than one would think. The Unlicense site has a link to Unlicensed software and well-known software in the public domain. You might be surprised by some of the software found here. SQLite, qmail, and MinGW are all listed as public domain software. netscan and Markdoc are among the short list of projects that have chosen to release code under a version of the Unlicense.
Google’s Go programming language, registered the largest amount of growth among all the languages in the TIOBE Programming Community Index over the past year. Go has syntactic similarities to C and Pascal but with type safety, concurrency support and fast compilation. It was introduced in November 2009 as an open sourced language implementation. Go is only 0.01 per cent behind over Apple’s Objective-C in the rankings.
The businessman, a father of two, said last night: ‘I had a sense of total disbelief. My wife and I decided to tell my 11-year-old son I had to go with the police because I had witnessed a road accident.
A report to the Council’s safer and stronger communities improvement committee states that a sharp rise in RIPA cases in 2006/07 was due to a cautious approach in the investigation of noise nuisances.
“Since April 2007 a more robust approach has been adopted, ie notifying by letter persons against whom noise complaints are registered that they will be monitored by tape recording equipment installed in their next-door neighbours’ house or by officers listening. This changes what was covert surveillance into overt surveillance and therefore outside the scope of RIPA.”
Police have been known to use social media like Facebook and Twitter to track down thieves (the IRS, too), and careless Facebooking can quickly get you arrested. But if you’re on the run from the law, there’s another online territory you might want to consider avoiding: World of Warcraft.
The radiation risk from full-body scanners used to improve airport security is low and unlikely to raise an individual’s risk of cancer, U.S. experts said on Wednesday.
Entergy Nuclear announced late Thursday one of its monitoring wells on the banks of the Connecticut River had detected radioactive tritium contamination, the first time such contamination has shown up at the plant.
Scientist and renowned historian Naomi Oreskes describes her investigation into the reasons for widespread mistrust and misunderstanding of scientific consensus. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T4UF_Rmlio She probes the history of organized campaigns designed to create public doubt and confusion about science.
EXCLUSIVE: Top administration officials tell Morning Money that President Obama’s budget, to be unveiled next month, is likely to include a fee on banks designed to recoup some of the cost taxpayers incurred in the bailout, which specified that the U.S. government should be made whole. This will stop short of a financial transactions tax, and the administration has decided that a tax on compensation packages would be too easily evaded. The officials said the final approach has not been locked down. The chief goal is a fee that is not easily passed along.
Many of the Washington interest groups that are seeking to shape final health-care legislation in the coming weeks operate with opaque financing, often receiving hidden support from insurers, drugmakers or unions.
The groups, some newly formed and others reappearing with different sponsors, have spent months staging noisy protests, organizing letter-writing campaigns and contributing to a record $200 million advertising blitz on health-care reform.
The group’s president, Andrew Langer, refused to offer any information about the group’s leap in funding. The Parternship to Improve Patient Care was created by the drug industry in 2008 to oppose medical effectiveness studies that might help determine what health insurance companies must cover.
The very independent liberal blog Firedoglake has exposed that Jonathan Gruber, an MIT academic and an influential promoter of Obama’s health reform proposals, has not been properly disclosing the hundreds of thousands of dollars he has received in government health care policy grants.
MIT health economist Jonathan Gruber has been the go-to source that all the health care bill apologists point to to defend otherwise dubious arguments. But he has consistently failed to disclose that he has had a sole-source contract with the Department of Health and Human Services since June 19, 2009 to consult on the “President’s health reform proposal.”
Brendan Demelle notes on DeSmog Blog that Murkowski “has received $470,000 in campaign contributions from dirty energy and mining interests since 2005, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.”
And Frank O’Donnell, president of the advocacy group Clean Air Watch, said, “It’s not a total shock that ex-Bush administration officials are ghostwriting for Murkowski on climate, though she ought to come clean and admit it so we can understand that big polluters are behind her initiative.”
The British lawyer who married the widow of Tintin creator Hergé has successfully sued Bob Garcia (“a detective novelist, jazz musician and Tintin aficionado”) for £35,000 for printing five short essays in appreciation of Tintin, two of which were illustrated with brief clips from the comic. The essays were distributed for free, and the two pamphlets with Tintin illustrations were printed about 500 times each.
If the Internet has a motif, it is rock ‘n’ roll’s Protestant Reformation thrashing against the orchestral One Church. Rock ‘n’ roll gets lots of wee kirks built in every hill and dale in which parishioners can find religion in their own ways; choral music erects majestic cathedrals that humble and amaze, but take three generations of laborers to build.
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But what does it cost to publish something half as good as Newsweek, say, the Huffington Post? Sure, HuffPo has brought in about $20MM in venture capital, but ignore that sum — that’s how much they can sweet talk out of the world of finance. I’m talking about how much capital it cost to build and operate HuffPo. A tiny, unmeasurable fraction of what it cost to build and run Newsweek.
The Stockholm District Court should decide that two of The Pirate Bay’s founders have to pay a fine since the file-sharing site is still open and they are still involved, according to a recent filing from the music industry.
But the legal changes introduced in the years after Fahrenheit 451 did more than just extend terms. Congress eliminated the benign practice of the renewal requirement (which had guaranteed that 85% of works and 93% of books entered the public domain after 28 years because the authors and publishers simply didn’t want or need a second copyright term.) And copyright, which had been an opt-in system (you had to comply with some very minor formalities to get a copyright) became an opt out system (you got a copyright automatically when you “fixed” the work in material form, whether you wanted it or not.) Suddenly the entire world of informal and non commercial culture — from home movies that provide a wonderful lens into the private life of an era, to essays, posters, locally produced teaching materials — was swept into copyright. And kept there for the life of the author plus 70 years. The effects were culturally catastrophic.
They equally provide space for Microsoft Windows Vista, XP and Ubuntu Linux (no MacOSX). Granted, in the office section, they explain how to work with MS Office tools, but they acknowledge existence of OpenOffice.org, quoting ‘We were attracted by Microsoft Office 2007 and OpenOffice.org.’, providing links to OpenOffice.org (on each chapter about office tools) and manuals.
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