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01.03.10

Links 3/1/2010: KDE SC 4.4 Videos, Zorin OS 2.0 Reviewed

Posted in News Roundup at 10:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Linux and FOSS-related Predictions for 2010

    Overall, more ARM and MIPS-based “smartbooks” will be sold than x86-powered machines UMPCs

    I am willing to bet the so-called “smartbook” market is just short of exploding. With chips like the Longsoon and distros like xPUD, there is no way people will be able to resist under-$100 smartbooks. This will be achieved in 2010, it is the next big thing, not tablets. I am aware of the broken promises by vendors in the recent years. Now it will be different, prices have been driven very low, we just need to wait for someone with a vision (no, not Negroponte).

    So, let’s talk about 2010 in the comments! What are you excited about, what do you think will happen?

  • Open Stickers – Computers are not exclusive to Microsoft Windows.

    Go open and get yourself some Open Stickers right this moment. Show your support for free software.

  • Surfin’: Visit the Online Ham Radio Stacks

    Those of you who lean towards Linux should check out the January 2010 issue of Linux Journal. It features ham radio with three feature articles on the subject: “An Amateur Radio Survival Guide for Linux Users,” “Xastir — Open-Source Client for the Automatic Packet Reporting System” and “Rolling Your Own with Digital Amateur Radio.”

  • Server

  • Google

    • Google takes on HP, Dell (and Microsoft) with own Chrome OS-based netbook

      Google sure is in the thick of news these days. Earlier this month we heard of the impending launch of an Android-powered Google phone (codenamed Nexus One) and now rumours are growing about a Google netbook that would run on Chrome OS.

    • Chrome Netbook OS; Tablet PCs; LBS; Open Source

      Google’s Chrome Netbook OS will be a hit. Their OS will mostly be dependent on a Google Account. A Google Account opens up their full Google Apps suite, which includes email, calendar, word processing, and MS Office like functions. Google’s renditions of their current OS have been well received by the “blogosphere” especially it’s ability to fit on a 1GB flash drive. An OS that small is perfect for Netbooks and tablet PCs. The smaller footprint also gives the user more capabilities. A key part of the Chrome OS will be the Chrome brower (my browser of choice) and one that is noted for its speed and security. Google rarely has missteps and I don’t foresee that Chrome OS will be one of them.

  • Applications

  • K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

    • What’s new in KDE SC 4.4 with Videos !

      In this post, I will try to collect all the videos which talk about next KDE SC version. KDE SC 4.4 will be released on February 9th, 2010.

    • Netbook, Pages and what they’re for

      As presented on this blog a bit ago the central and more important view for Plasma Netbook Shell is this so called “Newspaper” activity: applets are positioned in an arbitrary number of columns (default two), one on top of the other, scrolling when there isn’t enough space, giving you actually an “almost infinite” vertical real estate

      At the beginning this was decide just for a screen size issue, but with time this has been revealed to be a damn good metaphor that could have been expanded, so let’s see what the direction is.

      As said pretty much over the place, the “netbook” is not a little laptop is a totally new class of device, that is kinda inept to do what the computer has been used for ages, create content.

      The shift we are seeing now, is a shift on using the computer to create content only in certain moments (i.e. work ;p) and most of the time just “consuming” content or creating only really lightweight type of content (hello microblogging).

    • KPilot is dead

      Read Bertjan’s blog for details on what this means and where you can find the software if you would like to resurrect it. It’s under the GPLv2, so have at it.

    • KOffice & RDF: Who, What, When, Where?

      As mentioned in a previous post, ODF documents can contain one or more RDF/XML files. These files allow you to unambiguously encode information for both computer and human consumption. So you can describe a person in a way that tells you their phone number and also lets the computer know that these digits are a specific person’s home phone number. Common data formats like vcard and ical have some encodings in RDF and soon a KOffice near you will understand these pieces of data from ODF files.

      KOffice currently understands some of the FOAF vocabulary (storing contact data), and the rdfical format (for events). There are a few ways to encode longitude and latitude in RDF. The current patch supports two of them, with optional linking to rdfical. This is one of the major strengths of RDF, you can say who, where and when and also link these things together so an event carries not only a time but its location information too.

  • Distributions

    • Distro Hoppin`: Zorin OS 2.0

      Zorin OS comes in a beautifully packaged ~1.4 GB ISO file for both the 32 and 64 bit architectures. I, of course, am using a 32-bit processor (not for long though ohboyohboyohboy) so I got the corresponding image. The live environment booted in about 2 minutes with a rather unprofessional looking logo flashing in the middle of the screen. I wasted no time and installed the system onto my battered HDD. The process is identical to Ubuntu’s, except the feature slideshow part, which is understandable, given the fact that Zorin OS looks quite different from Karmic.

    • How to choose a Linux distribution flow chart

      I hope this flowchart makes your choice of Linux an easier one. Even more, I hope this flow chart helps you to start your new year off on an open source foot, and that you find this path a rewarding one.

    • Debian Family

      • Ubuntu Spotted on Doctor Who Set

        After watching the two Doctor Who Christmas episodes I thought I’d watch the ‘behind the scenes’ programme ‘Doctor Who Confidential’. During one segment where they discuss the set used in the Christmas episode I spotted a bunch of machines with what look like Ubuntu boot screens on them. If you’re in the UK (or have access to Freesat in Europe) you can see it on BBC HD at 16:55 on 3rd January, or on BBC Three at 04:10 on 5th January. according to the iplayer page.

      • My Mom uses Ubuntu

        All told, this makes for an interesting experiment over the coming months. One parental unit on Windows Vista, the other parental unit on Ubuntu. I wonder how they’ll fare.

      • Ubuntu 10.04 (lucid) Impression/Night Impression GTK themes (Proposed)

        For Lucid Lynx , the technical goal of Impression and Night Impression is to bring both themes to a common code base. The differences between the two themes is visible in the background color of the menu panels, the color of the scroll bars, and the adoption of the Humanity icon theme for Impression and the Humanity-Dark icon theme for Night Impression.

      • List of tweaks for Acer’s 11.6 inch thin and light laptops

        For example, there are updated wireless and audio drivers, a utility for controlling fan speed, screen resolution, and power options, tips for getting HD video tp play properly, increase the speaker volume, or install Ubuntu Linux.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • SmartQ V5 HD MID Launched In China [Chines MID Features 4.3-inch touchscreen, 2GB of Storage, Three Operating Systems]

      Strangely enough, the SmartQ V5 can run three different operating systems, Ubuntu, Android, and Windows CE 6.0 – and comes pre-installed with all three from the factory.

      The V5 is currently selling in China for 元1099 ($161). No word on a North America/European release, and it’s probably unlikely, however, some tech importers are reportedly offering the V5. Check your favorite Chinese importer if you’re interested.

      Read: SmartQ V5 HD MID Launched In China [Chines MID Features 4.3-inch touchscreen, 2GB of Storage, Three Operating Systems] » TFTS – Technology, Gadgets & Curiosities

    • SmartQ V5 MID available now to a world that’s just stopped caring

    • Phones

      • Palm

        • Palm’s Native webOS App Secrets Revealed

          The discovery of SDL’s inclusion in webOS 1.3.5 really should have been enough evidence for you that something big was brewing, but destinal and Rod Whitby’s (of WebOS Internals) latest discovery is proof positive: webOS 1.3.5 also includes a method for launching native Linux applications without any of the Upstart hackery we reported on yesterday.

        • webOS DOOM Paving Way For Future SDL Ports

          Since its initial release less than two days ago, development has proceeded apace on the webOS port of classic FPS DOOM. The latest news, however, has implications beyond just this particular port itself. For starters, the game no longer requires any fooling around in the Terminal to get it started: you can now load it from an icon in your launcher, just like any other app. You can also fire up multiple instances of the game in multiple cards – possibly useless in of itself, but it’s great for that geek cool factor.

      • Android

        • Exclusive: Google Nexus One hands-on, video, and first impressions

          That’s right, humans — Engadget has its very own Nexus One. You’ve seen leaked pics and videos from all over, but we’re the first publication to get our very own unit, and we plan on giving you guys the full story on every nook and cranny of this device. In case you’ve been living under a rock, here’s the breakdown of the phone.

        • Google gets smarter with Nexus One

          Google is diversifying further with its venture into the smart phone business. What once looked like a play field for Apple alone is now being intruded by the internet giant, Google.

        • Motorola to Debut Two Android Phones at CES?

          Motorola is believed to be preparing two new Android-based cell phones for introduction at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas next week, according to a market analyst.

          Global Equities Research Analyst Trip Chowdhry said in a research note to clients that he believes the company “may announce” a second phone for Verizon Wireless, which already has the hugely-popular Droid, and one for AT&T, which does not carry a Motorola Android phone as yet.

        • Motorola to announce two new Android phones next week?

      • Nokia

    • Sub-notebooks

      • Xtra Ordinary 2010: the XO Laptop OS Evolved

        I was checking out the forums of some recently added items to the On-Disk.com catalog when I found a really interesting post about recent updates to Enlightenment .17 (aka E17). I had been following development of E17 for several years, and it has replaced other desktop environments numerous times on my PC, but I always ended up going back to something else simply because there were just too many things missing.

      • Looking Forward To 2010: The Year Of The Smartbook?

        Netbooks have really taken off in the past few years, sporting Intel’s Atom processor and Windows XP or Linux and being sold cheaply to consumers. At the same time, smartphones are getting faster, being seen with processors capable of speeds up to 1GHz and running very capable operating systems. But what if a netbook’s too big for you? Is a smartphone too small for your needs? Then worry no more; 2010 is going to be the year of the smartbook!

Free Software/Open Source

  • Seeking Profit in Open-Source Search Software

    In the case of Lucid, the company hopes to profit from an open-source software package called Lucene.

  • In Defense of MapReduce for Bioinformatics

    Two Google research fellows have updated a paper published in the Communications of the ACM extolling the virtues of MapReduce, an open-source programming model framework designed to support distributed computing with large data sets, over parallel databases for large-scale data processing.

  • Six Enterprise Megatrends to Watch in 2010

    #3: Increasing open development of software and hardware

    All major IT firms, including the powerhouses that produce proprietary software and hardware, are now embracing the open source movement. Even Microsoft has an open source strategy that applies to some of their offerings. The open source community has long benefited from the developer talent in big companies that help produce and further code in Linux (see Red Hat for a supported variety), OpenOffice and many other open source solutions. We can all expect proprietary software will be the most full featured software (for many market reasons), but even that will be built in a way that works well with open source. The benefit to enterprises is a wider range of choices in solutions, and in many cases an ability to field solutions faster and with more security and lower cost. We can also expect all federal enterprises will find ways to enhance internal collaboration on software development projects, for example, the Forge.mil collaborative development capability.

  • Beware GSM calls get Hacked:A5/1 Algorithm turns Flaw!

    Last August they kicked off an open-source project to create the cracking tables — something that would take a decent gaming computer about 10 years to compute — and they have shown which open-source tools could be used to intercept messages, but they have stopped short of designing a device to intercept the messages. This is, however, something that a technically sophisticated hacker could figure out.

  • RSSOwl Newsreader Updates to 2.0, Adds Feed Importing, Search Features

    Windows/Mac/Linux: Feed reader RSSOwl has long been a favorite of open-source advocates, despite being a bit less powerful than its competition. Version 2, however, brings OPML import/export, sharing, and smart searching, finally giving it powers to rival its desktop counterparts.

  • National

    • IT Dept to launch ‘Foster Kerala’

      The year 2010 might see Kerala gaining its status as one of the major FOSS destinations in the world. Trusting in the great potential, it’s youngsters have to cut innovative paths in Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) domain, the State Government has decided to promote research works on free software in engineering colleges from the next academic year.

      The State IT Department is giving final touches to ‘Foster Kerala’- Free and Open Source Technical Competency, Entrepreneurship and Research Kerala- project, in a bid to engage student community to work on FOSS projects at national and international levels.

    • Opening up opportunities

      In a bid to cut expenses in the information technology (IT) sector, the government has adopted an open standards and open source software (OSOSS) policy.

      This means that, instead of purchasing proprietary software, which is usually expensive and not open source, like Microsoft products, government computers may one day be operating on free software like Ubuntu and OpenOffice.

  • Openness

    • 60,000 books from Library of Congress go online

      Almost 60,000 are available now and more are scanned every day. These books are in the public domain and come with no restrictions on their use. Feel free to harvest, index, investigate, and re-use.

Leftovers

  • California Science Center is sued for canceling a film promoting intelligent design

    L.A.’s California Science Center will start the new year defending itself in court for canceling a documentary film attacking Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.

  • What Were the Science Breakthroughs of 2009?

    As 2009 wound to a close, the PBS NewsHour asked scientists and science journalists to discuss the most significant science stories of the year.

  • Hole as big as city block found on Moon

    A Japanese led team of researchers has found a large, dark pit on the near side of the Moon that is “as big as a city block and deep as a modest skyscraper.” Probably created billions of years ago, it is considered by the scientists to be a collapsed lava tube.

  • Namebench: Google’s 20% Project To Find The Fastest DNS Server

    When Google launched its own DNS service last month, one of the main stated goals behind the project was speed. The problem is that most Internet users have no idea what a DNS server is, let alone how to configure one, or test how fast it is. But one Googler has taken it upon himself to create an easy tool for testing DNS and recommending what you use with his 20% time.

    Thomas Stromberg, a Google engineer based in Belgium, created Namebench, a piece of software to find the fastest DNS server available for you to use. The program is available for OS X, Windows, and Linux, and the entire thing has been open sourced by Stromberg.

  • Environment

    • Shell must face Friends of the Earth Nigeria claim in Netherlands

      A judge in the Netherlands has opened the door to a potential avalanche of legal cases against Shell over environmental degradation said to be caused by its oil operations in the Niger Delta.

      The oil group expressed “disappointment” tonight that a court in The Hague had agreed to allow Friends of the Earth Netherlands and four local Nigerian farmers to bring a compensation case in its backyard for the first time.

  • Finance

    • Christmas Presents for Bankers

      On Christmas night in 1776, George Washington led a surprise attack on a group of Hessian mercenaries employed by the British to suppress the American revolution. This was one of the biggest military victories of the Revolutionary War.

      In the same spirit of surprise, the Obama administration announced on Christmas eve that it was removing the $400bn cap on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s access to the US Treasury. The new draw is limitless. It also announced that the chief executives of the two government-controlled mortgage giants would be getting compensation packages worth $6m a year. This was another big blow for the financial sector in its effort to sap every last cent from the productive economy.

    • The Big Zero

      So here’s what Mr. Summers — and, to be fair, just about everyone in a policy-making position at the time — believed in 1999: America has honest corporate accounting; this lets investors make good decisions, and also forces management to behave responsibly; and the result is a stable, well-functioning financial system.

      What percentage of all this turned out to be true? Zero.

  • PR/AstroTurf

  • Censorship/Civil Rights

    • China Reaffirms Plans to “Purify” the Internet

      Says crackdown on online pornography is part of overall effort to preserve “national long-term stability,” build a “harmonious socialist society,” and prevent the “poisoning of young people’s physical and mental health,” but most likely is all about strengthening its grip on the what could be a dangerous conduit for threatening images and ideas.

    • Belarus to toughen control over Internet

      Belarus’ authoritarian leader is promising to toughen regulation of the Internet and its users in an apparent effort to exert control over the last fully free medium in the former Soviet state.

    • NZ’s cyber spies win new powers

      New cyber-monitoring measures have been quietly introduced giving police and Security Intelligence Service officers the power to monitor all aspects of someone’s online life.

      The measures are the largest expansion of police and SIS surveillance capabilities for decades, and mean that all mobile calls and texts, email, internet surfing and online shopping, chatting and social networking can be monitored anywhere in New Zealand.

    • Canada’s airlines fear violating privacy under new U.S. rules

      Canada’s major airlines say they will be forced either to break privacy laws or to ignore new American air security rules unless the federal government comes up with a response to U.S. demands for passenger information.

01.02.10

Links 2/1/2010: KDE’s Usability Goals, Pardus Praised

Posted in News Roundup at 1:49 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • And now for 2010

    6. Linux Mint goes upscale: Having gotten tired of the minty freshness and looking to appeal to more cosmopolitan tastes, Linux Mint will change over the course of the year to something a little more contemporary. It becomes Linux Merlot, with a bouquet that resonates from the north side of the vineyard slope. The distro will go a lot better with most cheeses.

    5. Also, Linux Mint forks into a smaller distro: Linux Mint developers who don’t drink wine, or anything else alcoholic, will fork the distro and make a version that will only run on thin clients, making it . . . say it with me . . . Linux Thin Mint. Monty Python fans continue to roll on the floor at the mere reference.

  • Linux Tech Talk 3

    For quite awhile, I’ve been wanting to install Debian onto my second PC, but I didn’t want to have to “start from scratch” and tweak and configure everything on it. What I really wanted to do was to use rsync to copy the files in debian1’s / and /home partitions onto partitions on debian2, and see if debian2 would boot up and run, already configured the same way as debian1. I was concerned that it might not work, because debian1 and debian2 use different monitor resolutions and completely different CPUs — although I was pretty confident that the different CPUs would not cause a problem because they can both use the type of linux kernel (686) that is already installed on debian1.

  • Linux Gazette – January 2010 (#170)
  • Linux In A Nutshell – Sixth Edition

    The book begins with some simple ideas about the operating system and then leads through the System and Network Administration overview through boot methods and package management to the Bash shell and pattern matching. The latter is something that is an invaluable source of facts for the first time and experienced user. The section on the use of variuos editors is also useful as is the later part of the book which shows CVS and Git management. If you would like to get hold of something tasty in a nutshell rather than talking to the nut the down corridor this book could be for you.

  • Switching to Linux with Puppy

    If you would like to be sure that you are doing online banking from a clean system, just run your operating system of choice (Windows/Linux/Mac) everyday and boot from the Puppy CD before going to your banking site. This is a great way to prevent malware keyloggers from stealing your banking credentials.

  • Samsung NC10 – a pleasant Ubuntu experience

    Anyway, how does it fair with Ubuntu?

    I used an Ubuntu 9.10 live USB session to see what was working. I was pleased to discover that it appears to be everything. Wireless, bluetooth, correct resolution, touch pad and keyboard. Battery life is not noticeably different to Windows either.

  • A Tale of Two Cultures

    There are fundamental differences between people who use GNU/Linux and those who use that other OS. The former rarely worry about the speed of their systems. The latter have DRM, malware, WGdisA and bloat constantly in their face.

    [...]

    All these blessing are ours out of the box when we use GNU/Linux instead of that other OS. For purposes of education, we will have a system that the school controls, not some corporate monopoly. We will have a system that works for us and our students, not against us.

  • End of the year, a decade and an era.

    Over time I could tell that my message of Linux and Free Software was beginning to put a strain on Digital’s management, since one of Digital’s biggest “partners” was Microsoft, so in 1999 I was offered the opportunity to “do Linux full time”, and I accepted, leaving Digital and my “six figure salary.”

    In many ways the ten years since 1999 have been some of the best in my entire life. I have met and talked with many amazing and passionate people. While I had traveled to many counties as part of Digital’s Unix group (both as a trainer and as a marketing person), I often talked only to managers and large groups of people in conferences and conventions.

  • Server

    • Convert Your Old Computer to a Linux Server

      Linux is a very popular platform. Not just because it is free but also because it is reliable and supports anything you can imagine. A popular setup is a Linux server without any graphical user interface. It can be used for web hosting, as a file server, as a database server, or for anything you need. Most people comfortable with Windows operating system are afraid to start thinking in a different way. In fact, installing and using Linux is pretty simple.

  • Kernel Space

    • One Month Of Monitoring The Linux Kernel Performance

      The Linux kernel benchmarks for the past month illustrate many different performance regressions, some of which are bad but others are actually improvements introduced into the Linux 2.6.33 kernel. With the EXT4 file-system in the Linux 2.6.33 kernel it represents yet more performance drops, as can be seen from the SQLite numbers, for example.

    • Pull Request Goes In For X’s udev Input Handling

      A month ago we reported on news regarding the X.Org plans to move away from HAL considering the FreeDesktop.org Hardware Abstraction Layer project is no longer being developed. Since then patches have emerged to support a xorg.conf.d directory for storing some device-specific options and some new xorg.conf configuration options have emerged for filling in some of the gaps previously covered by HAL.

  • Applications

  • K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

    • KDE Usability Goals for 2010

      This past Fall semester was pretty busy with the wedding, full-course load, and travel. I didn’t have an opportunity to work on KDE as much as I would like and spent most of my time on board duties and conference planning rather than on the Usability project. Now that my coursework is completed and I’m preparing for Comprehensive Exams, I will have more time this semester to work on the KDE Usability project. Some of the things I would like to get done in the next few months include:

      Continue work on Notifications

      Last year I began researching desktop notifications as a way to bridge design ideas coming from Canonical’s Ayatana design team with work that was being done in KDE.

  • Distributions

    • Pardus Linux – An open-source Janissary

      Pardus is a really nice distro. I’m surprised it does not have a bigger user base. But it kind of figures out. Few people have heard of Pardus or had the chance to try it and find out just how great it is, myself included. But now that I’ve been exposed to its goodies, it’s time to spread the word.

      Pardus wins you over by many great features, starting with a very soft, pleasant installation, followed by a smooth, streamlined desktop setup. Then, you get lots of great programs, cross-platform productivity out of the box, great looks, good performance and solid stability, and a whole lot of tiny details that you don’t normally encounter.

      Pardus is truly a unique, refreshing change from the daily routine. The only bad thing I could find was proxy support and nothing else. It behaved phenomenally.

      Well, I am genuinely pleased. I warmly recommend you try Pardus and see for yourself. It’s a small distro, so you might not be tempted. But don’t let this distract you. In the worst case, you won’t be won over and you won’t be using it, but I doubt that. If you’re a home user in search after a decent distribution that offers everything, you’re in no mood for command line hacks and you just want to enjoy your desktop out of box, browse, chat with friends or listen to music, Pardus is a great choice.

      This Turkish distro is a very smart solution. The best thing you can do is help it grow bigger and gain more popularity. Sometimes, all it takes for a talent to break through is the critical mass of believers. Currently, Pardus is ranked #37 on DistroWatch and it definitely deserves better than that.

      Speaking of DistroWatch, you may want to read the review thither. Like most reviews of Pardus 2009, it speaks highly of the distribution. Many good points and some small problematic details I’ve not observed, definitely worth checking out.

      Thank you all who suggested Pardus. It’s really great!

    • New Releases

      • blackPanther OS 10.1
      • Zorin OS 2.0 video released

        If you’re interested in Zorin OS 2.0 then you’ll be interested to see the first video of it. Head over to the Videos page on this site view it.

        Also as a quick reminder, Zorin OS 2.0 will be availible on the 1st of January, that’s less than a week!

    • Debian Family

      • Full Circle Magazin – Issue 32

        This month:

        * Command and Conquer.
        * How-To: Program in Python – Part 6, The Perfect Server – Part 2, Installing Chromium (browser) and Offline Package Install.
        * My Story – Classroom Experiences, and How I Became An Ubuntu Woman.
        * My Opinion – Time To Review The Release Schedule? and Will Linux Ever Get It Right?
        * Review – Music Player Daemon.
        * MOTU Interview – Roderick Greening.
        * Top 5 – Media Centers.
        * Ubuntu Women, Ubuntu Games and all the usual goodness!

      • Goodbye to the GIMP

        It’s a sad time for Ubuntu users. Canonical has announced that it is removing the GNU Image Manipulation Program, aka GIMP, from the default Ubuntu installation routine.

        [...]

        When I write Linux reviews for my blog, I always harp on distros that don’t include GIMP as part of the default install routine. Without it, there usually isn’t much included in the way of image editing tools, and I consider that category of application to be very important to most desktop Linux users.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open Source Days
  • What can open source do next decade?

    I may be wrong, but I don’t buy this. I think it’s software, not the Internet, that has to change. I think either Microsoft solves the problem or open source will solve it and eliminate the need for Microsoft. This tension will be one of the decade’s biggest stories.

  • Audio

  • Databases

    • Our Favourite Database Management System, MySQL

      This is quite odd. MySQL is FLOSS so it can be forked and MW has done that. What is his problem? Does he want to sell something and then kill its value? Is he trying to keep open a window of opportunity for his new fork to grow? That’s OK but why cause FUD in the huge universe of users of MySQL?

  • Licensing

    • Plagiarism and the Creative Commons license

      The bottom line is that this guy tried to pass off my work as his, got caught, lied himself into a corner, then tried to bluff his way out. Didn’t work. I’m not surprised at how it went down, in retrospect; after reading some of the things in his online profile, I should have known this was not a man who would ever admit a mistake even if he was walking around with a bucket of shit stuck on his foot. I’ll admit to one, though: it was a mistake for me to offer a compromise. To someone like that, a compromise offer is seen as admission of weakness.

  • Programming

    • Python wanderings, part two

      Pulling in external dependencies is a big deal for us – many of our users are on Ubuntu or similar desktops with lots of python packages already installed, but some are not using GNOME or a Linux desktop at all, so we have to be sure that we need a library before we depend on it.

      After playing a little with both of the options I came to the conclusion that while they are both really well made and capable, they are far more formal than we need, and the added dependency issues continued to concern me.

Leftovers

  • How Digitized Content Democratizes Knowledge

    Imagine my surprise this week when I learned that National Geographic is selling digital versions of every copy of National Geographic published since 1888 on DVD for $70 . No, there are no typos here. They’ll sell you 120 years of brilliant photography, insight and commentary about our world for essentially the price of taking your family to see “Avatar.” For $200, they’ll even send you the lot on a 160GB hard drive.

  • Finance

    • The banks are still avoiding reform and the public is paying

      As we all know, the public is angry about the big Wall Street bank bailout and they have reason to be. Peter Goodman writes a “fair and balanced” piece quoting both critics and the banks on the government program to protect homeowners from foreclosure that is offering some palliatives but really only delaying the inevitable loss link here. At the same time, the banks seem to be making out very well. Goodman suggests with a few examples, that they are exploiting their superior bargaining position and knowledge to maximize their return.

      The public is paying the banks in ways most people don’t realize. They are of course aware that the government–i.e., the taxpayer–is on the hook for the direct payouts which must ultimately be covered by taxes.

  • Censorship/Civil Rights

    • WikiLeakS.org applies for $532,000 funding from the Knight Foundation – for “local news” whistleblower leaks ?

      WikiLeakS.org has applied for a grant from the Knight Foundation a charitable foundation financed from the former Knight-Ridder US newspaper conglomerate.

      Do not confuse this with the recently revived 1980′s fictional Knight Rider TV series featuring a supposedly artificially intelligent car, which starred David Hasselhoff.

    • And the draft of the ACTA reply to me in English

      So here is a Council draft document in English to the reply to my secondary request for document access related to an ACTA criminal provisions document.

    • ACTA secondary application answered

      Formally, I could go to Court now or invoke the ombudsman.

    • TSA Withdraws Subpoenas Against Bloggers

      In the wake of public outcry against the Transportation Security Administration for serving civil subpoenas on two bloggers, the government agency has canceled the legal action and apologized for the strong-arm tactics agents used.

      Travel writer and photographer Steven Frischling, who was served with a subpoena by two TSA agents on Tuesday, told Threat Level that he received a phone call Thursday evening from John Drennan, deputy chief counsel for enforcement at TSA, telling him the administration was withdrawing its subpoena.

    • President Obama, It’s Time To Fire the TSA

      Today, DHS’s Napolitano’s response to the crotchbomber: “We’re looking to make sure that this sort of incident cannot recur.” But the TSA’s response to Abdulmutalib’s attempt makes one thing clear: We must stop pretending the TSA is making us safer.

      Security expert Bruce Schneier nails the core incompetency: “For years I’ve been saying ‘Only two things have made flying safer [since 9/11]: the reinforcement of cockpit doors, and the fact that passengers know now to resist hijackers.’”

      So what has the TSA done in response to the attempted attack? They’ve told airlines to make passengers stay in their seats during the last hour of flight. They’ve made it verboten for passengers to hold anything in their laps, again only during the last hour of flight. Perhaps most hilariously telling, they’ve forbidden pilots from announcing when a plane is flying over certain cities and landmarks.

    • Long arm of law reaches into World of Warcraft

      The virtual world of online gaming seems like the perfect place to hide. There is plenty of anonymity, and it’s almost impossible for someone to trace activity back to its source, right? Wrong.

      Two weeks ago, Howard County Sheriff’s Department deputy Matt Roberson tracked down a wanted fugitive through one of the most popular games on the Internet — World of Warcraft. And he got his man.

01.01.10

Links 1/1/2010: “Avatar” Powered by GNU/Linux, Garmin to Make Android Phone

Posted in News Roundup at 2:25 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • LinuxCertified Announces its next Embedded and Real-Time Linux Development Training course.

    The course covers the key issues in embedding Linux. Such questions as: why Linux, how to embed Linux, and how to measure and obtain real-time performance in Linux are examined. Taught by veterans in the field, this course provides an in-depth analysis of the subject. The course will be useful both for managers looking to identify correct tools and resources for their projects as well as developers looking to hone their skills before taking on a serious Embedded and Real-Time Linux project.

  • 2010’s Tech Predictions That Really Matter

    Open Source will definitely make a mark this year, what with Linux shaping the decade with some excellent contributions. Without doubts, Linux will play a big role in how the technology shapes in 2010 and the rest of the new decade.

  • What Lies at the Heart of “Avatar”?

    Oh, look: Linux. Why am I not surprised…?

  • Graphics

    • The State Of OpenGL 3.x in Mesa Core

      While ATI R600 users only recently received OpenGL 2.0 hardware support within the open-source Radeon 3D stack and there is many more OpenGL extensions to be implemented just not for the ATI Mesa driver but the other DRI drivers as well, Brian Paul has published a document that lays out the current state of OpenGL 3.x within the classic Mesa core. This document lays out what core Mesa supports and not necessarily that any of the drivers are implementing the said support at this time. Granted, with Mesa not really being very performance-efficient at this time or capable of running most games, a majority of users will be waiting for the OpenGL 3.x state tracker for Gallium3D.

  • Games

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Android

      • Will smartphones see off sat-nav?

        The two models currently available run on Linux and Windows platforms but Garmin plans to launch an Android phone in America in 2010.

      • My 2009 Team of the Year Award

        A couple of months ago when my Nokia N95 suddenly turned into a brick the inestimable James Whatley aka whatleydude was kind enough to loan me an HTC Magic running the new mobile OS from Google. I played with the device for about five minutes before proclaiming: For now, Nokia, you’re dead to me.

      • The Androidification of Everything

        The bigger indicator of momentum for Android is the excitement it has generated in the semiconductor industry. EETimes reports that, in addition to chip companies ARM and MIPS, semiconductor design firms such as Aricent and Mentor Graphics have established special Android-focused businesses. Freescale Semiconductor is working on an Android-based netbook design, as is Qualcomm.

    • Sub-notebooks

      • Sugar Learning Platform Will Succeed In Virgin Markets

        I think is time that Sugar Labs and Sugar developers to realize that the success or failure of Sugar does not depend on its ability to play YouTube videos. Not because is not important but because there is very little chance to penetrate this market dominated by Microsoft and Apple.

      • $99 Cherrypal Africa Netbook Now Available

        The sub-100 dollar laptop is now a reality in the form of the Cherrypal Africa, a $99 seven-inch laptop intended to help developing countries and low-income persons connect to the Web.

Free Software/Open Source

  • New Open Source Intrusion Detector Suricata Released

    The OISF has released the beta version of the Suricata IDS/IPS engine: The Suricata Engine is an Open Source Next Generation Intrusion Detection and Prevention Engine. This engine is not intended to just replace or emulate the existing tools in the industry, but will bring new ideas and technologies to the field.

  • OSUOSL: Looking back on 2009

    2009 has been an exciting and eventful year at the Oregon State University Open Source Lab (OSUOSL). This year marks our sixth anniversary of providing open source projects with world-class hosting and development services. I’d like to take this chance to look back on what we’ve done at the OSUOSL this year, and what we expect from next year.

  • 8 ECM Predictions for 2010

    This is not new for open source. MySQL and JBoss have worked with many non-open source vendors and bolstered their capabilities. In 2010, this will take on a new significance though.

  • Top Ten Open Source Legal Developments: 2009

    6. Enforcement of GPL for Busybox Continues. The Software Freedom Law Center has continued to enforce the GPLv2 on behalf of some of the owners of the copyright in Busybox software.

  • Databases

    • Moglen on Patents and Bilski

      Eben Moglen has a very interesting presentation on patents (including comments on Bilski) that was originally presented on Nov. 2, 2009. Software patents and business method patents have been a disaster for the U.S. and world economy, and he has some interesting things to say about how we got here (and how it could be fixed).

      [...]

      Because the patent system predates the APA, all potential harms to society from a patent are completely ignored during the patent examination process. If patents were individually considered as new regulations under the APA, such questions would need to be carefully considered. That’s an interesting point Moglen makes.

  • Openness

    • TinkerCell: modular CAD tool for synthetic biology

      An application named TinkerCell has been developed in order to serve as a CAD tool for synthetic biology. TinkerCell is a visual modeling tool that supports a hierarchy of biological parts. Each part in this hierarchy consists of a set of attributes that define the part, such as sequence or rate constants. Models that are constructed using these parts can be analyzed using various third-party C and Python programs that are hosted by TinkerCell via an extensive C and Python application programming interface (API).

    • Who will pay for the arXiv?

      Last time I mentioned the INSPIRE system as an exciting development in high energy physics literature databases (no, that’s not an oxymoron). There’s another big change going on in that field next year, but this will be behind-the-scenes. None-the-less, it’s raised a lot of questions about the ownership and financial support of an important resource that is free to anyone in the world: the arXiv.

      The e-print arXiv (pronounced “archive”) is a central repository of research articles in physics, mathematics, computer science, and quantitative biology. Since its inception in 1991 by theoretical physicist Paul Ginsparg, it has had a huge impact on the way science is done by providing free access to “pre-prints” of research papers.

Leftovers

  • Obama Curbs Secrecy of Classified Documents

    President Obama declared on Tuesday that “no information may remain classified indefinitely” as part of a sweeping overhaul of the executive branch’s system for protecting classified national security information.

  • How not to handle China

    Behind this froth, what is plain is that China has once again asserted its determination to protect its own sovereignty whatever the issue, and is intent on doing things its way. Given its economic progress in the past three decades and the immediate effect of its huge pump-priming over the past 12 months in restoring growth (even if the second half of next year may prove more problematic), the leadership and the population feel pretty good about themselves. They are in no mood to take lessons, moral or otherwise, from the west.

    In this context, the Shaikh case fits into a string of scratchy non-meetings of mind between China and the west over the last couple of months.

  • Winner: Pixel Qi’s Everywhere Display

    I’m watching a clip from Slumdog Millionaire on what looks like a standard netbook computer, a scene in which deep blue body paint gives way to luscious saffron-yellow cloth. The picture quality is fine, if nothing special. But then I push a small white button at the side of the display, and it does something I’ve never seen before: The backlight disappears, and the image turns black and white, remaining visible thanks to the overhead lights in the room. I hold up an Amazon Kindle by way of comparison. Both displays have the same crisp grayscale text I’ve come to expect from e-paper.

  • Happy 40th Birthday time(2)!

    The Unix time(2) system call is “over the hill” at 40 years old today. The time(2) system call has dutifully told us how many seconds have passed since January 1, 1970. I use the day as my “birthday” on public websites in tribute. Please raise a glass of champagne tonight with me in celebration!

  • UTStarcom to Pay US Fines for Bribing Chinese Carriers

    Telecommunications equipment vendor UTStarcom will pay a total of US$3 million in fines for violating U.S. bribery laws by giving employees of Chinese carriers free U.S. vacations that were reported as training programs.

    UTStarcom, based in Alameda, California, reached a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice in which it will pay a $1.5 million fine, the department announced on Thursday. In the settlement, the company took responsibility for the actions of UTStarcom China, the wholly owned subsidiary through which it does business in China, the DOJ said in a statement. In a related settlement on Thursday, the company also agreed to pay a $1.5 million penalty to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the DOJ said.

  • Life in Transit: Happy New Year everyone

    I think 2010 is going to be the Year of Platforms. Not Snake-Oil-as-A-Service. Real honest-to-goodness heavy-lifting platforms. The stuff that makes it possible for everyone to have Everything-As-A-Service.

    Some of you think that platforms are passe, so 2007. Some of you think that platforms are cloud-cuckoo-land, to be filed alongside the Paperless Office and the Paperless Loo. To my mind there’s something very William Gibson-ish about platforms: the future’s already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.

  • Security

    • Asteroid Deflection as a Public Good

      I wrote this post over the weekend but given Paul Samuelson’s classic contribution to public goods theory and to economic textbooks it seems to also fit today.

  • Environment

    • Retro: Y2K and Peak Oil

      I’m getting a shiver of deja vu these days when I read the peak oil-related websites. Some are boggling over the fact that “global warming” got more attention than “peak oil” in the discussions over the recently-passed Energy Bill in the US, while others are simply furious that the American public (and these websites seem predominantly American in focus) isn’t taking peak oil sufficiently seriously. They’re particularly bothered that mainstream discussion of the idea, when it happens, often pushes the peak date out by ten to twenty years (or more), making it seem like a distant crisis at worst.

  • Finance

    • Goldman Sachs in The Cayman Islands

      Some stories are not all that surprising, but they are nonetheless sickening beyond measure.

    • Goldman Sachs Faces Probes

      The New York Times reports investigators in the U.S. Congress at the Securities and Exchange Commission and at the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority have launched probes into Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms for deliberately selling risky structured securities to clients, and then betting on the securities failing.

      The probes are looking at how Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank and other Wall Street firms profited off complex mortgage-based securities — known as synthetic collateralized debt obligations, or C.D.O.’s. Pension funds and insurance companies lost billions of dollars on such securities that they believed were solid investments.

    • Goldman Sachs Duped Investors, Investigation Finds

      McClatchy reporters have been digging into the shady offshore dealings of Goldman Sachs and what they found in the records of the financial-meltdown villain is as maddening as you’d expect.

      According to the investigation, “Goldman peddled more than $40 billion in U.S.-registered securities … but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting.”

    • In Goldman Sachs’ Cayman Islands Deals, Investors Could Only Lose

      When financial titan Goldman Sachs joined some of its Wall Street rivals in late 2005 in secretly packaging a new breed of offshore securities, it gave prospective investors little hint that many of the deals were so risky that they could end up losing hundreds of millions of dollars on them.

    • Investors could only lose in Goldman’s Caymans deals

      McClatchy has obtained previously undisclosed documents that provide a closer look at the shadowy $1.3 trillion market since 2002 for complex offshore deals, which Chicago financial consultant and frequent Goldman critic Janet Tavakoli said at times met “every definition of a Ponzi scheme.”

      The documents include the offering circulars for 40 of Goldman’s estimated 148 deals in the Cayman Islands over a seven-year period, including a dozen of its more exotic transactions tied to mortgages and consumer loans that it marketed in 2006 and 2007, at the crest of the booming market for subprime mortgages to marginally qualified borrowers.

    • Goldman Sachs’ response to latest McClatchy article

      As flattering as it is, Mr. van Praag’s assumption that Greg Gordon produced his Dec. 30 story in six days is incorrect. In fact, he had finished reporting and writing the story, and it was being edited on Dec. 24 when The New York Times published “Banks Bundled Bad Debt, Bet Against It and Won,” that paper’s variation on the theme of McClatchy’s Nov. 1-4 series on how Goldman Sachs had bundled bad debt, bet against it and won.

    • Goldman’s offshore deals deepened global financial crisis

      When financial titan Goldman Sachs joined some of its Wall Street rivals in late 2005 in secretly packaging a new breed of offshore securities, it gave prospective investors little hint that many of the deals were so risky that they could end up losing hundreds of millions of dollars on them.

  • Censorship/Civil Rights

    • Apple Censors Dalai Lama IPhone Apps in China

      Apple appears to have blocked iPhone applications related to the Dalai Lama in its China App Store, making it the latest U.S. technology company to censor its services in China.

      Those apps, which appear in most countries’ versions of the App Store, do not currently appear in the Chinese version. Another app related to Rebiya Kadeer, who like the Dalai Lama is an exiled minority leader reviled by China’s authorities, is unavailable in the China App Store as well. The apparent censorship comes after carrier China Unicom launched iPhone sales two months ago, making regulatory approval of the phone’s contents in the country necessary for the first time.

    • Poland apparently planning to control Internet much more strictly

      Poland is apparently planning to make its control of the Internet drastically stricter. heise Online Poland, the Polish sister website of The H, reports that the government is working on new legislation already. The new law would create a registry of websites to be blocked and force Internet service providers to hand over detailed user data to investigators, for instance.

    • What were the worst offences against liberty, democracy and the rule of law in 2009?

      For most bloggers and hacks, the end of the year is a time to look back at some of the best moments from the previous 12 months. But I’m a miserable bastard. So instead I thought I’d make a list of some of the low points for freedom and democracy in the UK in 2009. I’m thinking of those things which offend against the very notion of a free society; the kind people refuse to believe until you show them the proof.

  • Internet/Web Abuse/DRM

    • 2010: The Year Networks Are Decreed Neutral?

      Long-frustrated network neutrality advocates headed into 2009 with high hopes. After all, there was a new administration headed by a man whose campaign promises included the assurance that he would “take a back seat to no one” on the issue, a decidedly Democratic Congress and a general warming to the idea that unfettered access to content and applications on the Internet was somehow essential to the new economy and the sacrosanct rights of the First Amendment.

    • Whoops! F.C.C. Chairman Spams Facebook Friends

      Facebook scam artists have closed out 2009 by snagging a prominent victim: Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.

      On Thursday at around 10:30 a.m., Mr. Genachowski sent his Facebook friends this puzzling message: “Adam got me started making money with this.” It was followed by a link to a Web page that is no longer active. The message blitz indicated that Mr. Genachowski’s account had been taken over by a malicious program that was using it to send out spam.

    • How to Destroy the Book, by Cory Doctorow

      People keep showing me ebook readers that try to recreate the book experience with cute animations showing the turning of pages. But if you want to recreate the important part of the book experience, the part that keeps people buying books for their whole lives, filling their homes with treasured friends that they would not part with for love nor money, then we need to restore and safeguard ownership of books. When I buy a book, it’s mine. There’s no mechanism, not even in the face of a court order, whereby a retailer can take a book away from me, and yet Amazon—there’s the most extraordinary thing that they had to do in the United States—you’ve heard of course that someone put a copy of Orwell’s 1984 in the Kindle Store, and it wasn’t licensed for distribution in the U.S.—of course, Orwell is in the public domain outside the U.S., in copyright in the U.S.—and Amazon responded to this intelligence by revoking the book 1984 from its customers’ ebook readers. After they’d bought it, they woke up one morning to discover their book had gone.

    • Tomorrow Is National Book Burning Day; Thank Your Friendly Entertainment Industry Lobbyists

      January 1st of each year should be National Public Domain Day, when many different creative works enter the public domain, where they can be made useful. In years past, it was a regular occurrence as tons of creative works went into the public domain each year. Often this was by choice on the part of the copyright holder. That’s because copyright used to have a renewal requirement, and the vast majority of copyright holders found little reason to renew their copyright. In 1958-59, only 7% of book copyright holders chose to renew their copyrights, meaning that 93% of books that could have been covered by copyright were allowed to enter the public domain. The small number that did have their copyrights renewed were (not surprisingly) the books that were still huge commercial successes, whose authors and publishers wished to retain their monopoly rights.

  • Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights

    • From the archives – March 2001: Major label digital strategies

      The company’s internet strategy begins and ends with AOL. The thinking here is that AOL, with 24 million subscribers, has a natural customer base for Time Warner’s extensive music catalogue, as well as serious Internet expertise in house. Although MBI World Music Report lists Warner Music Group’s global market share as equal to BMG’s at 11.9 percent (tied for fourth), AOL was working to secure licensing rights from the other music titans.

      Combined with Time Warner’s cable-modem Road Runner service, AOL also has control of fat pipes in the US. The reason many people didn’t use Napster is because it is slow and expensive. With control of broadband, subscription is that much more compelling.

    • What Could Have Been Entering the Public Domain on January 1, 2010?

      Current US law extends copyright protections for 70 years from the date of the author’s death. (Corporate “works-for-hire” are copyrighted for 95 years.) But prior to the 1976 Copyright Act (which became effective in 1978), the maximum copyright term was 56 years (an initial term of 28 years, renewable for another 28 years). Under those laws, works published in 1953 would be passing into the public domain on January 1, 2010.

    • Sookman found liable for worldwide article inaccuracies

      OK. I’m being mean. I know it. You know it. Barry knows it. But hey, it’s me. This is how I am. Still I feel kind of guilty. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel. Quite frankly I should just forget about Barry, and finish the article I started before Christmas on Canadian attitudes towards Climate Change.

      But hell – I declare this ‘Beat up on Barry week.’ In my earlier articles about Barry’s writing (one) (two) I mentioned that I had spotted other inaccuracies, and here’s one:

      Fung and Isohunt found liable for inducing worldwide copyright infringement

      Like wow, man. Guilty of Worldwide Copyright Infringement! That’s bad. Really bad.

    • Why Indie Directors Give Movies Away Free Online

      When Finnish filmmaker Timo Vuorensola came up with the idea for his movie Star Wreck, a parody of Star Trek, he knew that looking for conventional distribution would be futile. An amateur, science-fiction comedy with a miniscule budget — and in Finnish, to boot — would hardly be attractive to mainstream studios. So Vuorensola took matters into his own hands: he used a Finnish social networking site to build up an online fan base who contributed to the storyline, made props and even offered their acting skills. In return for the help, Vuorensola released Star Wreck in 2005 online for free. Seven hundred thousand copies were downloaded in the first week alone; to date, the total has now reached 9 million.

    • My only prediction for 2010 and it ain’t pretty

      Sure we have all read posts about how the entertainment industry is trying to get changes made to existing copyright laws in various countries and the response has for the most part been a big *YAWN* and then it’s on to whining and gushing respectively over Twitter and Facebook. The problem is that the movement to gut existing copyright laws, being led by the US entertainment industry, is only a shadow of the real effort that will supersede any local country laws.

      This is all being done behind closed doors where even government officials are being required to sign NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreements). Yes, NDAs on the creation of a new global treaty – something that has never been done before because laws and treaties are suppose to be open to public examination and input. This isn’t the case with the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) however.

    • The Problem Isn’t Middlemen, It’s Monopolies

      So many middlemen insist on monopolies, we’ve forgotten we don’t need to grant them. They say that without a monopoly (aka “exclusive rights”) they have no incentive to promote and distribute. Actually a monopoly gives a middleman no incentive, because no one is competing with them. Take away the monopoly, and the middleman has to compete with other potential middlemen (including the artist). Then they have an incentive to work. Rather than monopoly, they succeed on the basis of expertise (theatrical distributors already know how to track, ship, and manage prints), innovation (finding better ways to meet customers’ existing desires and identifying new ones), and quality.

Activate Windows Without Losing Your Selected Text


12.31.09

Links 1/1/2010: Many New GNU/Linux Releases, Ubuntu Tweak 0.5

Posted in News Roundup at 10:07 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Novell happy year

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • A standard Windows desktop is useless

    I type, LyX does the layout. Creating a PDF is painless. With eLyXer HTML creation is easy – and boy, does it look good. With LaTeX2RTF I can create those @#$% Word documents the whole world seems to be craving for. I written my entire 4tH manual with LyX, which is over 450 densely written letter-size pages – with graphics. No problem. Making references, bibliographies or a simple table of contents, it’s just a few quick clicks away. I fire LyX up, adjust the document properties and I’m away. I type the title, my name, indicate this is the “title” and “author” and begin my first section. Highlight the section title, indicate this is a “section” and off we go. That’s how you produce content. Needless to say that once you’ve put an image somewhere that it doesn’t move anymore – and certainly isn’t overlaid.

  • The Linux Commercial Contest

    Post a link to that video in the Comments section below this post.

    The deadline is January 10, 2010 at 5pm Eastern Standard Time. You can post your entries after that time but they won’t be considered for the contest.

    I will announce the winners via a post here on Daniweb on January 15, 2010.

    There will be three winners: First, Second and Third place.

    Winners will receive fame and possibly some higher form of recognition. I’ll work on that part.

    Winners will be judged on the following criteria:
    1. Originality
    2. Number YouTube views
    3. Commercial Appeal

    Good luck and get creative.

  • IT Experts: Our Top Tech Resolutions for 2009

    If you’re not going to stick with Windows, then jump ship in 2009 — after all, it’s now clear that Windows 7 won’t be a brand-new OS but simply a better Vista, so what are you waiting for? Plus, the next Mac OS X, Snow Leopard, will also be a continuation of the current OS, so there’s no reason to delay your journey down that path. Linux’s stability also argues for not waiting.

  • Applications

    • Trying Out Single Window Mode on GIMP 2.7

      Once you run GIMP 2.7, you’ll notice that it will start up in the traditional multi-window interface. To switch to the single-window interface, go to the “Windows” menu and toggle “Single-window mode”.

      Now that GIMP has the window mode of your choice, I hope the multi-window zealots and the single-window lovers can both rejoice about the wonderful, yet underrated program we know as GIMP.

    • A Look Back At Docky in 2009

      As with a few other of my favourite Linux applications, Docky has an incredibly insightful and focused team who hare a passion for making Docky awesome – as proven by its breathtakingly fast development speed!

    • Some GNOME Activity Journal (GNOME Zeitgeist) Screenshots

      So after some cleanup we decided to upload these pics before new years starts. Development is going very fast thanks to the Zeitgeist Framework 0.3 series. This is not our final design and there are ofcourse some usability flaws. We welcome critics, praises and suggestions.

    • Learning is Childsplay

      I spent some time looking at Childsplay and if you have small children, I think you should too. As soon as I started the program, it started to play it’s theme song and my 18 month old son came running, and he still comes running every time he hears that music. For most parents and educators, my review of this program could end right here, but I suspect that I should probably write a bit more.

    • Android apps: Six of the best

      Astrid

      Astrid is a to-do list manager on steroids. Astrid can be used to create tasks with notes, deadlines, reminders tags and priorities. Input is straightforward and reminders can be set in any form. Astrid can also sync with online site Rememberthemilk.com and prompts you with human-like reminders at regular intervals: “Let’s get this done”. Tasks can also record time spent on each of them so Astrid also acts like a time-logger for billing hours. If you have stuff to do then Astrid is the best at keeping you organised.

    • Instructionals

    • Games

      • 3 Wonderful Open-Source Games to Install After Installing Ubuntu

        Wesnoth 1.6.5

        Scripting is handled in Wesnoth by WML, the Wesnoth Markup Language, which allows for building entire scenarios and campaigns.

        Wesnoth is in a continuous change, with every new release bringing more features and gameplay innovation. The current stable release is 1.6.5, but soon 1.8 will be out, and it will include new unit portraits, WML (Wesnoth Markup Language) improvements, updated campaigns and more. 1.8 will also allow the user to directly upload user-made campaigns and scenario from in-game add-ons menu.

  • Distributions

    • Getting Started with Arch Linux

      It’s hard to come up with an opinion about Arch, since Arch is what you make of it. I like that it gives so much control to the user when it comes to system configuration, but at times it feels like a little too much control. There are a few things that make you think “come on, does this HAVE to be manual?” but the developers are clearly just trying to follow the Arch philosophy of giving the user all the control. In particular, it would be nice to have tools like hwd and aurbuild as part of the system, or at least available for installation through pacman. That may happen at some point as packages in AUR have a chance to be worked into the community repo eventually. Overall I think I like Arch and pacman, and I can see how it would make a great choice for systems that should be kept fast and clean.

    • New Releases

    • Mandriva

      • Noteworthy changes 21 december – 31 december 2009

        In spite of the holiday season, lots of new packages continue to trickle in Mandriva Cooker. Amongst the many updates, here is an overview of some important changes:

        * GNOME is now updated toversion 2.29.4: The most important changes are in Nautilus. In preparation of GNOME 3.0, where Nautilus will purely be a file browser and won’t provide the desktop anymore, the file management part has been improved a lot. Upstream is now using browser mode by default (this was already the case in Mandriva) and made several UI improvements for it. The developers have added now an optional split view like Midnight Commander. Another useful change is that it’s now possible in GNOME to configure a background per monitor on a multi-monitor setup in GNOME. Also worth mentioning is the fast progress the Tracker document search engine is making since some time. I would recommend removing Beagle from your Cooker system, and switching to Tracker instead. Then by clicking on the Search button in Nautilus’ toolbar, you can easily search your files.
        * KDE has been updated to the latest beta, which is version 4.4 beta 2.

    • Ubuntu Tweak

      • Ubuntu Tweak Gets New User-based Website, New Release

        Today should also see the release of Ubuntu 0.5.0 which sports a slightly-rejigged interface and several new features – not least of which being the integration of UTCOM application database.

      • Ubuntu Tweak 0.5: An Early Look

        Ubuntu Tweak 0.5 will come with a redesigned UI (but version 0.6 will suffer major UI changes), XFCE specific features and most importantly: the ability to fetch online database to keep the ppplication information up-to-date. That means that you will be able to keep your applications and sources up-to-date without updating Ubuntu Tweak.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Ask a Geek: Home servers, and why you need one

      The final solution that I can present is to use a Linux distribution such as Ubuntu Server (http://ubuntu.com). There are a great many tutorials throughout the Internet that will walk you through setting up Ubuntu as a server, and more specifically as a home server. Please know that this column lists solutions from least to most complicated, and Ubuntu will be the hardest setup of the solutions presented. At the same time, Ubuntu will also provide you with the most flexibility to do whatever you want with your own machine for little to no cost.

    • Tri-OS SmartQ V5 MID goes on sale in China

      The company does reveal, however, that the device is powered by a 600MHz ARM11 CPU which can be overclocked to 800MHz thanks to a firmware update. Most interestingly, the V5 ships with Android, Ubuntu Linux and Windows CE 6.0 preloaded.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Spoiled Brats

  • BSD

    • Letter from the President

      In 2009, the FreeBSD project had the misfortune of losing two long time contributors: John Birrell and Jean-Marc Zucconi. I chatted with John recently, during this year’s BSDCAN, so his death was all the more shocking. It forced me to recognize my own mortality and to consider what contributions from our lives remain after we pass away. Reviewing the heritage of FreeBSD it becomes clear that our work on this project takes on a life of its own. John and Jean-Marc’s efforts live on in FreeBSD.

    • The Great Fallacy of BSD Unix vs. Linux

      “Linux is just a kernel.” It’s a commonly heard refrain amongst the arguments put forward by BSD Unix aficionados, and it is a true statement, but it is all too often abused to try to make a fallacious point.

  • Programming

    • Release Early, Release Often, Adopt Slowly

      The Mozilla folks can push people to upgrade to the next release Firefox in droves because it’s relatively easy to upgrade to the latest Firefox, and they have mechanisms in place to make that easy. But one shouldn’t expect that all technology adoption is going to happen at the same clip. Moving to a new OS or a new version of PostgreSQL or Python requires a lot of moving bits to be aligned correctly.

Leftovers

  • 10 Historic Events Then and Now
  • South Korea Closes Flash Memory Antitrust Investigation

    South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission has closed an antitrust investigation of the flash memory industry, concluding that there is no evidence of a pricing cartel.

  • Fallon’s Getting a Dell!

    Fallon would probably have preferred the more colorful Mini9 but he got the Vostro, instead, because I was able to buy a new one from Dell for $199 with free shipping.
    Heck of a deal.

    [...]

    The Dell people have been uniformly helpful, friendly, courteous, and kind.

  • Dell crowned Bad Santa computer maker by angry customers

    Dell customers are furious at the computer maker after it failed to deliver products in time for the holiday season, and instead offered a “Holiday Card” to place under their Christmas trees to replace undelivered gifts.

  • DVD Is Dead

    The movie studio fantasy was that we’d pay $20-$40 per Blu-Ray disk, but then Daddy was laid-off and that Blu-Ray copy of 8 Mile suddenly wasn’t THAT much better than the DVD version for half the price. Some people decided to wait while others gave up completely, leading to that $68 Blu-Ray player down at WalMart. Remember WalMart is the largest seller of DVD’s (and presumably Blu-Ray disks) in America and possibly the world. WalMart is such a Big Kahuna in the home video business that they can dictate prices pretty much to the rest of the market. I predict, therefore, that after Christmas Blu-Ray prices will crash to only marginally more than DVDs and maybe even the same.

  • Tories swallow Web 2.0, spit out £1m crowdsource prize

    The Tories are waving a £1m taxpayer-funded crowdsourcing prize under the noses of developers to produce a website that can “harness the wisdom” of voters to “resolve difficult policy challenges”.

  • Security

    • TSA Subpoenas Bloggers, Demands Names of Sources

      As the government reviews how an alleged terrorist was able to bring a bomb onto a U.S.-bound plane and try to blow it up on Christmas Day, the Transportation Security Administration is going after bloggers who wrote about a directive to increase security after the incident.

      TSA special agents served subpoenas to travel bloggers Steve Frischling and Chris Elliott, demanding that they reveal who leaked the security directive to them. The government says the directive was not supposed to be disclosed to the public.

    • US feds squeeze bloggers for posting TSA orders

      At least two bloggers who posted the latest Transportation Security Administration security guidelines have received visits from the feds. One had his laptop confiscated and was served a subpoena. The other just received the subpoena.

      In case you’ve been recovering from a massive holiday bender and haven’t viewed the news recently, on Christmas day a singularly inefficient Nigerian doofus attempted to blow up an airliner by setting his underpants on fire.

    • TSA To Save Print Media? No Electronics On International Flights? What A Joke.

      Obviously, this is all in reaction to the Nigerian man who attempted to bring down a plane coming into the U.S. And the TSA is going to do whatever it thinks is necessary to prevent further attacks of a similar nature. But the simple fact is that if the TSA was really this seriously worried about electronic devices, they could have banned them anytime since the attacks on September 11, 2001. Instead, they’re doing it more than 8 years later after a man apparently lit some sort of mixture of powder and liquid in his lap. How that relates to electronics, I’m not sure. This just reeks of a “well, we have to do something” move.

  • Finance

  • Censorship/Civil Rights

  • Internet/Web Abuse/DRM

    • Despite Awful Customer Service, Woman Felt Forced To Buy Another Sony eBook Reader… Thanks To DRM

      After all of this, she went out and bought another Sony ebook reader. She noted that she would have gladly purchased a competing product “but would have lost access to the library she’s spent hundreds of dollars building up.” And there it is. The DRM tax at work creating serious lock-in and consumer problems. At least in this case, due to the publicity from Consumerist, Sony agreed to reimburse the woman, but you shouldn’t have to get a major publication to tell your story first to get that kind of resolution.

  • Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights

    • Netflix Trying to Make Peace with Wary Studios for More Streaming Content

      Things are looking tough for Netflix. The online rental service is trying to convince Hollywood studios to sell them the rights to more video content for their “Watch Instantly” streaming offering, but many studios still seem to be mad about Netflix’s deal with Starz last year. The Starz deal, which in one fell swoop added around 2,500 titles for streaming, allowed Netflix to gain access to newer Disney and Sony movies without asking for permission from the studios.

    • Author Robin Sloan Offers Up Money To Fans For Good Remix Ideas

      It’s yet another cool way of connecting with fans, and going explicitly against what copyright allows. It’s explicitly encouraging people to copy his work and even offering money to them if they do a good job.

    • Songwriter Sues Eddie Vedder for Changing ‘Hard Sun’ Lyrics

      Peterson is now suing Vedder and has filed papers in New York’s Manhattan federal court. The suit states, “Vedder altered certain key lyrics of ‘Hard Sun’… eroding the integrity of the composition.” Executives at Universal Music are also targeted in the lawsuit after allegedly licensing the track without his permission.

Clip of the Day

Direct link

Links: Happy GNU Year Special

Posted in News Roundup at 9:20 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU key

GNOME bluefish

  • 2010 as the year of Linux on the desktop – does it really matter?

    Why? Linux is ready for my desktop. It has been for years now.

    [...]

    Until the year of Linux on the desktop finally rolls around (if it ever does), stop worrying about it. Just keep on using Linux and free/Open Source software. Keep enjoying the flexibility and choice and freedom that you have with Linux.

  • Linux on the cusp of 2010

    And this brings us, finally, to Linux. Currently about a third of netbooks are being shipped with Linux globally and this should rise to a majority by 2013. This is the beginning of Linux taking over the low-end of ‘desktop’ (that is, ‘not server’) computing. What I think will happen this coming year is going to be a convergence of technologies that are going to result in that sub-$200 machine, and it won’t have Windows XP or 7 on it. But unlike the current generation of netbooks that are Intel Atom-based, these will run on ARM processors. Predictions include that 20% of 2010’s netbooks will have ARM processors and the amount will be over half by 2012. And while Google’s Android will be on some of them, Ubuntu stands to grab a large amount of the market with its 10.04 LTS release.

    So, will 2010 be the year of ‘desktop’ Linux? I think yes, but in a way that I didn’t quite imagine in 2007.

  • Linux in 2010

    2009 has been a rather interesting year for Linux, and 2010 promises to be even better. In 2009 we have seen the explosion of Linux in the mobile phone segment: Google’s Linux-based Android OS smartphones have blossomed, Nokia’s Maemo based N900 made geeks all over the world drool, Palm released a new linux-based OS for its smartphones, WebOS, even Samsung unveiled a new Linux-based OS for its mobiles called Bada.The year of the Linux Desktop, may yet be far far away, but there is no doubt that 2009 was the year of the Linux Mobile.

  • 2010 – A Linux Odyssey.

    My Linux Odyssey for 2010 is going to be two pronged. One, as the control op here at the Linux Journal’s Virtual Ham Shack, I am going to start the process of converting my few Amateur Radio programs to Linux. One of the first programs I want to dive into is Xastir, the APRS program. My training is as a geographer, with a focus on cartography, so anything maps is right up my alley and I look forward to leveraging the abilities and capabilities of Xastir. Second, I am going to continue my focus on Linux, particularly in business, as we move through the year in my occasional posting in this space.

  • The H Year: 2009′s Wins, Fails and Mehs

    Win – Android’s Rise – With Chrome/Chromium, Chrome OS and other web related open source projects coming out of Google, it has been a good year for Google’s contributions. But the big win in 2009 for Google and for open source has been the rapid advance of Android as an operating system for smart phones and other mobile devices. 2008′s mediocre launch of the Linux-powered phone OS was surpassed in 2009 with a wide range of devices running the OS, new versions of Android and a rapidly growing developer community.

  • Open source predictions for 2010

    Linux takes over mobile market

    This prediction is one of the more certain to come true. With more and more powerful phone arriving on the market with the Android operating system and the netbook hardware gaining more power and more Linux-based options (Moblin and Chrome OS for example), the mobile space seems ripe for a Linux takeover in 2010. Of course there have been many who would argue that netbook sales have declined, it has been predicted that netbook sales will top 50 million by 2012. But to this I would suggest that (although I am not a huge fan) cloud computing is going to even further enhance the Linux netbook sales. Because the Linux operating system was made to be networked, it is a perfect candidate to serve as the operating system the cloud will reach out to.

  • Three best Linux Technologies of this Decade

    Linux on cellphones is fast becoming popular and is being adopted by major manufacturers line Nokia and HTC. We have the revolutionary Nokia N900 running Maemo and the HTC Hero running Google Android. Both are Linux for smartphones and are highly customizable and developer friendly.

    We hope to see more of these technologies in future. These two years of 2008 and 2009 have brought remarkable development for Linux and we hope to be nearing a better and a wider users base.

  • The Top 9 Linux Stories in 2009

    2009 will be looked at as the year that Android OS really took off. The first Android phone was released in October 2008, the G1, wasn’t really a big hit. A few of the early adopters, including me, picked it up. However, in 2009, things really boomed. More than a dozen devices were announced/released, covering both mid and high ends of the smartphone market. Most notably, the Motroloa Droid, was lauded by many analysts and was put right up there with the iPhone. By November 23rd, Android accounted for at least 20% share of the US smartphone market. Not a bad feat in one year.

  • 2009′s Five Most Popular & Important Linux Stories

    The economy lingers on its sick bed, but Red Hat continues to prosper. At the rate Red Hat’s continuing to grow, I won’t be at all surprised to see Red Hat to become the first pure Linux play company to top a billion dollars in annual revenue in its next fiscal year.

Clip of the Day

Direct link

Links 31/12/2009: Great Year for Mobile Linux

Posted in News Roundup at 4:33 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Boycott Novell in 2010

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Still Livin’ La Vida Linux

    It’s been over a year since I wrote about my conversion to a Linux based digital media environment, and since it’s the holiday season (or just after) I thought it was time to update the story, and describe some new Linux based devices I’m using that others might find useful.

    In the original essay I spoke about converting all my physical CD’s to digital files into the patent-free FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) format. At the time I was looking at the Sonos multi-room music system to play the files. I took the plunge and ended up buying a four room system last year. They aren’t cheap, but they’re the most robust devices I own. They never crash (and for a device as sophisticated as this that’s a real pleasure). I’ve owned televisions that fail more often than the Sonos boxes.

  • Linux and windows people are the same.

    Linux is, for the average user, no easier nor harder to use than windows. It is more configurable and flexible than windows will ever be and this gives power users more of an opportunity to tweak and twiddle than their windows brethren. Those who don’t tweak and twiddle have the same computing experience with Linux that they have with windows. The caveat here is, of course, that they must use the operating system as it is designed to be used. You don’t drive a manual car like an automatic so to speak.

  • Linux 2019

    What does that tell us? That the trend toward mobile computer devices — smartphones, netbooks, etc. — is going to continue, and that the traditional PC desktop will be a niche technology by 2019. By 2005, computer vendors were making more money from laptops than desktops. In the last year, more laptops were being sold than desktops.

    It won’t stop there though. Google, with its Linux-based Chrome OS, is pointing the way not just to making the traditional Windows desktop obsolete, but putting the whole concept of desktop-based computing in the junk pile. Google is taking a lightweight operating system, adding cloud-based applications and storage, and creating a world where any netbook or smartphone can do 95% of what most people do every day with a Windows-powered desktop.

    It’s not just that this kind of Internet mobile computing is going to displace older-style desktops and bring entertainment to anyone, anywhere on any device. No — there’s a whole new set of services that will be taken for granted by 2019 that no current static computing device can duplicate. It will be a combination of LBS (Location-Based Services) and AR (Augmented Reality) that will transform how we use computers.

    With LBS, your applications use GPS and related technologies to determine where you are at any given moment. Armed with this information, applications can tell such things as where the nearest subway or closest steak house is. The next step, which is already being taken, is to update that information in real time. So, for example, you’ll soon be able to know that your buddy is waiting for you at the coffeehouse two streets away.

    LBS is already changing how we get around, and AR will take it one step further. Instead of looking at a map, you’ll be able to look at the world through your smart device’s camera viewer to see a virtual golden brick road to where your friend is staying. You can already use it in applications like SPRXmobile’s Layar Reality Browser 3.0, which can already serve as virtual tour guides with your Android, and soon your iPhone 3Gs phones.

  • Best Linux software for new users

    This is a Live DVD – you simply place the DVD in the computer’s DVD drive and reboot the machine from it. When the machine comes up, you will be running Linux. Normally, the software won’t write to your computer’s hard drive unless you specifically ask it to.

  • Server

    • OEIPL releases new versions of SafeSquid: Content Filtering Internet Proxy, for Linux and Windows

      The latest SafeSquid Linux version – ntlm-RC2.0, now supports NTLM authentication, or Single Sign On. NTLM uses a challenge-response mechanism for authentication, in which clients are able to prove their identities without sending a password to the server. This allows access to clients using Windows Integrated Authentication in Microsoft-centric Networks, without an authentication pop-up.

  • Applications

    • Seven great Ubuntu applications

      Phatch

      (http://photobatch.stani.be/)

      Now how many time did you have couple of photos and needed to do the same editing on them. It could be just resize or something other, but you needed to open every single one and repeat that action. Now there is one cool program for photo and batch, Phatch. You can do: resizing, adding watermark, text, shadow, rotate pictire, … But there is no crop, I needed it couple of time but isn’t there.

      [...]

    • Announcing Acire

      After a wonderful week in England with family celebrating Christmas, Erica and I flew home to the East Bay. We were sat at Heathrow having a cup of coffee and I was thinking of what I occupy myself with on the plane ride over. Unfortunately, Lernid hacking was out of the question as I had no net connection on the plane, so I got to thinking of something else. After some busy hacking time at 35,000 feet I am proud to show of the results of my labor: a little program called Acire.

    • Instructionals

    • Games

      • Making a game with Ogre 3D

        This tutorial series steps you through the process of creating a 3D shoot’em’up game using the popular and powerful Ogre 3D engine.

      • Gifts for Gamers: Some End-of-Year Recommendations, Part 3

        OpenLieroX

        Free, 2D graphics, http://www.openlierox.net

        Players alternately take charge of an army of worms that are armed to the teeth in an unfriendly terrain. As in the game Worms, the surviving team wins.

        Puzzles

        Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection

        MIT license, 2D graphics, http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles

        A good puzzle solver will find his collection rewarding. A number of good examples await.

  • GNOME Desktop

    • Theming GNOME

      I get a lot of questions as to how to make the GNOME desktop look better. This question can be approached from numerous angles: Compiz, Emerald, Metacity, Window borders, etc. I have covered Compiz here on Ghacks (see Compiz on Ghacks) as well as Emerald (see Emerald on Ghacks). But I have yet to cover the basic theming of the GNOME desktop. As of this tutorial, that will all change.

    • GNOME needs to get its act together

      To understand the significance of these links, one must go back to 1997 when GNOME was set up by Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena Quintero. The only rationale that they had for setting up a project to create a second desktop environment for a small number of users – KDE was a thriving desktop by then but it used a non-free library for development – was that it would be totally free.

      GNOME was set up under the aegis of the GNU Project. The name says it all: the GNU Network Object Model Environment.

  • Distributions

    • What Is Ubuntu?

      Ubuntu is an easy version of Linux. It is not windows,but it is almost user friendly like windows. No all applications have graphical interface. Many applications force users to use commands to run them.Commands are mandatory to work with Linux and Ubuntu is not an exception.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Linux drivers for Broadcom HD Video Accelerator

      The Broadcom Crystal HD video decoder is a card that you can slip into a netbook to enable HD video playback on computer with an Intel Atom processor and integrated graphics. Broadcom has supported Windows since day one, and the Broadcom BCM70012 and BCM70015 cards play well with Windows media Player 12, Adobe Flash Player 10.1 beta, ArcSoft TotalMedia Theatre and CyberLink PowerDVD. Linux, on the other hand, has been a different story… up until now.

    • welcome to the internet acceleration appliance blog

      As well as detailing my solution, I have also written some very basic general Linux/Networking guides – basically stuff that I learned whilst getting the Internet Acceleration Appliance working.

    • Logging on at Warp Speed

      I’ve been using one such program, HyperSpace from Phoenix Technologies, on a Samsung NC10 netbook for the last couple of weeks, and even starting up cold, the speed is impressive. Press the power button and in 15 seconds the Linux-based HyperSpace presents you with a customizable screen including a Web browser, a notepad application, and RealPlayer media software, along with news, weather, and stock information. I jotted a quick note, watched videos on YouTube (GOOG), and made calls using Skype, all without launching Windows.

    • Phones

      • 2009: A breakthrough year for mobile Linux

        In 2009, mobile consumer devices including netbooks, e-readers, tablets, MIDs, PMPs, and mobile phones were increasingly dominated by embedded Linux or the Linux-based Android. LinuxDevices presents four updated showcases of story summaries for netbooks, phones, and other portable devices, recalls 2009 highlights ranging from the Kindle to the Droid, and looks in on new rumors about the Google Nexus One and Chrome OS netbook design.

      • Root Google Nexus One on Android 2.1

        Paul over at Modaco forums has managed to successfully root his Nexus One, running the latest Android 2.1 version on the said device. He has cooked a custom ROM for Nexus One with the method, which he is referring to as Superboot.

    • Sub-notebooks

      • 2009: A year in review, November

        The hardware end of the netbook world was quiet, but the software side exploded with the release of the source code for Google’s forthcoming open-source, browser-based operating system Chrome OS. Within hours of release, enterprising hackers had managed to put together a working version that could be run in a virtualised window, so we had a play with it and found it to be a little lacking – just a browser window and nothing else. Hopefully Google can do a little better before it’s finally released in 2010.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open Source 2010: New Year’s predictions.

    New Year predictions are of course a licence to speculate. What’s more the normal boundaries of sanity are loosened sufficiently to make the predictions fun rather than libellous.

    ‘Predictions’ in the above context are merely extrapolations of what has occurred already, (genuine sight of the future is best left to the psychics), so it’s not really that hard to do if … you look closely at what is going on now. But, the other component of a prediction uses what I call ‘white space’ analysis which involves looking for gaps and silences. In other words looking for lack of information. This is important.

  • eyeOS and IBM – Working together

    We’re happy to present to the eyeOS community the result of more than six months of work together with the great IBM US team, where eyeOS will be the Sample Workload of the new System Z serie Solution Edition for Cloud Computing. System Z is the IBM brand used to produce their mainframe servers, used worldwide by governments, big companies and thousands of organizations.

  • Pixelize, create an image consisting of many small images

    Pixelize is a program that will use many scaled down images to try to duplicate, as closely as possible, another image.

    Pixelize works by splitting up the image you want rendered (or duplicated) into a grid of small rectangular areas. Each area is analyzed, and replaced with an image chosen from a large database of images. Pixelize tries to pick images that best match each area.

  • Open source in 2009

    Unlike in previous years where each new release of a Linux distribution or an application was met with expectations of it being the killer app, this years OSS developments were more low-key, more circumspect. The idea that Linux is suddenly going to hit a critical mass and turn into the Microsoft-killer is fading, to be replaced with a more rationale view that Linux, Mac OS X and Windows will co-exist, even if uncomfortably, for many years to come. Linux is not going to wipe out Microsoft’s dominance any time soon, just as Mac OS X is unlikely to turn the tables on Windows in the coming year.

    And yet, there was much progress in 2009 that open source fans can celebrate. It was a year in which open source software became even more deeply entrenched, even if users weren’t completely aware of the change. Even Microsoft started embracing open source software, albeit cautiously, with a few carefully thought out moves.

  • WSO2 Launches Business Activity Monitor

    Open source code firm WSO2 has launched WSO2 Business Activity Monitor to provide visibility into services oriented architecture-based services, transactions, and workflows.

  • How to Write a Client Proposal

    Anybody can use open source. You might depend on open source software if you’re responsible for IT in a large enterprise or as a consumer who prefers FOSS apps for her own personal computing needs. That’s true whether you’re simply a software developer contributing code to the open source project, a techie who customizes software that just-so-happens to be open source (such as a web developer building sites using Drupal), or an end user who appreciates the price (free!) and quality of FOSS apps.

    [...]

    The problem that techies have is that they want to talk about and use technology, and they hate having to “sell” anything — particularly themselves or their skills. Often, or at least to begin with, the work comes to them, either because they’ve developed a reputation for excellence (“My brother-in-law says you’re good at creating websites”) or because of a relationship with another techie who needs assistance (“A client asked me to take this on and I’m already busy; could you write the back-end code and I’ll deal with the company?”). That’s fine — and with the right connections you can make a living that way.

  • CMS

    • Queen Rania using Drupal

      More royal Drupal goodness. This time her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan is using Drupal: see http://www.queenrania.jo. Queen Rania is well-known for talking about using social media to help change the world — follow her on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Flickr.

  • Openness

    • A New Firm Lures Brokers from Big Wall Street Houses

      Possibly the most compelling of the new opportunities for breakaway brokers is a Chicago firm called HighTower. It offers brokers with at least $100 million under management what it describes as an “open source” alternative to firms like Merrill and Morgan Stanley Smith Barney.

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • Top Storage Stories of 2009: RAID, Clouds, SSDs and Mergers

    In a year of dramatic change and mergers for the data storage industry, it should come as no surprise that the most-read stories on Enterprise Storage Forum this year were about … dramatic change and mergers.

  • AMD plans two six-cores in Q2 2010

    We don’t have many details, but we can confirm that AMD plans to launch two six-core desktop CPUs next year. This should happen in Q2 2010 and if AMD holds on to this date, it might come a bit later than Intel’s Core i7 980X.

  • Security

    • Further evidence of council CCTV failure

      When Big Brother Watch released our first report earlier this month – a study into the huge number of council controlled CCTV cameras – we condemned the enormous rise of almost 200% in 10 years for several reasons.

    • Innocent face postcode lottery over removal of records from DNA database

      Innocent people face a postcode lottery in the way police treat requests to remove their records from the national DNA database, according to figures published today.

      The huge difference in the way police forces across England and Wales deal with requests is described as a “shambles” by the Conservatives.

      Some police forces refuse to remove any records once a case is closed and the person declared innocent, while others comply with 80 per cent of requests for deletion.

      Damian Green, the Shadow Immigration Minister, said the huge disparities in the way police deal with requests showed that the system was in chaos.

  • Finance

    • Diet for fat-cat bankers an illusion

      On the surface, many of the moves undertaken by investment banking behemoth Goldman Sachs look respectable, but a bit more digging reveals some ulterior motives at play. While Goldman repaid the money it took from Uncle Sam as part of the TARP program, many taxpayers are still angry that the government’s taxpayer-funded bailout of AIG indirectly benefited Goldman, who had billions invested in complicated trading deals with the troubled insurer.

    • Regulators Probe Banks On Failed Securities

      The SEC and FINRA are investigating conduct by Wall Street investment banks, which bet against securities which they created ahead of the implosion of the housing market, according to reports from the New York Times.

    • Banks Probed for Betting Against Own Securities

      Congress and financial regulators are probing several Wall Street firms for bundling bad debt, selling it to clients, and then profiting from betting that those same securities would fail, insiders say. Clients at Goldman Sachs and other firms lost billions of dollars on the mortgage-related securities as the housing market collapsed. The firms and some hedge funds made billions from the negative bets.

    • Adams: Goldman’s Actions Cross Into Criminal Activity

      Thomas Adams, a lawyer at Paykin Krieg and Adams, LLP, and a former managing director at Ambac and FGIC is backing up the charges that Janet Tavakoli has been making against Goldman Sachs. In fact, he is taking her charges one step further and stating that the Federal Reserve and the Treasury aided and abetted Goldman Sachs in “committing financial and ethical crimes at an astounding level.”

    • small chinese firm gives goldman sachs the finger

      Goldman Sachs (GS.N) was one of the foreign banks, along with Citigroup (C.N), Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley (MS.N), blamed by the state assets watchdog for providing “extremely complicated” and difficult to understand derivatives products.

    • JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs Trillions Deep In Derivatives or Dumbed-Down Reporting?

      First, Kosman states and characterizes the institutions involved in these derivatives trades as “brokers” when, in fact, they participate as PRINCIPALS. The amount of risk involved when one trades as a principal is materially larger than when one acts as a broker or agent. Of course, if Kosman had bothered to read the rest of the Report, he would have known that these trade COULD NOT HAVE BEEN BROKERED because the report tells us there are empirically NO END USERS FOR THESE PRODUCTS…

    • How Goldman Sachs Made Tens Of Billions Of Dollars From The Economic Collapse Of America

      Step 1: Sell mortgage-related securities that are absolute junk to trusting clients at vastly overinflated prices.

      Step 2: Bet against those same mortgage-related securities and make massive bets against the U.S. housing market so that your firm will make massive profits when the U.S. economy collapses.

      Step 3: Have ex-Goldman executives in key positions of power in the U.S. government so that bailout money can be funneled to entities such as AIG that Goldman has made these bets with so that they can get paid after they win their bets.

      Step 4: Collect the profits – Goldman Sachs is having their “most successful year” and will end up reporting approximately $50 billion in revenue for 2009.

    • Goldman Sachs Should Have Known Its Gun Was Loaded, And It Owes The Public Reparations

      The New York Times published a Christmas Eve expose of Goldman Sachs’s so-called “Abacus” synthetic collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). They were created with credit derivatives instead of cash securities. Goldman used credit derivatives to create short bets that gain in value when CDOs lose value. Goldman did this for both protection and profit and marketed the idea to hedge funds.

    • Goldman Sachs: Following God or the Devil?

      But certainly the economic damage to the USA that resulted from Lloyd Blankfein’s “work for God”, and that of his disciples, was much more than the economic damage inflicted on that country by the activities of Osama bin Laden.

    • Sell Junk, Short The Same Junk, Laugh Your Way To The Bank: Ethical?

      According to the New York Times, Congressional and SEC investigators are examining if these firms knowingly created disastrously performing securities, sold them to investors and then proceeded to short the same securities. Essentially collateralized debt obligations were sold to investors. Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche and other firms sold these securities and then proceeded to short the same securities, in effect hedging against a loss in the value of the securities.

    • Wall Street Crime Blockbuster: Goldman’s Lucrative Bets Against America

      Ace biz blogger Henry Blodget has a shrewd take on it, “The Goldman Housing Scandal Isn’t A Scandal: It’s Inevitable.” Blodget’s argument, as always, is that this is how business is done. And he’s right. And he should know. A dot-com bubblegummer, Blodget didn’t get banned for life from the securities industry for being stupid.

      Probes are supposedly under way, the NYT story says, but that won’t mean much. One of the smaller firms that peddled these CDOs and then bet against them was Tricadia, whose parent firm is controlled by Lewis Sachs, now a special counselor to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.

  • Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights

Digital Tipping Point: Clip of the Day

Joerg Heilig, Sun Microsystems Senior Engineering Director talks about OpenOffice.org 18 (2004)


Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.

12.30.09

Links 30/12/2009: Slax (GNU/Linux) Downloaded Over 2 Million Times

Posted in News Roundup at 10:14 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Microsoft Cracks Down On Windows Piracy In China… So Pirating Group Offers Up Ubuntu That Looks Like XP

    Even Bill Gates has famously said:

    “And as long as they’re going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.”

    Except… of course, Microsoft has been pushing hard to “stop” that kind of “piracy” in China, and it may be having an unintended effect. Slashdot points us to the news that a group that had been offering pirated copies of Windows is now offering a copy of Ubuntu Linux, designed to look just like Windows XP.

  • Still waiting for a 64-bit Flash Player

    Curiously, though, the October press release doesn’t mention 64-bit support at all, and the announcement of the latest beta includes only a passing link to “the latest alpha refresh” of the 64-bit Flash Player 10 prerelease for Linux.What about Windows or the Mac? Sorry, folks, no news to report.

  • Open Source in 2010: Nine Predictions

    Users have been waiting a long time for open source video drivers that match proprietary ones feature for feature. But by the end of next year they may actually arrive. Intel drivers are already solid, and are used on about twenty-five percent of open source computers.

    However, the Linux 2.6.33 kernel is supposed to include increased support for both ATI and NVIDIA cards, so major improvements are a certainty by the end of next year. At the very least, if features are still missing, they should be come by mid-2011.

  • Kernel Space

    • The abrupt merging of Nouveau

      The merge window is normally a bit of a hectic time for subsystem maintainers. They have two weeks in which to pull together a well-formed tree containing all of the changes destined for the next kernel development cycle. Occasionally, though, last-minute snags can make the merge window even more busy than usual. The unexpected merging of the Nouveau driver is the result of one such snag – but it is a story with a happy ending for all.

  • Instructionals

  • Distributions

    • 10+ free, fast-booting Linux distros that aren’t Chrome OS

      A 200MB dynamo built on Slackware, Slax offers one seriously awesome feature you won’t find with any of the other options mentioned here. You can customize you ISO before you download. It’s as simple as choosing build Slax and then browsing through the massive inventory of packages available to plug in. Bonus points: you can even drop Google Chrome into your personal build.

      Slax has long been a favorite of Linux users looking for a feature-packed but lightweight desktop OS, and it’s been downloaded more than 2 million times.

    • ArchLinux + modular KDE 4 + Tools = Chakra (Alpha 4)

      I had heard abοut ArchLinux back from the early days that I started experimenting with GNU/Linux distributions. It caught my attention for two main reasons:

      1. The mentality of Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS) and lightweight.
      2. It’s a rolling distro, which means you don’t need to upgrade every now and then to newer versions to keep up to date. Just update your way into everything new out there.

      To be honest, I had attempted installing ArchLinux on an old laptop back then, but I failed miserably in completing the task. Same disappointing results on Virtualbox on my desktop PC. Although Arch has extremely thorough documentation available, I was stuck somewhere between manually setting up the system files and installing and configuring a working desktop environment. As an newbie I couldn’t handle the pressure, so I gave up. But not for long.

      To my great pleasure, I recently stumbled upon the Chakra Project. Chakra is as the title suggests, a brand new distribution which is based on Arch Linux and KDE 4, but it comes extra with its own tweaked package set of KDE called KDEmod and some very handy tools.

      I was extremely happy to see that it features a graphical installer, and the fact that it supports automatic hardware configuration made it irresistible. I just had to download and see with my one eyes. It was about time I get rid of that Windows XP dual boot with Ubuntu after all.

    • New Releases

      • Best Linux releases of 2009

        Ubuntu Linux may get the majority of attention from Linux watchers but there are many good alternatives available. One of those is Mandriva Linux, a version of Linux formerly known as Mandrake and long considered one of the most user-friendly of Linux versions.

        Mandriva 2010 focused heavily on netbook users and other alternative desktop users. Boot time was also a priority for Mandriva, as it is for most other operating system makers, and the developers said that Mandriva 2010 shuts down, hibernates, suspends, and resumes faster. The bootup procedure on Mandriva 2010 is managed by Plymouth, which also makes for a more attractive, graphical boot up process.

      • Nova versão da distribuição multimídia juntaDados 1.04r2
      • KANOTIX 2.6.32
      • Parted Magic 4.8

        Parted Magic 4.8 fixes “Live” mode and direct ISO booting with GRUB4DOS. No programs were upgraded.

      • Webconverger 5.9
      • SystemRescueCD 1.3.4
      • Frenzy 1.2

    • Debian Family

      • Distro Review: Linux Mint 8

        Ease Of Installation & Use: 5/5
        Stability: 5/5
        Speed: 4/5
        Community & Documentation: 4/5
        Features: 4/5
        Overall: 5/5

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Spaz webOS 1.0 Ushers in New Features for Palm Pre Microblogging Client

      We covered Spaz webOS, a microblogging client for Palm devices, when it was still a babe in the woods. The project has grown considerably since then and this week its developer, Ed Finkler, announced the release of Spaz webOS 1.0. It’s an important milestone that includes a slew of new features that ought to satisfy anyone looking for an open source microblogging app for their Palm device.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Nightshade Forks From Stellarium, Designs Open Source Software for Planetariums

    Nightshade is available for Linux and Window, and the project is currently looking for developers to help build a package for Mac OS X. According to the project team, the decision to break from the Stellarium project was based on a desire to depart from Stellarium’s desktop-heavy focus and plans to implement a new graphical interface.

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD – the unknown Giant

      FreeBSD is a free, open-source and UNIX-like operating system. Though relatively unknown, it’s a performing and powerful work-horse, capable of coping with massive work-loads whilest remaining fast, ultra-stable and rock-solid. Blogging about FreeBSD and operating systems based on this versatile, safe and secure OS, I want to generate more interest in FreeBSD and its dependants. If you need a reliable, rock-solid and performing system for either your desktop or servers, consider FreeBSD!

    • FreeBSD Foundation Newsletter, December 26, 2009

Leftovers

  • Security

    • Obama ends Bush secrecy policy, launches ‘declassification center’

      WH releases all visitor logs for first time ever

      In an executive order issued Tuesday, President Barack Obama ended a Bush-era policy that allowed the head of the US’s intelligence agencies to have the final word on the declassification of documents.

    • One Day We’ll All Be Terrorists

      This corruption of our legal system, if history is any guide, will not be reserved by the state for suspected terrorists, or even Muslim Americans. In the coming turmoil and economic collapse, it will be used to silence all who are branded as disruptive or subversive. Hashmi endures what many others, who are not Muslim, will endure later. Radical activists in the environmental, globalization, anti-nuclear, sustainable agriculture and anarchist movements—who are already being placed by the state in special detention facilities with Muslims charged with terrorism—have discovered that his fate is their fate. Courageous groups have organized protests, including vigils outside the Manhattan detention facility. They can be found at www.educatorsforcivilliberties.org or www.freefahad.com. On Martin Luther King Day, this Jan. 18 at 6 p.m. EST, protesters will hold a large vigil in front of the MCC on 150 Park Row in Lower Manhattan to call for a return of our constitutional rights. Join them if you can.

  • PR/AstroTurf

    • Health Insurance Lobby Pushing to Amend States’ Constitutions

      The health insurance lobby is laying the groundwork to block federal health care reform by working through think tanks to pass state laws invalidating federally-mandated reforms. Conservative and libertarian think tanks have started encouraging states to amend their constitutions to block federal health reform measures, including a mandate to purchase health insurance.

    • Efforts already underway in Colorado to blunt federal health care reforms

      Lobbyists lay ground

      Regardless of when the fight happens, the health care industry has already laid lobbying groundwork across the country.

      A New York Times story Tuesday showed that companies and individuals with a financial interest in the health care debate have already given heavily in state races. Data from the Institute on Money in State Politics show that while not a leader in the debate, Colorado is part of that trend.

      Colorado ranks second in the Rocky Mountain West in the amount of political contributions accepted from the health care industry in the past three election cycles — $1.9 million — though nearly half went to support the 2005 ballot initiative Referendum C, a timeout on the revenue limits of the state’s Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights.

      The years of sustained contributions point to a history of political involvement by health care interests and not necessarily a flurry of new activity, said Nathan Newman, director of liberal group Progressive States Network. And local health care lobbyists said they are waiting for the final version of federal legislation before wading into any state fights.

      “States are the ones who are going to continue to spend the most of the money on health care,” Newman said. “Where they’re spending money, the lobby is already there.”

  • Censorship/Civil Rights

  • Internet/Web Abuse/DRM

    • Kindle Total Cost of Ownership: Calculating the DRM Tax

      There is one other problem with DRM protected books. When the reading device reaches its end of life, you have to assume all the content you purchased will be lost. If, for instance, I went with a Kindle, all of the content I purchase can be used only on devices supported by Amazon.

      When, several years later, it comes time to replace that Kindle I may get a new Kindle — but I can’t assume that. Maybe somebody else will have a better device at that time. Or, maybe Amazon went bankrupt or evil or stupid and I need to switch to another vendor. There are any number of reasons I might like to switch my e-reader. If I do, I have to assume I won’t be able to use any of the content I purchased for the Kindle.

      Thanks to DRM, when my e-reader reaches its end of life, I will have to pay to acquire replacement books for the material that’s locked out of the new e-reader. I call the amount of that purchase the “DRM tax” — an added cost imposed by DRM restrictions.

  • Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights

    • Experts: Comcast’s Acquisition of NBC May End Free TV

      Increasingly, media moguls, national journalists and Wall Street experts are predicting that cable provider Comcast’s acquisition of NBC will lead to the end of free broadcast television. Numerous outlets have reported that Rupert Murdoch, founder of Fox News Channel’s parent company NewsCorp, is actively pushing to end the long-time television business model where advertising dollars pay for programming.

    • The rise of machine-written journalism

      Famine isn’t a worry for most journalists in the developed world. But the information workers who toil at the core of the news business do resemble the stocking-makers of Nottinghamshire in other ways.

    • SoundExchange Claims To Open Up, But Somehow Its List Of Unpaid Musicians Has Disappeared

      This is a big issue. As we’ve seen over and over again, many of these collections societies use sampling and counting methods that greatly overvalue big stars (who need the money less) at the expense of up-and-coming artists. It’s like the poor get to pay the rich.

      From there, Wilhelm’s letter goes on in great detail responding to claims from SoundExchange and debunking them one by one. SoundExchange claims that they’re now going to be much more open and respond to these types of questions. We’ll be interested to see what they have to say.

    • Christopher Bryant Works To Gain New Fans By Opening For Himself

      One of my favorite things about the emerging new music industry has been the realization that there is no longer a single best way to do much of anything anymore. That pioneering spirit is leading to wonderful experimentation including this great twist from indie artist Christopher Bryant.

    • With Ads, Music Downloads Sing a New Tune

      ON Hulu, the popular Web site that streams free television shows and other video, users have proved to be perfectly willing to watch short commercials, and a new site is betting that the same willingness will apply to downloading music.

    • Google Lawyer Claims Viacom Request Undermines Its Charge Of Copyright Infringement

      The judge presiding over the Viacom-YouTube copyright lawsuit has allowed Viacom to withdraw infringement claims for around 250 clips — including approximately 100 that were uploaded to the site by Viacom employees or agents.

    • Among The Clips That Viacom Sued Google Over, About 100 Were Uploaded By Viacom Itself

      That alone should show how ridiculous Viacom’s claims are in this lawsuit. There is simply no way for Google to know if clips are uploaded legitimately or not. Oddly, however, the court has now allowed Viacom to withdraw those clips, but lawyers like Eric Goldman are questioning how this isn’t a Rule 11 violation for frivolous or improper litigation. But, more importantly, it demonstrates that even Viacom has no idea which clips are infringing and which are authorized. Given that, how can it possibly say that it’s reasonable for Google to know?

    • Youtube and McDonalds says this is copyright infringement

      Evidently Youtube wants me to take this down, because of course a 4 year old dancing to a McDonald’s happy meal song (that was included with a happy meal) is too much for the copyright holder to handle.

Digital Tipping Point: Clip of the Day

Joerg Heilig, Sun Microsystems Senior Engineering Director talks about OpenOffice.org 17 (2004)


Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.

Links 30/12/2009: ‘Google Phone’ Imminent

Posted in News Roundup at 2:26 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • What Took Wired So Loongson?

    I’ve been writing about the Loongson chip for three years now. As I’ve noted several times, this chip is important because (a) it’s a home-grown Chinese chip (albeit based on one from MIPS) and (b) Windows doesn’t run on it, but GNU/Linux does.

    [...]

    Because GNU/Linux distros have already been ported to the Loongson chip, neither Java nor OpenOffice.org needs “adapting” so much as recompiling – hardly a challenging task. As for “releasing it all under a free software license”, they had no choice.

  • What To Expect in 2010

    The coming year should be a good one for free software. Desktop environments are maturing, technology is improving. A lot of the ground work done in many areas over the past twelve months should propel free software further.

    While things are looking good, 2010 still won’t be the “Year of the Linux Desktop” (whatever that means).

  • Google

    • 18 Must Have Google Chrome Extensions

      Google and its applications are fast becoming the backbone of the internet. They seem to be solving everyone’s problems with free stuffs. Just when you get happy with something like Firefox, Google comes along and makes a browser that’s fast, super secure and has all kinds of add-ons and themes to personalize it.

  • Kernel Space

    • Ubuntu 32-bit, 32-bit PAE, 64-bit Kernel Benchmarks

      For this comparison we used Ubuntu 9.10 on a Lenovo ThinkPad T61 notebook running an Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 processor, 4GB of system memory, a 100GB Hitachi HTS7220 SATA HDD, and a NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M. We were using the Ubuntu-supplied kernels that are based off the Linux 2.6.31 kernel in Ubuntu Karmic. Other packages that were maintained included GNOME 2.28.1, X Server 1.6.4, NVIDIA 195.22 display driver, GCC 4.4.1, and we were using the default EXT4 file-system with all other defaults. With Ubuntu to properly address 4GB or greater of system memory you need to use a PAE kernel as the Physical Address Extension support through the kernel’s high-mem configuration options are not enabled in the default 32-bit kernels.

    • Drivers

      • The YoLD is Dead; Long Live the YoLD!

        Yes, I’m helping to advertise for this vendor because they deserve my support for their explicit Linux support. senyum

      • Christmas wish: Distro hardware buyer’s guide

        So when I go shopping for hardware, it sucks to be me. I haven’t tested all this stuff, and I don’t know how much of it works perfectly out of the box. What I need is to decide what software I’m going to put on it,n and have hardware recommendations per price point from the software distributor, so that I can just go to my local Surcouf, FNAC or whatever, and just look at one label & say “That’s only 90% supported, no custom from me!”

      • Nvidia Linux Display Driver 190.53

        The drivers are available for 32, or 64-bit Linux versions.

  • Applications

  • K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

    • KDE Community Invited to FOSS Nigeria 2010

      A few days ago The Dot received an invite for the KDE community to FOSS Nigeria. FOSS Nigeria 2010 will be the second Free Software conference in Nigeria, following the successful event last year (as reported on The Dot). Again, Free Software developers and community members from around the world, but of course especially those from Africa and Nigeria, are invited for a 3-day conference in Kano at the Bayero University Kano.

    • New Exposure Blending Tool for digiKam

      Great. Pre-processing is done. It’s time to use the second part of this plugin and to fuse bracketed images to a pseudo HDR image. On this new window, you can see a preview area on the left, and on the right, the bracketed images stack on the top, all Enfuse settings on the center, and finally, all processed images generated on the bottom. For each enfused image, you can choose which input bracketed images you want to use. Selecting a processed image on the bottom will load it to preview, to easy compare results. You can zoom in/out and pan preview if you want. To save processed images, just press Save button, and all selected items from processed stack will be saved to the current digiKam album.

  • Distributions

    • Mandriva 2010 thoughts

      TOMOYO is also in this version of Mandriva. TOMOYO is the new security framework used by default instead of AppArmor. It promises quite a lot just now but should mature rapidly, as do all GNU/Linux-based security applications. On the Mandriva community wiki, you are advised not to use the RC1 or RC2 version to upgrade an existing Mandriva Linux installation. There are unresolved issues with KDE and GNOME and other windows managers, which is likely to result in a system upgraded from any stable release to this version being unable to start a desktop or rendering it useless for most people.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Meeting business demands

        “We considered a number of operating systems as the platform for our business-critical SAP applications, and after much testing and evaluation, we selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform on HP ProLiant servers because it met our requirements and provided the best overall value, stability and performance,” pointed out Mohit Agarwal, CIO of Carnation Auto.

    • Debian Family

      • SuperOS: Like Ubuntu But Easier

        One problem I run into a lot when recommending Ubuntu to complete Linux newbies is they aren’t used to installing codecs or using the terminal when they want to play DVDs, MP3s and other file types. Explaining the legal situation is something I make a point of doing but some people “just want it to work”. This is what has led me to Super Ubuntu or SuperOS as it’s now called. Once the recently released SuperOS 9.10 was adequately seeded I downloaded this enhanced version of Ubuntu and took it for a spin.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Composite video output from chumby

      [bunnie] posted this pretty slick way of getting composite video out of a Chumby. The Chumby is an open source connectivity device that has already seen some decent hacking. This modification, done by [xobs] isn’t too difficult. It only requires patching into some pads on the motherboard and loading a custom kernel to support the external output.

    • Phones

      • Palm updates webOS for Pixi, Pre smartphones

        Palm has launched an update to its web OS, which comes with enhancements to its App Catalog and improvements in battery life optimisation when in marginal coverage areas. It is available for Palm Pixi and Palm Pre smartphones, both of which are exclusive to the Sprint Nextel network.

      • Android

        • Googlephone debuts Jan. 5, says everyone but Google

          This morning, a carefully selected slice of the tech press received a short but sweet invitation to the announcement event. In the long-standing tradition of milking product announcements for every drop of suspense, the invitation doesn’t mention the Nexus One specifically, but merely reads:

          With the launch of the first Android-powered device just over a year ago, we’ve seen how a powerful, open platform can spur mobile product innovation. And this is just the beginning of what’s possible.

        • Google Confirms Android Media Event — Hello, Nexus One?

          It may be the moment the tech world’s been waiting for: Google has just officially announced plans for an Android-related media event to be held next Tuesday, January 5, at its Mountain View campus.

          If recent online chatter is to be believed, the event could have something to do with the Nexus One — the highly anticipated HTC-built handset seemingly under development by Google.

        • Android Developer Challenge Winners!

          The quality of applications available on Google’s Android platform is improving by leaps and bounds. Whereas most of the apps that Google showcased last year in its first Android Developer Challenge

        • Linux Outlaws 129 – The Year 2009 in Review (Year of the Android Revolution)

          In the final show for the year and the decade, Dan and Fab look back at 2009 and the major news stories of the year. We also try to decide what this year was all about. There’s even some special funny content as a little bonus.

    • Sub-notebooks

      • ‘Smartbooks’ Latest to Join Crowded Computer Market

        Most smartbooks, which are expected to be built by both PC makers as well as manufacturers of cellphones and consumer-electronics, will run versions of the Linux operating system and low-cost chips based on designs licensed by ARM Holdings PLC.

      • Smarter than a netbook

        Freescale’s research focused on the future because most smartbooks have yet to hit the market. The company has collaborated on one smartbook to date: the NetWalker from Japanese manufacturer Sharp. Qualcomm has also unveiled one smartbook, made by Lenovo. Both companies expect at least a dozen smartbooks incorporating their chips to debut in early 2010.

      • Twenty companies to release smartbooks from Q1 2010

        We have been waiting for the smartbook revolution to take hold for some time now. Well it looks like it will kick off in earnest from the first quarter of next year. According to President Kim Yung-sup of ARM Korea, “20 companies in the world are preparing for release of smart book. And we will see them from 1Q.”

      • Linux on Netbooks – with PICTURES!

        As this is the holiday season, and things are slow, I have finally taken the time to follow up on some very good advice that Jake gave me, and learn to produce blog entries with pictures. Of course, there is no better way to start than with the specific subject that Jake (and others) said they would like to see pictures of, so here is a quick review of some of the most common Netbook-centric Linux distributions.

        [...]

        Overall I am quite impressed with the KDE Netbook desktop, and I am anxious to see how its development continues. The last I heard it was scheduled for an initial release in early 2010, so I will be watching for that.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Advogato’s Number: Advice for young free software developers

    This week, Advogato gets up on his soapbox and dispenses advice to free software neophytes.

    I’ll take the risk of demonstrating my advanced age and give some advice for new free software developers. With luck, this post will get some discussion rolling. What are some of the worst mistakes you’ve made as a free software developer. What has worked well for you?

  • Best of 2009

    Best distro release: Knoppix 6.x
    After a long hiatus, the venerable Live CD Linux distribution emerged in a new version redesigned from the ground up. The latest version sports a brand new accelerated boot procedure which significantly reduces the boot time, and the LXDE lightweight graphical desktop environment. Unlike previous versions, Knoppix 6.0 comes with a trimmed software bundle, but key productivity applications like OpenOffice.org, Iceweasel (aka Firefox), Icedove (aka Thunderbird), Pidgin, and the GIMP are still there. The latest version of Knoppix features a new flash-knoppix tool that allows you to install Knoppix on a USB stick or a flash card.

  • More than ever, saving is in vogue

    And try the OpenOffice.org, instead of paying for Microsoft Office.

  • Cleaning dust on photos: or “In Gimp We Trust!”

    A few weeks ago I finally realized my old wish: I bought a real camera for me: a Nikon D40 – which is, according to many, many people, is the best DSLR out there. At least for non-professionals.

  • Our future – SixthSense Technology

    The good part is that Pranav is planning to make available this software as open source so every one can benefit. Since it will open source, anyone can add features or modify the software as he wishes. The hardware costs for this system are relatively low.

  • Mozilla

    • 8 Hidden Firefox Secrets Revealed

      8. Firefox Optimizer: Firefox Optimizers for Mozilla Firefox v1.x / 2.x / 3.x was developed for an easy and fast optimization of your browsing experience with Firefox. It is based on a collection of popular and well working optimization settings used and tested by the experts.

  • Databases

    • Some thoughts on MySQL and Oracle

      Fear #1 is that Oracle will kill MySQL, which Oracle is said to see as a threat to its cash-cow relational database management system. One might respond that similar fears were expressed after Oracle’s acquisitions of Innobase and Sleepycat Software, but that things have not turned out that way so far. One might say (as Eben Moglen has) that keeping MySQL healthy is in Oracle’s economic interest. One might also respond that Oracle could arguably do more damage to MySQL by breaking off the acquisition and allowing Sun to simply die. But what is most interesting about this particular concern is the lack of faith it shows in our community’s ability to cope with such an outcome.

  • BSD

    • Social Hosting, Good Parenting Are Keys to Open Source Success

      Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool which allows you to write web code using an easy-to-understand plain text format. Markdown text is then converted to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML). Markdown is used all over the web — it’s even understood by the content fields and comment forms within most popular blogging platforms, including WordPress and Movable Type. It’s been ported to Python, Ruby, PHP and other popular languages.

      However, the original Perl script has remained largely unchanged since its release in 2004. In his post, Atwood takes Gruber to task for what Atwood calls “bad parenting,” an indictment of Markdown’s lack of bug fixes, updates and improvements.

      Markdown was released under a BSD-style open source license, meaning the community can do pretty much whatever it likes with the code, so long as it respects the copyright notices and naming rules. Indeed, many ports of Markdown enjoy rather widespread support with numerous contributors and an aggregate community of active developers that the original Markdown lacks.

  • Openness

    • ScienceOnline09 – an interview with Cameron Neylon

      In terms of the blogs on my blog roll there are many that will be familiar (Deepak Singh’s BBGM, Jean-Claude Bradley’s Usefulchem, John Wilbanks’ Common Knowledge, Neil Saunders’ What you’re doing is rather desperate). I keep an eye on Richard Grant (The Scientist), Jenny Rohn, and Martin Fenner at Nature Network. Some other blogs that may not be as familiar to the regular sciblogger community but are well worth the effort are Greg Wilson’s The Third Bit, Mike Ellis’ Electronic Museum, PT Sefton’s blog and Nico Adams’ Staudinger’s Semantic Molecules.

    • The picons databases (Personal Images) are available via WWW in the Picons Archive

      “picons” is short for “personal icons”. They’re small, constrained images used to represent users and domains on the net, organized into databases so that the appropriate image for a given e-mail address can be found. Besides users and domains, there are picons databases for Usenet newsgroups and weather forecasts. The picons are in either monochrome XBM format or color XPM and GIF formats.

  • Programming

    • Embedded programming languages

      A long time ago when I first started at IBM I used an editor named XEDIT that ran under the VM/CMS operating system on mainframes. It was a fullscreen, line-oriented editor that looks primitive now but was quite sophisticated in its time. One of the best things about it was that it was scriptable: you could write very sophisticated programs that could manipulate files and their contents. XEDIT really became powerful when used with the REXX programming language and many of my thoughts and philosophy about embedded languages were formed during my use of REXX.

    • New Year, New Adventures in Software Application Development

      In 2010, developers will learn to let go and adapt to a centralized resource pool, continuous testing will eclipse continuous integration, coffee breaks will get shorter, open source CI tools will buckle in big shops, and distributed software configuration management tools will cross the chasm from open source projects to the enterprise.

  • Applications

    • Nightshade Open Source Planetarium Project Launched

      Digitalis Education Solutions, Inc. is pleased to announce the official launch of Nightshade, open source astronomy simulation and visualization software specifically tailored to digital planetarium and educator use.

    • Firebird 2.5 RC1 released

      The primary goal for Firebird 2.5 was to establish the basics for a new threading architecture that is almost entirely common to the Superserver, Classic and Embedded models, taking in lower level synchronization and thread safety generally.

Leftovers

  • Jimbo asks online folk to play nice, be civil

    The co-founder of Wikipedia is once again calling on internet surfers to adopt good manners online.

  • Google Loses Claim to Groovle Domain Name

    Google’s complaint that the domain name groovle.com is confusingly similar to its own is without foundation, an ICANN-approved arbitration body has ruled.

  • Crime

    • Former Seagate engineer says company destroyed evidence

      A former employee of Seagate Technology claims that the company destroyed evidence that could have affected a long-standing patent infringement lawsuit filed against it by engineering company Convolve Inc. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

      In a court document obtained by the New York Times that was filed late last month, the former employee, Paul A. Galloway, claimed in an affidavit that Seagate deliberately destroyed the source code pertaining to a disk driving using Convolve’s intellectual property and “failed to preserve” Galloway’s PC containing all of his work during development of the drive.

  • Police State

    • Big Brother’s watching you..undress

      A PREGNANT mother was horrified to see live pictures of her BED on a travel news website.

      A camera meant to be monitoring traffic was instead pointing directly at Megan Franklin’s bedroom.

    • Boy in deportation raid kept in van with border agency officials

      A nine-year-old boy was separated from his mother and kept in a van for several hours by UK Border Agency officials while she was treated in hospital.

      The agency held the boy – known as Child M – in a vehicle for three hours after an early morning deportation raid, and said that he had not been distressed. The family, however, said the child repeatedly asked to see his mother and was terrified during the incarceration.

    • California cops don defensive headcams

      Ever since Rodney King was famously videotaped receiving what many saw as an over-the-top thrashing by Los Angeles lawmen back in 1991, video footage of alleged police misconduct has time and time again come back to haunt overzealous boys in blue.

  • Security

    • How To: Hack like China’s Government

      Fascinating study done by Northrup Grumman Corporation for the US government’s US-China Economic and Security Review Commission about the Chinese government’s Cyberwar capability.

      In fact, it presents techniques in such a way as to offer a “How To” guide for aspiring state-sponsored hackers.

    • Is aviation security mostly for show?

      We’d do much better by leveraging the inherent strengths of our modern democracies and the natural advantages we have over the terrorists: our adaptability and survivability, our international network of laws and law enforcement, and the freedoms and liberties that make our society so enviable.

      The way we live is open enough to make terrorists rare; we are observant enough to prevent most of the terrorist plots that exist, and indomitable enough to survive the even fewer terrorist plots that actually succeed. We don’t need to pretend otherwise.

  • Environment

    • Long term agricultural overshoot

      According to Peter, humanity has probably been in overshoot of the Earth’s carrying capacity since it abandoned hunter gathering in favor of crop cultivation (~ 8,000 BCE). The problem is that soil needs tightly woven natural ecosystems to properly recycle nutrients and prevent soil erosion.

    • Updates to model-data comparisons

      It’s worth going back every so often to see how projections made back in the day are shaping up. As we get to the end of another year, we can update all of the graphs of annual means with another single datapoint. Statistically this isn’t hugely important, but people seem interested, so why not?

      For example, here is an update of the graph showing the annual mean anomalies from the IPCC AR4 models plotted against the surface temperature records from the HadCRUT3v and GISTEMP products (it really doesn’t matter which). Everything has been baselined to 1980-1999 (as in the 2007 IPCC report) and the envelope in grey encloses 95% of the model runs. The 2009 number is the Jan-Nov average.

    • Trade, Transportation, and the Chinese Finger Trap

      One of the central underpinnings of neo-classical economics is trade. And one of the central tenets of trade is the Ricardian theory of comparative advantage. Trade (in theory) benefits both parties because both are better off after the exchange. But our international trade system has, by baby steps, become completely dependent on twin enablers: crude oil and credit. By air, water, land or rail, petroleum accounts for 95% of all transportation energy. As we move up the complexity chain in the products that make up our daily lives, are we moving further into a Chinese finger trap where there is no backing out?

      This post will examine the theory of international trade and the hierarchy of goods transport, production and consumption. It is quite possible that in the next decade, the increase in price (or the decreasing availability) of oil and financing, will offset the benefits of many types of trade.

  • Internet/Web Abuse/DRM

    • Home copying of e-books and digital rights management

      A frequently asked question that seems appropriate this time of year (given the number of e-books that are likely to appear in people’s Christmas stockings) concerns what one is legally allowed to do with documents on one’s own e-book, particularly one that is protected by some form of digital rights management.

    • The Lost Decades of the UK Web

      So, 20 years after Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the technology, and well over a decade after the Web became a mass medium, and the British Library *still* isn’t archiving every Web site?

      History – assuming we have one – will judge us harshly for this extraordinary UK failure to preserve the key decades of the quintessential technology of our age. It’s like burning down a local digital version of the Library of Alexandria, all over again.

    • One Million Free and Legal Torrent Downloads, The Album

      The FrostWire P2P client promotes music of starting and independent artists through its FrostClick service. The service has been running for over a year and is a great success. To celebrate the first million downloads of 2009, a compilation album has been released, featuring free Creative Commons-licensed tracks from 21 artists.

    • BitTorrent Sites May Be Censored in Italy

      The Italian Supreme Court has ruled that ISPs can be forced to block BitTorrent sites, even if they are not hosted in Italy or operated by Italian citizens. According to the decision by the Supreme Court, sites offering torrent files that link to copyrighted material are engaging in criminal activity.

      [...]

      The fact that a site is not hosted in Italy or operated by Italians is irrelevant according to the court. The site is visited by many Italians who (in part) use it to share copyrighted material, the Supreme Court argued.

  • Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights

    • Copyright Infringement: A Modest Proposal

      Given that the UK government seems happy for huge sums of money to be spent on this fool’s errand, why not spend it more effectively, in a way that sustains businesses, rather than penalising them, and which actually encourages people not to download copyrighted material from unauthorised sources?

      This can be done quite simply: by giving everyone who wants it a free Spotify Premium subscription. These normally cost £120 per year, but buying a national licence for the 10 million families or so who are online would presumably garner a generous discount – say, of 50% – bringing the total price of the scheme to around £600 million, pretty much the expected cost of the current plans.

    • Getting Copyright Right for the Digital Age

      It is extraordinary how copyright has turned from an obscure, dusty corner of the law to one of the flashpoints of the digital age. The reason is simple. Copyright is an intellectual *monopoly*, and like all monopolies tries to limit access to a given good. But limiting access to digital goods is a forlorn hope: as Bruce Schneier expressed it so memorably, trying to make digital files uncopiable is like trying to make water not wet. The battle over copyright is therefore a manifestation of a far deeper struggle between two ways of looking at the world: one based on scarce analogue objects, the other on abundant digital ones.

    • Abusing Copyrights to Silence Critics, Control Customers, and Crush Competition

      Hardly a day goes by without yet another news story about creative uses of copyright, the DMCA, and generic attack lawyers to stifle free speech, criticism, and competition. It seems that money can buy all kinds of creative “justice.” For example, in the increasingly bizarre Apple vs. Psystar drama, in which Psystar commited the awful crime of selling a tool to help customers install Mac OS X on the hardware of their choice, Apple have prevailed yet again in court, and Psystar cannot do this anymore.

Digital Tipping Point: Clip of the Day

Joerg Heilig, Sun Microsystems Senior Engineering Director talks about OpenOffice.org 16 (2004)


Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.

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