“I’ve been thinking long and hard about this, and the only conclusion I can come to is that this is ethically indistinguishable from bribery. Even if no quid-pro-quo is formally required, the gift creates a social obligation of reciprocity. This is best explained in Cialdini’s book Influence (a summary is here). The blogger will feel some obligation to return the favor to Microsoft.”
Summary: Another in-depth look at how Microsoft can guard the public image of Windows (or how to police the Web)
WE HAVE BEGUN assembling this experimental list about Vista 7 truths. We are not alone in suggesting that Vista 7 is a lot of marketing built on top of Windows Vista. Our reader Goblin has a batch of new posts on this subject, the first of which calls Vista 7 a “deja vu” because the hype surrounding it resembles the hype around Vista back in 2006.
The purpose of this article is to highlight a few points, firstly, the PR that Vista received pre-release from the MS faithful was, IMO very much the same as we see today for 7. Regardless of what people try to claim, I think its a given that Vista did not receive the reception that Microsoft would have liked.
In order to build up the hype, Microsoft’s leadership must punish Vista 7 dissenters [1, 2] (of which there are fewer before the official release, so they are relatively controllable) while rewarding or bribing influential voices whose opinions will ‘cascade’ onto readers/viewers and form a positive preconception/expectation until products are actually made available. At the same time, those who are used to attack dissenters can be awarded for it (or bribed, to put it more bluntly).
This is a very simple and common PR doctrine. It is sometimes called “perception management” [1, 2], which Microsoft cements with some legal terms and conditions. For example, at the beginning of this month we wrote about the London Stock Exchange (LSE) dumping its Windows platform and one person rightly argues (in the comments):
It’s quite likely that all of those related to the project who would actually know the exact nature of the failure. When posting via private e-mail, they can leak the information, but if they posted the information officially, their employers would be in violation of nodisclosures with LSE and LSE’s NDAs with Microsoft.
Funny how that works. The Consispiracy of Silence – all crafted by Microsoft’s lawyers.
Here, the concept of Microsoft giving away free laptops is covered: http://www.istartedsomething.com/20061227/microsoft-free-ferrari/ and the author comments:
“But if you write about Microsoft, they might even give you one for free. Is it ethical? Probably not. Is it worth something to hard-working sweat and tears bloggers? Hell yeah.”
Having said that, there are others who appear to have the same opinion as me, David Flynn said at the time:
“Any blogger with pretensions of being considered an independent voice and a ‘professional’ in their field or even their attitude, not to mention a sense of ethics, should be returning this ‘gift’ laptop to Microsoft.”
As he correctly points out, the FTC intends to combat this practice which Microsoft relies on. We wrote about this earlier [1, 2].
The FTC is allegedly planning to crackdown on bloggers/posters who recieve gifts/freebies for promoting products. Its a practice we have highlighted here before and one in my opinion that completely destroys the faith in “honest held belief” in the writings of many bloggers.
Ever read something praising a proprietary product where it has no resembelance to your experience? Its these type of posts which, because of the actions of certain proprietary firms means that when talking about proprietary software/products there is always a question of doubt in an honest held belief. (IMO)
The practice though is commonplace here (that being word of mouth marketing) one such company who can create a marketing buzz for you (as mentioned in the CNET article) http://izea.com/ and its worth keeping in mind when you see a person praising a product. What are their motives for doing so?
Will the FTC severely fine and shut down such companies whose only role is to deceive the public? █
Summary: Novell sidles with Microsoft’s end of the spectrum and Gartner promotes Hyper-V by comparing VMware to Novell
MICROSOFT HAS ALREADY used up most of its ‘puppets’ in order to attack VMware and advance Hyper-V. It used the Burton Group, which needed to be asked for an apology in some other circumstances. It also used the Yankee Group, which was soon forced to pull what seemed like a result of the usual fraudulent study methodologies [1, 2]. Then there was IDC versus VMware. The only pro-Microsoft analyst which has been conspicuously absent from this slog was the Gartner Group [1, 2]… until now. It is now Gartner’s turn to take shots at VMware. Gartner’s David Cappuccio published this article in the Indian press and his own turf. Characteristically enough, he too is totally ignoring anyone but Microsoft, pretending it is just Microsoft’s game. It is a familiar pattern of promotion through deception.
Could VMware be the next Novell? That’s the question Gartner managing vice president and chief of research for Infrastructure David Cappuccio asks in a provocative post, one that bears further discussion. While VMware is at the top of its game, there are several historical analogs between VMware and Novell.
A Citrix veteran pushed out there not one but two articles that give magnitude to this Microsoft promotion from Gartner:
Back in the early 1990’s Novel owned the local area network market – they were as dominant as VMware is today with well over 90% of the market and had an incredibly loyal following (I can attest to this having attended multiple Brainshare events with 10,000+ attendees – and I have the t-shirts to prove it).
Unlike Noorda’s Novell, VMware’s CEO, COO and Executive VP all come from high-level positions at Microsoft. They understand the Microsoft culture, strengths and threat. VMware is a company with a laser beam focus on virtualization that is undistracted by a personal vendetta.
They are giving Microsoft credit (only Microsoft), not to KVM, for example, despite the fact that it runs/will run on many Red Hat (and generally GNU/Linux) servers out there.
And then there is Citrix, which is all about Windows and Microsoft. Yes, it truly shows. From The Register:
It will launch a freebie version of its Citrix Essentials virtualisation tool set that works in conjunction with Microsoft’s Hyper-V hypervisor for Windows Server 2008.
This whole article shows the bias at Citrix (just Hyper-V/Xen and Microsoft/Novell). Linux is hardly a consideration after Citrix hijacked Xen. The Linux Foundation appears to have noticed that too. In another article from the The Register, it is shown that Novell chooses to help Microsoft and its semi-subsidiary Citrix. Novell will not help KVM, which competes directly with Microsoft, the Microsoft-influenced Citrix, and the Microsoft-dominated VMware (after Tucci’s aggressive transitioning).
SUSE Linux 11 has a technology preview of Red Hat’s alternative KVM hypervisor, but Novell is still pretty cool to it, having made big investments in Xen. “We don’t see an ecosystem developing around KVM yet,” says Steinman dismissively. But when Red Hat gets its freestanding version of KVM, called Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, or RHEV for short, out of beta and into production later this year, Novell will have to make up its mind what to do. Red Hat already has, and Xen is not its future.
Novell finds itself stuck with Microsoft. It is obliged to keep Microsoft happy in order to receive those cash infusions, without which it probably could not survive. █
Summary: Rob Enderle’s lies echoed/propagated by IDG
MICROSOFT’S vandalism of Java is well documented and it continues to this date according to the following article, whose author was ‘kind’ enough to include Microsoft FUD from Rob Enderle [1, 2, 3].
With nearly no explanation, Microsoft sent out an alert notifying customers that it was removing download information for 10 security patches “because Microsoft Java Virtual Machine is no longer available for distribution from Microsoft.” The revised bulletins are rated as critical and affect patches from the years 1999 through 2003.
It is sheer speculation as to why, on July 1 2009, Microsoft has suddenly discovered, and removed, software that contained the MSJVM. Can this have anything to do with the pending sale of Sun to Oracle? In April, the latest scuffle between the proprietary and open source worlds was more remarks about the so-called ownership of Linux, made by none other than industry pundit Rob Enderle. He seemed to think that much of the code in Linux belongs to Sun, and therefore will soon be owned by Oracle, who will turn around and use its so-called power to control Linux.
Enderle also believes that the moon is made of green cheese, and that the SCO Group will be rolling in cash after they beat IBM in court.
Another one:
Enderle said SCO owned Linux back in 2003
[...]
Enderle was impressed with the code that SCO was showing to the select few who would sign an NDA. Enderle believed that SCO would own Linux. Enderle and Didio are two people who should not be paid for their ‘contributions’ to the IT world.
And yet another (among more):
Who is this “Microsoft Subnet” person? Are they really that desperate to churn page hits to link to a quack like Enderle? That guy fell off the wagon long ago and suffered a bit of brain damage in the process. It would not surprise me in the least if “Microsoft Subnet” turned out to be Enderle. Is that you Bobby? You put the “L” in lame.
A year ago, “Microsoft Subnet” called for Microsoft bloggers to unite and probably just praise the company in an outlet that makes the news feeds.
Contrary to popular belief, most open source software does not give users complete freedom to do with it as they please [...]
2. Viral open source licenses inhibit innovation.
3. Government-funded research should not be licensed using the GPL.
As the reader points out, “An endless river of piss flowing out of Redmond. Most probably room full of trained legal monkeys typing this drivel. Delivered fresh daily to the likes of Microsoft Jack.” The reader is referring to this chap [1, 2], a pundit who is hostile towards Microsoft’s competitors and writes favourably about everything Microsoft. █
“Analysts sell out – that’s their business model.”
Summary: Lenovo still discriminates against market leader Red Hat and instead pushes the Microsoft-encumbered SUSE
NOT so long ago we remarked on Lenovo’s relationship with Microsoft. The companies appear in tandem more often than not and we have written about Microsoft staff who entered Lenovo’s top ranks, as well as Lenovo’s preference for SLE* (Microsoft-taxed) over Red Hat [1, 2, 3, 4].
Over at The Register, a new article expresses bafflement over Lenovo’s preferential treatment for the Microsoft-taxed GNU/Linux distribution.
All of the ThinkServers support Windows Server 2008 in the Standard, Enterprise, Small Business Server, and Essential Business Server flavors. Novell is the preferred Linux supplier at Lenovo, and customers can also get SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 on the new ThinkServers.
As for server virtualization hypervisors, VMware’s ESX Server 3.5 and ESXi 3.5 are certified on the machines, as is Hyper-V for Windows 2008 and the Xen hypervisors inside of SLES 10 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.
Given the proximity between Red Hat and Lenovo in North Carolina, you’d think they’d be best buddies. Anyway, if RHEL didn’t make the cut as a preferred Linux operating system, it is at least designated as a hypervisor. Yes, that is silly.
The servers are “virtualization ready,” meaning they are available with a choice of virtualization technology from Microsoft, Novell, VMWare or Red Hat pre-installed. With the expanded memory and storage capacity, the latest computers can be used to consolidate applications running on several legacy servers into one system.
At IDG, there is also this new reminder of what Novell did with Microsoft. The author later tries to defend it.
For me, this deal looks rather like the agreement between Microsoft and Novell back in 2006. While some open source advocates suggested Novel had sold its soul to the devil, the real story was Microsoft’s recognition that in future proprietary and open source software would exist side by side in most IT shops.
This is mostly the self-serving story told by Novell. To Microsoft, the Novell deal “clearly establishes that open source is not free,” to quote Steve Ballmer shortly after the deal had been signed. █
The Startup Business Accelerator, under chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie, was among the groups hit hard by the company’s latest round of cuts. The MSN Direct and .Net Micro Framework teams, other parts of the startup group, were also affected by those cuts.
“Microsoft can’t charge $80 or $100 when there’s Linux for free on netbooks,” Rosoff said. On regular PC sales, Microsoft’s profit margins are typically about 70 percent to 80 percent, he explained.”
Still not worth it. Ubuntu is free and I own Windows 2000 Professional, Windows XP Home, and Vista for all my Win32 needs. I can’t imagine a time in the future where I’ll need Windows 7 for any reason aside from a review.
I asked him last night about his initial impressions of Windows 7 and, in typical teenage fashion, as he was bouncing between Meebo windows and browser tabs, he said it was “nice.” I managed to extract from him that his favorite feature was that he was able to use his Zune with it, something that had never worked terribly well with Ubuntu. Otherwise, he said, “Windows 7 is the same as Ubuntu; there just really isn’t anything different about them.”
As the years go by, many computers start to slow down. One way to breathe new life into an old computer is to re-install Windows but, unless you have all the required discs, this can be tricky. One easier way to bring an old computer back up to speed is to install a copy of Linux.
By using Open Source softwares and exemplifying them as intellectually honest ways to work and perform my duties I introduce and reinforce the idea that being intellectually honest is easy and can actually save time and money as well as giving the students a new understanding of what intellectual honesty really is.
The nature of the enterprise desktop is changing, and the emphasis now is on instant accessibility, mobility and flexibility – attributes which Linux, on the server, desktop, netbook or mobile device, is well placed to provide
I don’t know how many people have a specific intention to use future versions of Windows or MacOS. I also don’t know many people intend to buy a computer, and will find that it comes with Windows 7 whether they wanted that or not. But if the numbers are large, my feeling towards them will not be one of awe, because I don’t wish for the kind of success that consists of gaining power over lots of people. For the GNU system, the question is rather how many people we can liberate.
My message for anyone that uses Windows or MacOS is to notice that using them means that Microsoft or Apple controls your computing. They decide what you can do, and what you can’t do. So escape! Join us in the Free World! We have worked 25 years to build it, for freedom’s sake. Now all you have to do is choose freedom.
Continuing the theme from #6, be willing to pay for Linux. Be willing to discuss Linux as a product people buy. Be willing to say “not free” isn’t always a bad thing.
I know Linux proscribes selling Linux, but there are many success stories where Linux is the cornerstone of a profitable product (think TiVo). A nicely constructed Linux Desktop is worth money, whether FOSS thinks so or not.
There is something fundamentally defective with a business that feels it can’t survive by giving customers a fair deal. Stick with FOSS. What you see is what you get, warts, roses, everything, with no place to hide tricksy dealings or dishonesty.
Ksplice is an amazing new technology which allows patches to be applied directly into a running kernel, without needing a reboot. Linux Magazine talks with co-founder and Chief Operating Officer and discusses the origins of the project and what it has to offer.
Linux 2.6.31 will be IEEE 802.15.4 capable and will include a new Wi-Fi driver for Intel chips. Developers have also added support for recent Ralink Wi-Fi components and revamped the Rfkill framework. The Wi-fi stack and drivers are now better able to use newer power saving technologies.
One of the benefits of moving the different graphics hardware drivers over to using kernel mode-setting, an in-kernel GPU memory manager (whether it be GEM or TTM), and other newer X innovations is the possibility of now running the X Server without root privileges. By doing so, this of course improves the security since this very large chunk of code is no longer running with all of these high-privileged rights.
I hope you’ll check out some of the links and sites presented here. Much important activity goes on in the Linux audio world that is not covered by the high-profile journalists, but hopefully the sites mentioned in this article will help keep you up to date. I’ll be back with more Linux audio-related news in this column in about two weeks. Meanwhile you can surf the sites mentioned in this article and let me know what you think should be added to my lists. Above all, breathe, stay vertical, and keep yourself open to communication.
GIMP, despite it’s interface, is the best open-source image editor. But often all you want to do is simply resize a picture or a similar minor task and for that you could use an application such as mtPaint which has a lot of great features such as:
* Quickly transform image gamma, brightness, contrast, saturation, hue, posterize from a single dialog, and preview the results in real time.
If you’ve been using Twitter through its website, I recommend that you use a desktop client instead to further enhance your tweeting experience. Since Twitter has become immensely popular, there are tons and tons of available desktop applications that support this great micro-blogging service. So I’m here to assist you on narrowing down the choices, and hope to somehow give you an idea on picking the one that suits you best.
Blogging has done nothing but gain steam over the last few years. Most bloggers are posting directly to sites like Facebook and MySpace. I consider that type of blogger to be amateur. The serious bloggers are using their own sites powered by outstanding open source solutions like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla!, or even home-grown solutions. But there are others who regularly blog to Blogger and Moveable Type. For those more serious bloggers the need for tools to make this job easier is at a prime. One such tool is that tool that allows the user to blog straight from the desktop, in both on and offline modes.
Dubbed Goldeneye, VLC 1.0.0 brings some of the highly anticipated features, lots of bug fixes and many improvements. Among the new features we can notice support for some HD streams. Without further introduction, here are the highlights of VLC 1.0.0…
Not all information on the web is static, connected in a meaningful way, or even as cool as it should be. Which is why one of the post-web 2.0 movements of note is the mashup – the repurposing of data from the web into new and exciting forms. Welcome to the world of data punk.
More than a year after KDE 4.0 unveiled a radically revised desktop, KOffice 2.0 is preparing to release an equally revised office suite, which should be released before this article is published (KOffice 2.0-RC-1 was released in April 2009).
On the first day of the joint developer conference on Grand Canary, representatives of the desktop projects Gnome and KDE formulated common goals for their future development.
I think that nicely summarizes the atmosphere of the event. There certainly is some competition, but in the end it’s motivating and stimulating for both communities and leads to better solutions for all of us.
The GNOME developers, through Lucas Rocha, have announced early this morning in a press release that the last maintenance release of the popular GNOME 2.26 desktop environment is now available for download. Just like the previous maintenance releases, GNOME 2.26.3 is here mainly to fix many of the remaining bugs, but to also introduce a few interesting features.
Gnome-Colors is looking like a very promising theme pack for GNOME and one of only a few that provide a PPA repository for regular updates. Whilst it may not be for everyone, I would certainly recommend that popular distributions such as Ubuntu and Fedora seriously consider including it as an option in their official releases as it really does enhance the Linux user experience and brings along a lot of eye candy to an operating system that has for quite some time fallen behind in the aesthetics department. I have to say a big thank you to the developers – and I look forward to seeing what else there is to come!
KDE e.V.’s Annual General Meeting was held today during the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain. The KDE e.V. is the association that provides representation, support and governance to the KDE community. After former board member Klaas Freitag and KDE e.V. president Aaron Seigo stepped down and vice president Adriaan de Groot’s term ended, three open positions had to be filled. Adriaan de Groot was re-elected as vice president of KDE e.V. and two new board members have been elected.
The KDE Team has released another release candidate for KDE called “Canteras”. It contains only few changes compared to RC1 which suggests that the 4.3 is stabilizing and shaping up well for the 4.3.0 release on 28th of July. KDE 4.3.0 will be followed up by a series of monthly bugfix and translation updates. Testers are asked to report bugs in this release so 4.3.0 becomes a release as smooth as possible.
I took some time today to install and take for a spin the latest version of KDE4 today, release 4.3 RC1. I installed the packages from the Kubuntu backports repositories, as explained in this tutorial. All the screenshots were taken at 1280×1024 and desktop effects enabled.
At the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit much cross-desktop work has been done. The days we have are being used for the Cross Desktop Tracks and during the talks there are KDE and Gnome developers mingling everywhere. Cross desktop sessions included bug triage, metadata sharing, instant messaging and sharing personal data cross-desktop with CouchDB. Read more about the results!
The Akademy Awards for 2009 have been announced, celebrating the best of KDE contributors. As always the winners are chosen by the winners from the previous year. Read on for the winners.
On the first day of the joint developer conference on Grand Canary, representatives of the desktop projects Gnome and KDE formulated common goals for their future development.
The Cross-Desktop Metadata track at this year’s Gran Canaria Summit highlighted developer activity targeting central storage of contact data, email and other personal information.
They say that good things come in small packages and so it is with Tiny Core Linux, a diminutive but powerful distribution. TCL weighs in at an incredibly petite 11MB when you download it. Yes, it really is that tiny. Tiny Core Linux is based on Busybox, the Linux 2.6 kernel, JWM, Fltk and Tiny X.
Five weeks ago when I wrote an overview of Debris Linux I received a number of requests to review other mini distributions from DistroWatch Weekly readers. CDLinux is a minimalist distro from China which takes a different approach to small. Rather than cram as many application as possible onto a mini (3″/8cm) CD, the CDLinux Community Edition aims for excellent support of half a dozen languages (Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese and Russian), support for a wide variety of filesystems and excellent hardware support, including CUPS and XSane for printers and scanners, all of which are included in the 204MB iso. They also offer a “standard” edition, just 64MB in size, which includes a basic Xfce desktop and almost no applications at all. CDLinux “standard” does include popular rescue and admin tools, making it an excellent choice for a recovery CD. Finally, the 25MB “mini” edition is console only. I decided to take the most complete version, the Community Edition, and put it through its paces.
Lately I’ve been looking at different distributions but there’s another angle of desktop Linux that bears looking at from time to time too: gaming. Yes, there actually are Linux gamers out there and, despite some shortcomings, it is quite possible to play some games on your Linux system. Usually people would do it by installing games and running them via their preferred desktop distribution. But there’s another way:
[....]
“Games that are bold are only contained on the “big” release.
Now I have a beautiful, very fast, very mature and stable Linux installation to enjoy and do my work. The result is so nice that I am debating on whether I will want to install the KDE 4 packages that are supposed to be arriving to the repository soon. I will have to think about that. In the mean time, PCLinuxOS Minime is working great and looking very nice on my machine, and it most likely can do the same on yours. Why not give it a try?
What is the operating system of the cloud? Linux vendor Red Hat would like it to be Linux. But networking giant Cisco, despite working closely with Red Hat in a number of areas, may be going another direction entirely.
Both Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) and Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) were busy last week with their own respective cloud-related initiatives. Red Hat launched a new cloud certification program while Cisco outlined its go-to-market cloud strategy. Is there an intersection between the two vendors and their cloud initiatives?
I do agree in a controlled environment or for users who don’t need the “latest and greatest” Linux Mint is a great distribution, and I think it’s a step above Ubuntu (in both regular user, and enterprise user space).
Linux Mint 7 “Gloria” was released a little while ago, so before it became too old of news, I thought I’d take a whack at experimenting with it for the sake of netbookers everywhere (and for myself, naturally). As I type this on gedit after about two weeks’ use, let’s just say that the system on my EeePC 1000 HE is, for the most part, rather glorious– pun intended. As a bonus, I also got Google’s Chromium browser to run on it, so keep on reading to find the section on that.
6. Ubuntu Cloud Computing
Ubuntu provides “Ubuntu Server Edition” for use on a public cloud and for building a own private cloud environment on servers, it offers “Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud”. Ubuntu help organizations to migrate to a cloud environment through Consultancy, Deployment services and Support
You may, by now, have heard of a little distribution called Ubuntu, unless you happen to have been in space for the past five years.
For now all you need to know is that Ubuntu is a popular offshoot of Debian, and the man behind it, Mark Shuttleworth, is considered to be a veritable Linux titan.
I’ve been using the WKB-4100UB with our latest home-built client (perhaps eventually to be a Windows 7 client, or maybe a Ubuntu server, or something else entirely), known as Bissell because it’s an Atom-based Intel D945GCLF2D mini-ITX motherboard built into (really) an old Bissell Carpet Machine Special carpet-cleaner. I mean, the thing would have wound up in a landfill, so why not? I’m pretty sure it won’t pass FCC, but it was a fun diversion to assemble, save for drilling holes to mount the motherboard, power supply, and especially cutting openings for the VGA and power connectors. The keyboard USB dongle is completely inside the case. Installing Ubuntu 9.04 start to finish took less than 30 minutes – I used the UNetbootin tool to copy the Ubuntu ISO image to a thumb drive, booted from that (and, by the way, this a now completely portable bootable Ubuntu environment; no installation necessary), then clicked “install” to write everything to another memory stick installed in the Bissell. I plugged in my Linksys WUSB600N USB .11n adapter, and voila, no kidding, it just worked. I was on the net less than 30 minutes from initial power-on.
No writer is completely without bias. I do the best I can to be even-handed and objective when reviewing a distribution. I have to admit though that I’ve been far too biased toward covering Gnome-based distributions and haven’t nearly covered as many KDE-based counterparts. I’ll be trying in the future to have a more balanced selection of reviews that cover both desktops plus some other environments.
Eventhough there is a number of good quality themes available for Ubuntu through various sites like gnome-look or deviantart, it is still a difficult job to find full set themes which include gdm themes(login window theme), wallapaper, metacity themes, icon set etc. But there is an option to download it from PPA launchpad repo itself, which is always the safer bet. Special thanks to the Zgegblog guys for contributing these out of the world themes for Ubuntu users.
There has been an explosion of activity going on over here at PCLinuxOS. The quarterly ISO updates for PCLinuxOS 2009.2 and PCLinuxOS Gnome 2009.2 are now available featuring a fully updated iso with the latest applications from the PCLinuxOS repositories. Additional features include a notification-updater to let you know when there are updates available for your installation. Addlocale will localize your your PCLinuxOS into one of many various languages. GetOpenOffice allows you to install Open Office 3.1 in any of the 104 languages available. Thanks goes to Pinoc, Neal, Travis, Maik and the rest of the community for providing these well desired applications.
Nokia is breaking from Symbian and about to use Android for one of its next smartphones, according to industry sources. A touchscreen, smartphone-class device is claimed by the Guardian to be later in development and likely to be unveiled at Nokia World in September. Its features are unknown beyond the use of the Google platform.
Dell on Friday said it would consider testing Google’s upcoming Chrome operating system, but didn’t commit to offering the Linux-based OS in future products.
The Linux-based CrunchPad boots directly into a WebKit browser and has no hard drive or keyboard. Arrington said the CrunchPad will cost less than a tablet device rumored under development by Apple, Inc. geared toward iPhone apps.
This is the reason why I am creating this article is because they are users of FOSS (as well as being a good cause).
One of the best things FOSS users have is IMO a sense of “community” , afterall we are alone in a world of proprietary software with massive advertising bugets yet still we are able to form communities and help each other. I am sending my list of skills to this charity as well as finding out their requirements for help for referall to others , I would urge you to do the same. What better way to do something you enjoy whilst helping a charity? – Its win, win.
With little fanfare, Sun Microsystems released version 3.0 of xVM VirtualBox, the Open Source and multi-platform desktop virtualization tool for Unix, Linux, Windows and Mac. The new release represents a culmination of hundreds of bugfixes and significant performance enhancements, including the ability for the product to permit guest OSes to use up to 32 virtual CPUs each. Under previous versions of the product, only one CPU core per guest OS was permitted.
In a symbolic show of support for Free Open Source Software and the OpenDocument Format, Brazilian President Lula da Silva recently attended the Linux-related FISL 10 conference in Porto Alegre, Brazil, where he gave an address underscoring the importance of Free Open Source Software to Brazilian national interests. He appears here wearing a hat with the ODF logo (the OpenDocument Format is a legally unencumbered document format upon which any company or community project can easily build.)
In late 2004, Google surprised the world of computing with the release of the paper MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters. That paper ushered in a new model for data processing across clusters of machines that had the benefit of being simple to understand and incredibly flexible. Once you adopt a MapReduce way of thinking, dozens of previously difficult or long-running tasks suddenly start to seem approachable–if you have sufficient hardware.
[...]
In fact, the MapReduce model has proven so useful that the Apache Hadoop project (an Open Source implementation of the infrastructure described in the Google paper) has become very popular in the last few years. Yahoo, which employs numerous Hadoop committers, recently hosted their annual Hadoop Summit which attracted over 500 users and developers.
I like FreeBSD now. I have fell in love with Ports. Compiling from source has its own advantages as you can specify several compile time options and the compiled program is better optimized for your particular system. And it feels so damn geeky! I love it.
The Symbian Foundation has released its first open source software package, the first step in the organization’s plan to eventually open source the entire Symbian mobile operating system.
The Symbian Foundation, established under a Nokia initiative, has released the first part of its Symbian Platform Security package under the free Eclipse Public License (EPL).
This may seem like reading apocalyptic meaning into Free Software, and I think it does have nearly-apocalyptic importance. Openness, accountability, honesty, success based on merit, community—hey, call me a nasty red Commie, but that sure sounds like the fundamentals of democracy. Who in the proprietary world is looking out for us? If it weren’t for Free Software we’d be shorn skinless. Tor, OpenSSL, OpenSSH, PGP, open standards, formats, code, protocols, free intellectual inquiry and sharing, a culture of stubborn resistance– they’re more important than ever. Technology is part of the foundation of modern life, and it’s too important to let the greedy exploiters control it.
Today is the day that the United States of America celebrates Independence Day. We declared ourselves free from England’s rule and started a Revolution to create a country based on truly revolutionary ideals. The ideal that all people are created equal in the sight of God and no one is above another in God’s eyes. The ideal that people have unalienable rights given to them from God, not from government. The ideal that people have the right to abolish an out of control, despotic government to replace it with one more amenable to the people. These unprecedented ideals had never been set forth in writing to form any other nation until the beginning of the United States of America. Yes, we did win our freedom but it was not freely given to us. Men pledged “… to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” and went to war to win this freedom.
What a typical open source vendor today will do, he said, is try to sell their product based on it being cheaper than a Microsoft Windows deployment, for example. But where that goes wrong is how it is viewed by the tech-wary SMB user who doesn’t have a big IT shop to do the work. “From their view, it would be more expensive because they would need training to do it” using open source, rather than sticking with Windows and what they already know and are familiar with, he said.
A recent report from Black Duck Software suggests there has been a five per cent decline in the use of GPL licences since 2008. The Software Freedom Law Center’s Aaron Williamson has called the figure “meaningless” pointing out that the methodology and mechanisms behind Black Duck’s statistics are not available for scrutiny.
The young Gitg project, which visualizes a graphical representation of git data for Mac OS X under Gtk+/GNOME, allows check-ins and merges in its newest release 0.0.4, among other things.
Firefox 3.5 and Chrome already support the new video tag of the HTML5 specification. Before it can become a standard, though, more browsers makers have to agree on the codec.
The funny thing is, though, that the quality of the result, and even the ability to interoperate in a world dominated by Microsoft’s Office, doesn’t necessarily equate to the depth of the resources of the developer. Now isn’t that an interesting observation?
Meanwhile, small webcasters don’t get much of a break either. Live365 is pointing out that these rates will basically kill off every webcaster it hosts by requiring a $25,000 fee. As the company notes, the guy running the Armenian folk music station for $10/month isn’t going to pay $25,000 and certainly isn’t going to make enough revenue to pay up.
The Shepard Fairey case continues to get more and more bizarre. You may recall that, back in January, someone figured out which photo Shepard Fairey had used as the basis of his iconic Barack Obama poster.
Reader Wesha sends in the news that the band Deep Purple has been fined for performing its own songs in Russia without first getting a license from the Russian Authors’ Society (NGO). And it wasn’t a small fine either, approximately $1,000 per song. Oh, but wait, it gets better. According to one news organization, the money will be passed along to the victim, a band called… Deep Purple. Yes, that’s right.
“Perhaps someone has the radio on or is listening to a CD and if so, you need to have a permit that allows for music to be played the workplace,” said Susanne Bodin, a STIM spokesperson, to the Sweden-based DN newspaper. “A workplace isn’t private and therefore you should have a licence for music to be played so that the copyright holders get paid.”
I think we should permanently cut off the internet access of any company that sends out three erroneous copyright notices. Three strikes and you’re out, mate.
Having been disconnected, your customers can only find out about your product offerings by ringing you up and asking, or by requesting a printed brochure. Perhaps you could give all your salespeople fax machines so they can fax urgent information up and down the supply chain. And there’s always the phone – just make sure you’ve got a bunch of phone books in the office, because you’ll never Google another phone number.
Call it a modest proposal in the Swiftian sense if you must, but I’m deadly serious.
You see, the big copyright companies – record labels, broadcasters, film studios, software companies – are lobbying in the halls of power around the world (including Westminster) for a three strikes rule for copyright infringers. They want to oblige internet service providers (ISPs) to sever the broadband links of any customer who has been thrice accused of downloading infringing material, and to oblige web-hosting companies to terminate the accounts of anyone accused of sticking infringing material on a web server three times.
New York – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) urged a federal court Wednesday to reject bogus copyright claims in a ringtone royalty battle that could raise costs for consumers, jeopardize consumer rights, and curtail new technological innovation.
Summary: The rest of Novell’s news (from two weeks)
THE past week has been slow and the company’s staff has been mostly dormant, so let us start with a couple of new videos. Novell carries on posting instructional videos — a practice it has been following for several months now. This first one is about ZENworks:
New trouble for Željko Topić in Strasbourg, making it yet another EPO Vice-President who is on shaky grounds and paving the way to managerial collapse/avalanche at the EPO
The utter lack of participation, involvement or even intervention by German authorities serve to confirm that the government of Germany is very much complicit in the EPO's abuses, by refusing to do anything to stop them
Another example of UPC promotion from within the EPO (a committee dedicated to UPC promotion), in spite of everything we know about opposition to the UPC from small businesses (not the imaginary ones which Team UPC claims to speak 'on behalf' of)
Uploaded by SUEPO earlier today was the above video, which shows how last year's party (actually 2015) was spoiled for Battistelli by the French State Secretary for Digital Economy, Axelle Lemaire, echoing the French government's concern about union busting etc. at the EPO (only to be rudely censored by Battistelli's 'media partner')
In violation of international labour laws, Team Battistelli marches on and engages in a union-busting race against the clock, relying on immunity to keep this gravy train rolling before an inevitable crash
A new year's reminder that the EPO has only one legitimate union, the Staff Union of the EPO (SUEPO), whereas FFPE-EPO serves virtually no purpose other than to attack SUEPO, more so after signing a deal with the devil (Battistelli)
Orwellian misuse of terms by the EPO, which keeps using the term "social democracy" whilst actually pushing further and further towards a totalitarian regime led by 'King' Battistelli
The paradigm of totalitarian control, inability to admit mistakes and tendency to lie all the time is backfiring on the EPO rather than making it stronger
An outline of recent stories about patents, where patent quality is key, reflecting upon the population's interests rather than the interests of few very powerful corporations
The role played by Heiko Maas in the UPC, which would harm businesses and people all across Europe, is becoming clearer and hence his motivation/desire to keep Team Battistelli in tact, in spite of endless abuses on German soil
The latest facts and figures about software patents, compared to the spinmeisters' creed which they profit from (because they are in the litigation business)
The US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) is planning to weigh in on a case which will quite likely drive patent trolls out of the Eastern District of Texas, where all the courts that are notoriously friendly towards them reside
The scope of patents in the United States is rapidly tightening (meaning, fewer patents are deemed acceptable by the courts) and Fitbit’s patent case is the latest case to bite the dust
Pretending there is a violent, physical threat that is imminent, Paranoid in Chief Benoît Battistelli is alleged to have pursued weapons on EPO premises
A look at actions taken at a political level against the EPO in spite of the EPO's truly awkward exemption from lawfulness or even minimal accountability
Selective emphasis on very few cases and neglect of various other dimensions help create a parallel reality (or so-called 'fake news') where software patents are on the rebound
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