07.17.12
Posted in News Roundup at 6:19 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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I’m an Ubuntu guy, though the advent of Unity has pushed me to try the other Ubuntu flavors like Xubuntu and Lubuntu (both of which are running on my netbook and laptop). Xfce might just become my standard desktop; I launch everything using Synapse anyway, and Unity’s universal menus and lack of document identification don’t work for me.
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After the success of Raspberry Pi, it seems mini PCs that run Linux has become a technology trend. Recently, 2 new mini Linux-enabled PCs have joined the party.
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Desktop
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Let me tell you a secret: Although I often claim I have no friends, I do! A few, but still, they are present and accounted for. One of these friends happened to give me his T61 for extensive, long-term operating system testing, which you’ve been enjoyed recently, with all the latest-gen SSD benchmarking and quadruple boot setup and whatnot. And now, that same friend has loaned me another one of his machines, for an indefinite period of abuse. This means more fun.
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The laptop is going back to its owner. I’m sorry to say, but with its crappy graphics and Wireless, it’s simply unusable. I could blame Linux of course, but then, that same Linux works fine everywhere else. Moreover, my other machines with N-capable cards are running just fine, since they happen to have other devices. And let’s not even mention the graphics card. You know what I think about non-Nvidia cards, or non-Nvidia drivers. You’ve seen what happens with Nouveau.
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I’ve been keeping track lately of what it is I do most during a full day of remote support. The three top things I deal with are:
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From time to time I get the question of “Why has Linux failed on the Desktop?” Recently Linus was also asked this question, and he considered it a personal failure, since his first desire was to have Linux as a desktop machine. He attributed this to the fact that end user customers just do not like installing operating systems on their machines that they purchased.
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Dell is toying with the idea of loading up Ubuntu onto an XPS 13 laptop to create a developer environment in which people can create Web and mobile apps. It’s called Project Sputnik. Should Microsoft be worried? My thinking is no.
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Kernel Space
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With Ubuntu 12.10 coming up in just a few months, here are our first virtualization benchmarks from the forthcoming “Quantal Quetzal” operating system. Compared in this article is the raw/bare-metal performance to Linux KVM and Xen virtualization from the latest Linux 3.5 kernel.
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Graphics Stack
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A large round of X.Org DDX graphics driver updates were released by Airlie on Monday night. These changes are mostly for the obscure and/or vintage graphics drivers that very few people actually use or care about these days.
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The Free Software Fondation has had a high priority project to reverse-engineer the PowerVR SGX GPU and to write an open-source 3D driver around this popular Imagination graphics processor more than a year.
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The Intel SNA acceleration architecture significantly improves the X.Org driver’s performance over the UXA acceleration method that’s the default. SNA has been in development since last year with much of the development being done by Chris Wilson of Intel OTC. SNA stands for Sandy Bridge New Acceleration, but it benefits all generations of Intel graphics hardware. SNA has worked out extremely well in recent months with all bugs appearing to have been squashed.
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It’s not entirely surprising that LunarGLASS isn’t talked about much any more (I haven’t heard it mentioned in about one year, but today it came to mind and I figured I’d check to see if anyone has been quietly working on it). It doesn’t appear that LunarG is doing anything with it at the moment, at least not publicly. It’s not entirely surprising though since some developers — like those at Intel — were in opposition to moving from GLSL IR to LLVM IR due to investments made to their existing infrastructure and not being convinced on the benefits of using LLVM as their intermediate representation.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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This column’s all about the terminal and using command line commands. If you rush off screaming, it’s probably because you’ve only ever encountered the (shudder) DOS terminal terminal in Windows. Let me tell you, the Linux terminal is way more advanced — and way easier to use.
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Games
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Finally some non-Phoronix exclusive information about Steam/Source Engine on Linux 
Valve Software has begun to write about their Steam Linux client initiatives on their public blog.
Over at blogs.valvesoftware.com/Linux is the start of the Linux blog! This should be linked to from the main Valve Software blog in the near future, I’m told (I was just pinged by them this evening about the soon-to-go-live blog post). The first post is entitled “Steam’d Penguins”; the post’s author isn’t displayed but I would assume it was written by Mike Sartain.
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The Valve team has set up a blog specifically about their GNU/Linux and Open Source initiative so as to crush the rumors and misinformation out there. In the first blog post the team admitted that they have been working on ‘moving Steam and the Source game engine to Linux.’
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After many rumours, Valve has now officially confirmed that it is porting its Steam game distribution platform to Linux. A port of the first-person shooter game Left 4 Dead 2 (L4D2) is also being worked on. The announcement coincides with the launch of a new Valve Linux Team blog, which will provide a first hand account of future Linux developments at the company.
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The buzz continues over the open source Ouya gaming platform. A Los Angeles-based project, Ouya is billed as “a new kind of video game console” on Kickstarter, the open crowd funding online site dedicated to giving innovative ideas a chance in the market. It’s already generated more than $5 million in funding on Kickstarter, and we covered this new platform in this post. Some criticism of the Ouya effort is appearing, though, with skeptics saying the $99 Android-based platform has a lot to prove.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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I left KDE back in the early KDE4 days. It wasn’t a matter of the fact I didn’t like the changes made, it was a matter of the plasma desktop simply being too unstable (for me) to get anything done.
I had always been a KDE user since first using Linux. When I first installed Red Hat 7.1, the friend who gave me the disk gave me this simple instruction “When it asks you GNOME or KDE, choose KDE.” – and I was off.
Oddly enough, I’ve made my way back to Fedora after leaving Fedora at FC2 for better KDE support, or I should say a more ‘upstream’ KDE (I grew to not like the Bluecurve thing that attempted to make KDE and GNOME look alike). I initially went to Mandrake (for maybe a week), tried out a little distro called Yoper (is it still around?), and finally settled in with Slackware for a while (and learned a *lot* in the process). After that I flopped around mostly between Kubuntu and Debian (usually Sid) with KDE.
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GNOME Desktop
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Gnome Web (Epiphany) is a misjudged and underestimated project when web-browsers are the most popular and significant software in any OS. The reasons? The two powerful open source alternatives, Chromium and Firefox, but also the bad quality and poor in features Web.
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I spent the weekend looking at the release candidates for four — or two, depending on how you count them — upcoming Linux distributions. Perhaps it is a good commentary on the state of Linux distributions that the most important thing to say about all four is that they just work.
From installation to hardware detection and driver support, and the full range of packages and applications included, everything just works with no huge drama.
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The Netrunner distribution is one I’ve been asked to review recently. It’s a project based on Kubuntu and the latest release of Netrunner, version 4.2, is based on Kubuntu 12.04, making it a long term support release. According the to the project’s website, Netrunner aims to be a complete desktop OS that will feel comfortable to new users while remaining flexible. The latest release is offered in both 32-bit and 64-bit builds and the ISO download is approximately 1.6GB in size.
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If you are a long time user of Windows or Mac and want to try Linux, there is a high chance that your first distro will be either Ubuntu, Linux Mint or Fedora since these distros are very popular. However, there are some other distros that are more suitable for beginners in my opinion. All of these distros work out of the box, come with a very friendly, easy-to-use desktop and are super easy to install and very well-supported.
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Today, Slackware celebrate it’s 19th birthday and i think it would be a perfect timing if we could have Slackware 14 on this wonderful moment, but unfortunately it’s not possible. Even though -Current is now stabilizing, there are still some things to do before we can have Slackware 14 ready for public.
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What do Bill Reynolds, Fabio Erculiani, and Clement Lefebvre have in common? They spearheaded new distributions that have become staples in Linux desktop computing. Beginning new projects is particularly difficult and not all who try succeed. So, that’s why Todd Robinson might sound a little nuts with his newest experiment. He’s going to attempt to create and release a complete Linux operating system each and every day for a whole month.
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There is a joke that there are more Linux distros than the total amount of Linux users. When this saying is obviously exaggerating, it is true that we have a lot of Linux distros already out there. But there will be more. At least there will be 31 more Linux distros after August this year.
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Package managers, desktops, installers, multimedia codecs, proprietary driver support, start up and shutdown, and release models. All these things, and many more, separate the different distributions from one another. In this week’s open ballot, we want to know if you were king for a day, what combination of components would you pluck out of which distributions to recombine into your perfect operating system?
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New Releases
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The final release of VectorLinux 7.0 SOHO is now available. This release is built on the 7.0 GOLD release featuring the recently released KDE4.8.3 desktop experience. VectorLinux is the fastest Linux desktop in it’s class bar none. We have spared no expense to bring the KDE4 desktop to the Linux community in a unique fashion that is best tried to see KDE4 at its most awesome potential. With the custom artwork, visual tweaks and a little Vector magic, behold SOHO as you have never seen it before.
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Nearly eight months after the 32-bit edition arrived, a 64-bit edition of version 7.0 of the Slackware-based operating system has been announced by the VectorLinux developers. Like the project’s Standard edition, the 64-bit release of VectorLinux 7.0 – referred to as “VLocity Linux 64-7.0″ – includes support for DVD playback, audio and video codecs, and plugins for multimedia and Java support out of the box.
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Linux Deepin is one of the most active Linux distributions in China. The developers of LD endeavour to provide its users with an operating system of high stability and efficiency, in order to fulfil our goal to “Keep newbies free from pain and save time for the experts”. With the efforts from both the community and the company that work behind the project, LD is becoming easier to use every day. We would like to say thanks to all of you who join us and support us. Please follow our blog ( http://planet.linuxdeepin.com ). Linux Deepin is released twice a year. Last major release was Linux Deepin 11.12.
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Red Hat Family
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There’s no foolproof way to know the future for Red Hat (NYS: RHT) or any other company. However, certain clues may help you see potential stumbles before they happen — and before your stock craters as a result.
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Fedora
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There are two Linux distributions which get the attention of a wide Linux-related community with enviable periodicity. Financially stable companies support both these distributions, and they are always on the peak of innovation. These are Ubuntu and Fedora.
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Debian Family
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The DebConf 12 developer summit ended on Saturday in Managua. Here is a recap of the prominent Debian Linux and open-source discussions that took place in Nicaragua’s capitol for the past week.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Valve has a working version of Steam and Left for Dead 2 on Ubuntu. The software company revealed this on a new blog about its efforts to bring its popular online game distribution platform to Linux.
This official announcement confirms months of speculation about Valve’s Linux development plans. In fact, Phoronix first broke the news in 2010, but it seems that it’s only recently that there was enough reason to believe that Valve was serious.
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Jonathan Riddell, who has been working on the Kubuntu for the last 7 years as its sole paid developer, announced back in February that Canonical would no longer provide financial support for Kubuntu after the release of Kubuntu 12.04.
And article on OMGUbuntu! explains further that the decision boils down to business. Riddell in the Kubuntu article above did say, “it has not taken over the world commercially and shows no immediate signs of doing so…”
While this shake up does not spell the end of Kubuntu it does shift the way it is supported. Canonical will, from Kubuntu 12.10 onwards, provide backing for the KDE flavour in the same way as it does Xubuntu, Edbuntu, and Lubuntu – with infrastructure and resources rather than money.
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Like Ubuntu’s Unity interface? Great. If not, you can easily change it to look and act like Ubuntu used to. This tutorial shows how.
I won’t debate whether Unity is an improvement. This article is simply a “How To” for those who want to alter it.
We’ll start by customizing Unity. We’ll add and delete icons from the applications Launcher on the left-hand side of the screen, then we’ll add icons and folders to the desktop. I’ll introduce some Unity tweaking tools.
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These articles are first and foremost meant for beginners in Ubuntu world and open source in general. That doesn’t mean that others, who are already very well involved in both the worlds, are forbidden to read. All of you are very welcome with your suggestions/ideas what could be better.
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Flavours and Variants
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Funduntu 2012.3 is somewhat unique among Linux distributions. While you find many Debian and Ubuntu spins and forks you do not find as many Red Hat spins and forks that are user friendly, and more, optimized for laptops and netbooks.
It seems not only optimized for netbooks and laptops, it is also very “Google friendly” having the Chromium browser, the Gmail application on the dock, and only having Google Docs for a word processor. I get this as Fuduntu is a distribution aimed at being light weight, and I credit the developers for having updated versions of Firefox, Thunderbird, and LibreOffice in the repository.
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The goal of the Raspberry Pi Foundation in releasing limited quantities of the Raspberry Pi was to accelerate the development of software for the machine before targeting schools. It seems to be working, and anyone lucky enough to have received their Raspberry Pi will soon be enjoying a much faster operating system.
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You might have heard of the Raspberry Pi, or the Cotton Candy, or the Snowball. Those are, besides nice pi, candy and snow, also small Linux pc’s. Most of them have an ARM chip, a small amount of memory and run some for of Linux.
This page will provide an overview of what is on the market, specs, an image, and links to the boards. It is probably not complete, and if I forgot one, please leave a comment. I think I’ll be doing another overview at the end of the year.
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As we’ve noted recently, when it comes to the top open source stories of 2012, it’s clear that one of the biggest is the proliferation of tiny, inexpensive Linux-based computers at some of the smallest form factors ever seen. And, the diminutive, credit card-sized Raspberry Pi (shown at left), priced at $25 and $35, is one of the most widely followed of these miniature systems. Now, the folks behind Raspberry Pi have announced that strict sales restrictions on the devices have been lifted.
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When it comes to the types of products and stories I cover, I’m rarely the most popular guy in the office. When Apple released all its new MacBooks several weeks ago, we had marketing folks streaming into the lab to get a glimpse. The CEO reportedly came by to try out the Windows 8 touchscreen PC we had set up. And it probably goes without saying that the phone, tablet, and camera guys around here get a lot more love than I do. Sadly, video cards, solid-state drives, motherboards, CPUs, and the like are all seen as too geeky, too user-unfriendly for the masses of my colleagues, so they usually leave me alone until some rare news happening forces them to remember I exist for a few hours.
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The sudden popularity of mini-board systems like Raspberry Pi have brought back the pioneering spirit of Linux’ early days. But will it bring a much-needed resurgence in programming and development?
I have yet to get a Raspberry Pi unit for myself, nor do I think I will get one anytime soon. For one, I already have a nice mobile Linux laptop, currently running Ubuntu 12.04, so my Linux needs are quite well handled by that.
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The success of the Raspberry Pi has inspired a Korean firm to publish details of a new and more powerful version of the same ARM-based Linux computer-on-a-board concept, the ODROID-X.
Marketed as a US $129 ($162) development board, the higher price of Hardkernel’s ODROID-X offers a taste of what the Raspberry Pi itself might one day turn into.
At its heart is Samsung’s powerful Exynos4412 Cortex-A9 Quad Core running at1.4Ghz (also used in the Samsung SIII smartphone), enough grunt to run Ubuntu 12.04 as well as Android 4.04 on the 1GB of onboard RAM.
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Phones
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Android
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Google officially unveiled its next-generation Android mobile OS, v4.1 Jelly Bean, in June at its annual I/O developer conference. The brand new software is currently only officially available for two devices, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphone and Google’s brand new Nexus 7 tablet—check out a Nexus 7 hands-on here—but Jelly Bean should make its way to the bulk of new Android devices in the coming months, starting with the Samsung Galaxy S III and Motorola XOOM tablet.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Tablet prices are dropping in the US with Samsung’s 7-inch Galaxy Tab now priced at US$219 from US$399 in various stores such as Wal-Mart and Best Buy along with white-brand tablets that are on sale for as low as US$59.
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A core dilemma for IT today is how to properly protect the organizations’ information systems and assets given security tools often seem like a black hole sucking down both time and money. But a strong defense doesn’t have to be expensive, and a good place to start is assessing what information is publicly available and figuring out how to safeguard it from attack.
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Meet David A. Wheeler. He’s a Research Staff Member for the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) and a well-known speaker, author, and expert on open source software and security. He helped develop the Department of Defense’s open source software policy and FAQ and has written other guidance materials to help people understand how to use and collaboratively develop open source software in government. He has a Ph.D. in Information Technology, an M.S. in Computer Science, and a B.S. in Electronics Engineering. We hope you enjoy getting to know David.
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This past week, Google open sourced the code for the animated Turing Machine logic puzzle it posted to its homepage in celebration of the computing pioneer’s centenary. Turning would have been 100 on June 23rd, and one of his most famous creations was Turning Machine, which exhibited some of the fundamental concepts that underpin today’s computers.
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Miro is a free and open source music player, video player, media converter, internet tv application, podcast organizer, downloader and generally a feature-rich multimedia playing, organizing and synchronizing application.
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Events
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From August 21. to 26. there is Campus Party in Berlin. I was asked beforeif I can make suggestions for good speakers from the Free Software community.That is what I did. So beside the already announced keynote speakers like Jon “maddog” Hall, MarkSurman (Mozilla Foundation), and Rainey Reitman (EFF) to following talks will take place in the Free Software track…
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Mozilla
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Sometimes it is the little things that are worth talking about. When you enter a phrase or word in Firefox’s address bar, you receive a listing with suggestions in a menu that opens up automatically. Depending on your configuration of the feature, you may see history items or bookmarks listed in the window. We have previously detailed how you can modify the Firefox address bar so that nothing, only bookmarks or history items, or both are displayed in it. Privacy is one reason why you may want to modify the settings but there are others, for instance to load bookmarks faster in the browser by only displaying bookmarks in the results.
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“Thunderbird does everything I want it to do right now,” said Google+ blogger Kevin O’Brien. “I grant that someone out there probably wants it to become a feed reader, a floor polish, and a dessert topping, but I’m fine with it just the way it is. If they just keep up the security patches (which they say they will do), I am fine with it.”
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For years, Ubuntu’s default email client was Evolution. Then, last year, Canonical switched to Mozilla Thunderbird. But now recent doubts over the future of Thunderbird — most of them pretty speculative — have spawned worries that Thunderbird might, in its turn, disappear from Ubuntu. Will it? And more importantly, would it really matter to many people? Here are some thoughts.
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SaaS
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Databases
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One could write thousands of pages about all the features PostgreSQL offers. Instead, let’s take a look at five features that are particularly interesting and find out where PostgreSQL sits in relation to other open source and proprietary database systems. PostgreSQL has a lot more to offer than might be immediately obvious.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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BSD
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As the founder of PC-BSD, what can you tell us about your decision to start this project? How did you get involved with BSD systems, and what drove you into creating one?
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Project Releases
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Version 1.10.0 of the Firebug web development tool has been released with several new features, such as a cookie manager and support for syntax highlighting. The major update to the open source web debugger is now compatible with the current stable Firefox 13 release as well as the Beta (14), Aurora (15) and Nightly (16) branches. It no longer requires the browser to be restarted upon installation; however, users upgrading from version1.9 will need to restart.
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Following the recent release of GParted 0.13.0, there has been a new release of the project’s own GParted Live distribution, as well as one from the Parted Magic developer. GParted Live 0.13.0-1 includes several important, and in one case long-awaited, bug fixes and Parted Magic 2012_07_13 has been updated with new packages and an improved icon theme.
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Public Services/Government
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There is a natural tendency to concentrate on what is happening locally, and so most of the stories here on Open Enterprise are about what’s happening in the UK, or developments that affect it directly. But it’s important to remember that open source is a global development, and that things are bubbling away everywhere, all the time.
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Openness/Sharing
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I first encountered 3-D printing in Cory Doctorow’s Makers, a science fiction novel set in the wake of economic armageddon. In Doctorow’s imagined near-future world, hulking industrial bulwarks are doomed. Malls are deserted. But garages are alight with innovative activity, as heroic, entrepreneurial inventor-doers concoct new gizmos by repurposing abandoned commodities.
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Open Access/Content
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ICT can bring greater openness: regular readers will know how committed I am to delivering those benefits for everyone. Today, some exciting news about how we are also helping open up science, and a reminder of the benefits it can bring.
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Radical shakeup of academic publishing will allow papers to be put online and be accessed by universities, firms and individuals
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Programming
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Andreessen Horowitz announced a whopping $100 million investment in GitHub this week. You can read commentary and speculation all over the web about what GitHub will do with the money, whether this was a good investment for Andreessen Horowitz and whether taking such a large investment is a good thing for GitHub.
But what the heck is GitHub and why are developers so excited about it? You may have heard that GitHub is a code sharing and publishing service, or that it’s a social networking site for programmers. Both statements are true, but neither explain exactly why GitHub is special.
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Security
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While the fruity cargo cult Apple advertises that its systems are totally secure, it is fighting a losing a battle with a Russian hacker who appears to be having a laugh.
Alexey Borodin published a video on YouTube showing users how they could avoid paying for in-app purchases without even having to gain root access to the system.
The method is actually simple. All you need to do is install two security certificates and change the DNS settings on their device.
Borodin claimed that more than 30,000 illegal in-app purchases have taken place since he told the world+dog about the hack.
The Russian seems to have a beef with the business model which offers you free software but insists you pay out for new features.
Read more: http://news.techeye.net/security/apple-losing-battle-with-hacker#ixzz20t3bbriH
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Finance
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THE business deal from hell began to crumble even before the Champagne corks were popped.
The deal, the $580 million sale of a highflying technology company, Dragon Systems, had just been approved by its board and congratulations were being exchanged. But even then, at that moment of celebration, there was a sense that something was amiss.
The chief executive of Dragon had received a congratulatory bottle from the investment bankers representing the acquiring company, a Belgian competitor called Lernout & Hauspie. But he hadn’t heard from Dragon’s own bankers at Goldman Sachs.
“I still have not received anything from Goldman,” the executive wrote in an e-mail to the other bank. “Do they know something I should know?”
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Former Goldman Sachs board member Rajat Gupta lived the American Dream before being led astray by a wealthy friend who was a master at insider trading.
That was the view of two jurors who on Friday voted with 10 others to convict Gupta of three counts of securities fraud and one count of conspiracy for sharing corporate secrets with hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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In a backward leap of anti-Copernican proportions, North Carolina’s state legislature recently passed what may be the nation’s first state-wide global warming denial legislation.
The legislature on July 2 effectively nullified the state’s own science panel’s report predicting a 20 to 55-inch rise in sea level. The statehouse also commanded scientists to wait until July 1, 2016, to make their next report (and only after it is approved/scrubbed by the powers that be).
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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This week, I made a parody music video criticising Lord Finesse for being a copyright draconian. Guess what. He had my video pulled down, claiming it infringed his copyright. Which proves my point more than anything I could have said myself. Techdirt has written an article on the issue here.
Anyway, in response to that, I got my Michael Moore on and have made this video. Ridiculously, I have had to avoid showing you any segment of the censored video, or of the song which I am discussing, for fear that Finesse will try to have THIS video removed too. With that in mind, please mirror and share as much as possible in case this one gets hit with a take-down as well.
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07.15.12
Posted in News Roundup at 6:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Little Linux computers have attracted a lot of interest from hobbyists this year. The $35 Raspberry Pi ARM board, which met with huge demand when it launched in February, is a compelling solution for affordable embedded projects. But what if you need more power than the 700MHz ARM11 board can offer?
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Desktop Linux will be ready for the masses, the old adage goes, when your grandma can use it — which is arguably not yet the case. If the WOW! Computer is any indication, though, Linux’s time has come. At least, that’s what the machine’s engineers, who have used open source software to develop a computer specially targeted at the senior population, seem to think.
I generally am skeptical of products and services that needlessly embed punctuation marks into their names. Yahoo! is bad enough. But obnoxious appellations aside, the WOW! — which is identical in form and price to the Telikin Elite, although the WOW! is marketed separately by partner company FirstStreet — represent an intriguing concept, particularly for the open source channel.
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What’s value of linux being modular if it needs so many duplicate and different versions of the same libraries.
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Desktop
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Google is establishing some “zones” in Best Buy and a few other outlets, buy it may end up being compelled to follow Apple and Microsoft with a chain of retail stores worldwide.
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Kernel Space
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Entangle allows for tethered camera control and capturing from most Nikon and Canon DSLR cameras under Linux. The camera’s shutter can be triggered from the open-source program on Linux, there’s support for live previews, automatic downloading and display of photos, and controlling of all camera settings from the computer. Basically you can remotely control the camera’s setting and proceed to take photos via the camera’s USB connection. This software is licensed under the GNU GPLv3+ and is built atop libgphoto, so it’s a bit catered towards GNOME.
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The kernel now better isolates containers and suspicious code. Event logging has been optimised and two important Android functions were merged.
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Every time you boot a CD or DVD, thank Peter Anvin for making it possible. And, as a key Linux contributor that’s not all Peter has done in his long Linux career.
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Graphics Stack
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Following yesterday’s article about Radeon Gallium3D HyperZ support defeating open-source developers, Jerome Glisse has clarified the situation after trying to make this code work properly for more than a half-year.
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The xf86-video-intel driver, the open-source X.Org driver for Intel’s graphics processors on Linux, is now being built with Sandy Bridge New Acceleration (SNA acceleration) by default. This means of acceleration is generally much faster than the long-standing UXA mode for both old and new hardware.
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The xf86-video-intel driver, the open-source X.Org driver for Intel’s graphics processors on Linux, is now being built with Sandy Bridge New Acceleration (SNA acceleration) by default. This means of acceleration is generally much faster than the long-standing UXA mode for both old and new hardware.
Chris Wilson enabled the compilation of SNA by default in a Git commit this afternoon. While that’s happened, it’s not being used by default. The SNA support and the different generational SNA back-ends are being compiled and built into the driver, but for now at least, it requires setting the AccelMethod within the xorg.conf to SNA rather than UXA or GLAMOR.
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Jerome Glisse has published a new patch to enable HyperZ support for the AMD Radeon (R600g) Gallium3D driver. While this patch could be pushed to Mesa, it’s not being enabled by default as it’s still causing some GPU lock-ups and developers can’t seem to figure out the cause. Jerome is now moving onto other work.
A message hit the Mesa development mailing list today entitled r600g: hyperz, from veteran open-source ATI/AMD contributor Jerome Glisse of Red Hat. He’s posted a new R600g HyperZ patch, but it looks like it might be his last.
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NVIDIA released the 304.22 Linux x86/x86_64 graphics driver beta this morning, which has a number of new features and fixes. There’s 27 official changes to be exact.
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Applications
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Synfig Studio is a free and open-source 2D animation software, designed as powerful industrial-strength solution for creating film-quality animation using a vector and bitmap artwork. It eliminates the need to create animation frame-by frame, allowing you to produce 2D animation of a higher quality with fewer people and resources.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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In Managua this morning, the Debian game team presented a BoF described as “Fun and games are an essential part of any operating system and the games team aims to bring these to Debian and our users. This BoF aims to help achieve that. Come meet the games team, discuss our past, present, plans and future directions.”
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With Valve Software’s ambitious plans for Linux, they have just picked up another Linux development all-star. Their latest hire has been working on Linux games for more than a decade, is a former Loki Software developer, and he’s the creator of SDL.
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On the same day as announcing he’s joining Valve Software, Sam Lantinga announced that it’s time to unleash Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) 2.0 on the masses.
The latest Valve hire looks like he’ll still be leading SDL’s development while working for the Bellevue company. In his latest mailing list thread entitled SDL 2.0 blockers?, he shared, “I talked with Ryan [Gordon] and Gabriel and we all agree that it’s time to unleash SDL 2.0 on the masses. Before we do that I want to get as many blocking issues resolved as soon as possible. The timing on this is interesting, because my computer is on a truck, but I think if we get the hot issues known publicly, then we’ll be able to get them fixed more quickly and folks on the list can help bang them out.”
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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KDE was represented at the SouthEast LinuxFest again this year with a booth showing off our latest software. The Calligra Suite, Kontact, Telepathy, and Plasma Workspaces were featured. Krita particularly intrigued many people. As a result, many copies of the Comics with Krita training DVD were handed out along with the accompanying comic book, Wasted Mutants and Wisdom Mountain.
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The next major update to the open source K Desktop Environment is on schedule: the KDE developers have published the second and final release candidate for version 4.9.0 of the KDE Software Compilation (KDE SC). Aimed at developers and testers, KDE 4.9 RC2 already includes all of the planned enhancements and feature changes; as expected at this stage, the developers have focused on “further polishing”, as well as finding and fixing any last minute bugs.
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KDE just lost support for tiling windows with the feature being removed from the KWin window manager code-base.
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The KDE Project announced a few minutes ago, July 11th, that the second and last Release Candidate of the upcoming KDE Software Compilation 4.9 desktop environment is available for download and testing.
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GNOME Desktop
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The Gnome developers are working on a DBus daemon that will keep you safe from phishing and malware infected sites. Yann Soubeyrand, a developer working on this daemon as his GsoC project, said that the main goal of this daemon is to “ add a way to advertise the user about possible tentative of phishing when browsing”.
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Having been a user of Zorin 5 up until recently I decided last weekend to download a copy of Zorin 6 and tonight I decided to install it. (Well my wife is watching Geordie Shore, what else am I to do?).
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New Releases
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Finnix is a small, self-contained, bootable Linux CD distribution for system administrators, based on Debian testing.
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Gentoo Family
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I gave an introductory talk on Gentoo at a local BarCamp called MinneBar a couple of months back, and the videos were just posted online. The sound isn’t perfect but it’s perfectly understandable. Oddly, this is the first time I’ve ever given a formal talk on Gentoo in nearly 10 years of working on it.
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Red Hat Family
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The Delhi High Court has restrained a local IT service provider from using the trademark ‘Red Hat’ as their corporate name after Red Hat Inc., world’s leading open source software company, filed a trademark infringement suit.
Justice Manmohan Singh directed Red Hat Infocom Private Limited to stop using the trademark. The court ordered the company to change the mark ‘Red Hat’ by 31 December 2012.
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Debian Family
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Debian GNU/Linux 7.0 is definitely on its way. It still may be months and months from release, but another major decision is in the can. We learned recently that the initial freeze has begun and now Wheezy has its theme.
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Earlier this week at DebConf there was a discussion about Debian derivatives so that Debian’s offspring could share their experiences and also for the Debian developers to share various derivative-related initiatives. Some friction between Debian and distributions based upon it (namely Ubuntu) were exposed.
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For those not aware. Emdebian is a smaller, lighter flavor of Debian Linux intended for use on embedded devices. At DebConf this week they talked a bit about this initiative.
Emdebian is essentially Debian but a binary distribution for embedded hardware where limited RAM and disk space are critical. Embdebian works with regular Debian tools but effectively re-works upstream Debian so that the packages are smaller by taking greater control over package dependencies, included files/content, and other tweaks.
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Besides Android as the dominant Linux-based mobile platform, Ubuntu, Tizen, Maemo/MeeGo, webOS, Firefox OS, and various other Linux platforms have aspired to compete in the mobile space. In addition, Debian wants to remain relevant in the mobile space.
On the last day of DebConf 12 in Managua, Nicaragua, there was a mobile session this morning. The purpose of the session was how to “keep Debian relevant for mobile devices.”
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Debian developers are looking forward to work with Ubuntu, as reported by Phoronix. This topic was brought up in DebConf this year.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu has come a long way in these 8-9 years. The Linux-based distribution which started in 2004 has created a unique identity of its own which sets it apart from the ‘traditional’ and often negative image of Linux distributions.
I was talking to a new friend the other day and when I mentioned Linux he said “I tried it in 2006 and it was very hard to use. All those command lines and things.” He never tried it again. Unfortunately people still carry that impression of Linux, even in 2012. I showed him my Ubuntu desktop and his remark was : “Is this Linux?”
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According to reports the company is in talks with Canonical to join their OEM program. Niam Computers are aiming to sell 500 desktops and 1000 laptops powered by Ubuntu in the financial year 2012.
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Canonical announced yesterday, July 11th, on the Ubuntu One blog that they will completely remove support for Facebook from the Ubuntu One cloud storage.
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Fans of Ubuntu Linux may recall a project launched by Dell back in May to create an Ubuntu-loaded laptop specifically for developers.
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Flavours and Variants
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A thriving home-brew community is already putting the credit card-sized PC to use in drones and robots. The device’s designer, Eben Upton, wants to see it in rockets and satellites, too
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The Raspberry Pi is a dirt cheap mini-computer with a Broadcom BCM2835 700 MHz ARM11 with Broadcom VideoCore graphics. A basic model with 2 USB ports, HDMI and Ethernet sells for about $35, and the developers plan to offer an even cheaper $25 model without Ethernet soon.
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Owing to its low cost, Raspberry Pi has become extremely popular among developers and enthusiasts. Arthur Amarra aka Algorhythmic has created a voice controlled robotic arm powered by Raspberry Pi, Debian and open source software.
Arthur says, “Due to its small size and low power requirements, the Raspberry Pi is an excellent platform for the Julius open-source speech recognition system. This opens up almost limitless possibilities for voice command applications.”
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Although most people consider the Raspberry Pi to be a lightweight desktop computer, the small form factor device can also function as an embedded system to take on tasks such as performing metering, control or regulatory functions. Developer Arthur Amarra, who also goes by the name of Algorhythmic, has written a blog posting describing how he used a Raspberry Pi as a voice control system for a robot arm.
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Phones
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Android
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HTC was quick on the draw with quad-core smartphones, getting its One X to market well in advance of Samsung and LG’s quad-core entries. Since then, we’ve seen models like the Droid Incredible 4G LTE arrive, but nothing really up there on the same level as the One X. Well, HTC may be planning to one-up itself with its model PM63100, revealed through some benchmark figures and sporting some decent hardware.
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Ouya is a new Android open source video game console, developed through ingenious research and sponsorship from Kickstarter donors who like the idea of indie game development.
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The Boeing 787 Dreamliner is the most-anticipated wide-bodied jet of all time: Boeing has taken a total of 859 orders since 2004, and so far it has only delivered 14 planes. By end of 2013 it intends to ramp up production to 10 units per month, but even then, most customers still have a wait time of between 5 and 10 years. This isn’t a story about the Dreamliner’s composite body, or the fact that it uses 20% less fuel than a 767, though: Inside all 859 of those planes, each and every seat will be outfitted with an Android-powered entertainment system.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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The Taiwanese firm predominantly makes smartphones but a spokesperson for HTC told PC Advisor a tablet will ‘definitely’ arrive. It’s not clear when this will happen but it will be the first tablet from HTC to launch in the UK since May last year.
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Patrick Gray, writing in TechRepublic, has some theories about why open source computing has yet to live up to some expectations. In the abstract, people may love the idea of the openness and freedom in technology. In practice, however, “vendors and consumers alike voted with their wallets for closed systems.” He cites the appeal of Microsoft, Apple and Amazon.
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France-based e-commerce platform provider PrestaShop seeks to expand in the U.S. Having opened a Miami office in 2011, it provides software for about 6,000 U.S. e-commerce stores—roughly six times as many as last year.
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The web hosting review site Top-Cheap-Web-Hosting.com announced the best Ruby on Rails hosting provider for 2012, based on ruby on rails hosting features, loading speed, reliability, technical support and price.
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The first 30 minutes of the workshop will present an overall of goals of the foundation, the philosophy and advantages of open source software and how it hall be implemented in Fiji.
“Linux has the same features of operating systems such as Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh,” said SFF President, Mr Kush Singh.
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Samsung, in an apparent attempt to encourage hackers and developers and trying to give them a head start with the ongoing roll out of the OTA updates, have released the source codes of the Sprint Epic and AT&T’s Skyrocket on their download pages. The updates are available currently on their download pages for anyone interested.
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Although it’s popular these days to pooh-pooh the advertising-supported, for-profit SourceForge in favor of GitHub, the SourceForge folks want to remind you that the forge still hosts more than 300,000 projects and serves up a good 4 million downloads a day.
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There are a number of reasons why a closed-source project is turned into an Open Source project by its parent company or developer. Among them lack of interest by the parent company or developer, a drop in popularity, not enough resources to continue development, having been bought by another company, or a change of hearts. It is not really clear from the announcement why Digsby is going down the Open Source route but judging from the frequency of blog posts on the official site, it could be a bit of everything sans the being bought by another company part.
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There’s a very exciting open-source announcement coming soon that will please an increasing number of ARM Linux users and fans of open-source graphics drivers.
This forthcoming announcement, which isn’t being detailed yet but will be yet another Linux graphics exclusive for Phoronix the near future, is something entirely different from the other recent open-source ARM Linux graphics advancements. As something until then. let’s recap the existing open-source ARM graphics activities:
- The Lima driver project that’s sponsored by Codethink and led by Luc Verhaegen as a reverse-engineered open-source ARM Mali graphics driver. Here’s the latest update on Lima from LinuxTag Berlin back in May.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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A normal web user may login and use to tens to hundreds of sites everyday. This is a hectic task and also one may remain in doubt as how his/her data is being used in each of these networks. To simplify this login system and to give users better control over their data, Mozilla has introduced a new product in the market, Persona.
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In early February of last year, we noted that for the very first time, Mozilla had pledged to move to a rapid release cycle for the popular Firefox browser. “Can’t wait,” responded one reader. It was clear at the time that Mozilla was making the move to better respond to competition from Google Chrome, which was already on its own rapid release cycle.
Fast-forward to today, and Chrome’s market share is about equal to or possiby greater than Firefox’s, depending on whose numbers you believe. And, Mozilla has had to wrestle with problems related to its rapid release cycle. Now, one former Firefox developer is saying that Firefox’s woes can be blamed on the cycle itself.
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With the announcement that version 0.3 of Mozilla’s Rust has been released, the alternate procedural, concurrent, OO and functional style is continuing its rapid evolution. Designed as a safe alternative to C or C++, as it is being developed, Rust is being used to create an experimental parallel browser called Servo. Version 0.1 of Rust was introduced in January 2012 after being created as a side project by Graydon Hoare in 2006 and revealed to the world in 2010. Version 0.3 includes over 1,900 changes from April’s version 0.2, as the developers work through the roadmap that will lead to a 1.0 release of the language.
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SaaS
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Large enterprises are putting a lot of money and effort into making sure they have the latest and greatest in Hadoop and other big data infrastructure tools, but it turns out their IT teams are far from prepared to actually use those tools once they are in place.
That’s one observation from Jeremy Howard, president and chief scientist of Kaggle, which uses crowdsourcing techniques to provide statistical and data analytic services for clients.
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Databases
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Other open source databases may have more name recognition, but PostgreSQL is seeing strong growth — as is the company EnterpriseDB, which helped develop it
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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For some interesting benchmarks to share before the start of the weekend, here’s some recent test results conducted at Phoronix that’s comparing Oracle Solaris 11 Express, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, CentOS 6.2, Debian GNU/kFreeBSD Wheezy, and Fedora 17.
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CMS
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Drupal is possibly one of the most popular open-source CMS in the world, and probably one of the largest free software community with over 800,000 members. During the last year, the Drupal business has experienced exceptional growth, both financially and socially.
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Healthcare
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At the healthcare track, this year we will be sharing the latest news and upcoming plans for OSEHRA, the Open Source Electronic Health Records Agent.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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There’s a proposal within the GCC development camp to change the CFLAGS under which the GNU Compiler Collection is built when in a release mode.
Dimitrios Apostolou proposed on Wednesday to the GCC development list Change default BOOT_CFLAGS for release builds.
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Public Services/Government
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Public administrations in the Italian region of Calabria should increase their use of free and open source software, says Emilio De Masi, regional president for the IdV party (Italia dei Valori, Italy of Values). He drafted a law to encourage the use of this type of software.
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The IT department of the Finnish city of Tampere will try out OpenOffice, a free and open source office suite. The free suite of office productivity tools will be installed alongside the proprietary office suite currently used by the city staff. The IT department warns against high expectations.
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Openness/Sharing
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It’s one thing to like open source, but it’s another thing to live open source. Sam Muirhead, a 28-year old filmmaker who lives in Berlin, is making headlines for an unusual pledge he has made: He has sworn that beginning August 1st, he will spend one year living totally open source. And he doesn’t just mean he will use open source technology. He means that his beer, the paper he uses–everything he uses–will be open source.
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Standards/Consortia
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I am not an accountant. However, as a Graham and Dodd value investor over the years, I’ve picked up some of the fundamental principles. A key one is the Matching Principle, that revenues and expenses should be booked in a way that clarifies the underlying business performance, rather than based purely on the timing of cash transactions. In some cases this requires the use of special accounts, for things like depreciation, where the lifetime of a fixed asset (say factory machinery) extends beyond a single revenue cycle.
A similar technique is used when dealing with deferred expenses. For example take the case of a nuclear power plant. A plant has a useful lifetime, but when that end date arrives there is a clean up cost. The property is not immediately usable for other purposes, but must undergo an expensive remediation. From an accounting perspective there is an asset retirement obligation, a form of deferred expense. This deferred expense is recognized on the books as a liability based on the present value of the expected clean up cost, which is then depreciated.
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If you are a Google plus use, there are two things you would be most annoyed about. One is there is no way to see the private messages sent to you if you plan to respond to them two days later. Second is the new Google+ Event. I was bombarded by the event invite the moment it was announced.
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Oracle turned its attention away from its Android patent fight with Google on Monday to battle Hewlett-Packard over Oracle’s decision to stop making new versions of database software that works with HP’s Itanium-based servers.
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Security
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Finance
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Andrew Williams, a former spokesman for Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, is headed to Goldman Sachs at the end of July, the Financial Times reports. That’s only increased the speculation that Geithner may head to Goldman next year.
Williams, currently director of media relations at General Electric, is the second of Geithner’s top spokesmen to decamp to Goldman. Richard “Jake” Siewert, also a former spokesman for Geithner, left the Treasury Department a few months ago to lead Goldman Sachs’ public relations department.
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Starting tomorrow banks will begin to tell investors how they did in the second three months of 2012. Overall, the indications are that the quarter will be a disappointment. But, surprisingly, Goldman Sachs (GS) may emerge as the biggest loser. Expectations for the once-vaunted investment bank have fallen more than rivals.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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When Idaho state legislators proposed a seemingly uncontroversial bill to ban access to commercial tanning beds by minors earlier this year, IdahoReporter.com took up the issue with force.
The state news website, an affiliate of the conservative Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity and overseen by the free market Idaho Freedom Foundation, posted six stories on the proposal between Feb. 16 and March 22, when the bill was voted down in a state Senate Committee.
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In the vast ecosystem of corporate shills, which one is the most effective? Propaganda works best when it is not perceived as propaganda: nuance, obfuscation, distraction, suggestion, the subtle introduction of doubt—these are more effective in the long run than shotgun blasts of lies. The master of this approach is Malcolm Gladwell.
Malcolm Gladwell is the New Yorker’s leading essayist and bestselling author. Time magazine named Gladwell one of the world’s 100 most influential people. His books sell copies in the millions, and he is in hot demand as one of the nation’s top public intellectual and pop gurus. Gladwell plays his role as a disinterested public intellectual like few others, right down to the frizzy hairdo and smock-y getups. His political aloofness, high-brow contrarianism and constant challenges to “popular wisdom” are all part of his shtick.
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DRM
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There was some surprise in the comments of yesterday’s post over the fact that the United Kingdom has effectively outlawed encryption: the UK will send its citizens to jail for up to five years if they cannot produce the key to an encrypted data set.
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07.12.12
Posted in News Roundup at 8:05 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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This year has already been a notable one on many technological fronts, but certainly one of the more exciting ones among them is the Linux-powered revolution that’s taking place in personal computing.
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If you kick in $35 to help get them get funded, in November they’ll send you a cool looking 8 Gig flash drive with their 200 megabytes of Jumpshot tools installed. Users boot their computer to the flash drive, and it launches a customized version of Linux, which connects with a Jumpshot internet service and proceeds to open a browser interface while it scans the computer’s hard drive for viruses crapware and signs of misconfiguration.
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ThreeGates today confirmed that it will be offering a Linux version of Legneds of Aethereus, its action RPG game currently in production. The game project has nine days left to raise the remaing funds and reach the $25,000 funding goal on Kickstarter. Other recent updates include a confirmed version for Macintosh, new digital rewards, a DRM-free version and more. To support the project, please visit: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/460738485/1886583818
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Kernel Space
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For those interested in reverse-engineering USB keyboards (or other input devices), there’s a short yet effective guide by Julien Danjour for reverse-engineering a Logitech keyboard in order to provide Linux support.
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Graphics Stack
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It looks like, thanks in part to an existing shoddy EXA 2D acceleration implementation, that the GLAMOR-based Radeon acceleration support for xf86-video-ati may work out quite well.
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On supported hardware/drivers — like Mesa 8.0 — the OpenGL support is basically limited to OpenGL 3.0 compliance. There’s some new OpenGL extensions now supported by this upcoming Mesa release, but it doesn’t meet the specification for GL3.1 or any newer revision. OpenGL 3.1 won’t be in Mesa until 2013 and there’s no realistic idea yet when OpenGL 3.2/3.3/4.0/4.1/4.2 (or any further OpenGL spec or the soon-to-be-released OpenGL ES 3.0) will be supported for this critical free software project.
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Applications
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NitroShare is an application that works on Linux and Windows which can be used to easily send files to other computers on the same local network. It supports drag’n’drop, sending folders, file compression, comes with Nautilus integration and more.
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Open Recall is a space on The H for those things that are too small to package as news but are worth the linkage. Open Recall collates the interesting stories that didn’t quite make the cut. This edition is all about new apps for the Linux desktop.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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GNOME Desktop
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While the GNOME 3.x Shell is working its way around to most major Linux distributions, within the BSD world, it’s still mostly a GNOME 2.30 world.
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New Releases
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Anne Nicolas broke the sad news yesterday of the passing of former Mandriva developer, Eugeni Dodonov. Dodonov died Sunday in route to the hospital after being found unconscious in the middle of the road. He was 31.
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The decision taken by Mandriva SA, the French company that produces the Mandriva GNU/Linux distribution, to base its workstation and server products on two different codebases is a pragmatic one, based on the state of the two codebases.
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Red Hat Family
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The Open Source solutions provider announced the availability of Red Hat Storage Server 2.0, an open source storage scalable solution designed to manage unstructured data.
Red Hat Storage Server 2.0 is the first system to combine the innovations of the open source community and the benefits of capacity and cost effectiveness of standard x86 servers built on-premises hybrid cloud environments.
It helps to store larger data volumes within a single pool. This unified storage of files and objects simplifies the management of disparate data and gives users all the performance and scalability to cope with the explosive growth of unstructured data in an economical manner, with the assurance of centralized access to information.
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Debian Family
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When it comes to top open source stories of 2012, it’s clear that one of the biggest is the proliferation of tiny, inexpensive Linux-based computers at some of the smallest form factors ever seen. The $25 Linux computer dubbed Raspberry Pi (shown here) has grabbed many headlines on this front, and Google Chairman Eric Schmidt recently pledged to give some of the units to U.K. schools along with training for teachers who can pass on Linux knowledge to kids. But the Raspberry Pi is only one of many tiny LInux computers being heralded as part of a new “Linux punk ethic.” Now others are showing up? Have you heard of the Oval Elephant?
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Phones
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Amazon.com Inc. is working with component suppliers in Asia to test a smartphone, people familiar with the situation said, suggesting that the Internet retail giant, which sells the Kindle Fire tablet computers, is considering broadening its mobile-device offerings.
Officials at some of Amazon’s parts suppliers, who declined to be named, said the Seattle-based company is testing a smartphone and mass production of the new device may start late this year or early next year.
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Android
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Android: now four out of five phones in Spain http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/mobile-phones/9392178/Android-now-four-out-of-five-phones-in-Spain.html #linux #android
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on{X} uses the term “recipes” for its rules. Example recipes include turning the phone’s Bluetooth radio on when you arrive or leave a location; showing you the weather forecast everyday at a specific time if the anticipated temperature is below a set level; and texting someone when you arrive or leave a specific location. Recipes can be turned on and off at the phone.
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The entry-level 8GB version of Google’s new Nexus 7 media tablet carries a bill of materials (BOM) of US$151.75, according to preliminary findings from the IHS iSuppli Teardown Analysis Service. When manufacturing expenses are added, the cost increases to US$159.25. The high-end model with 16GB of NAND flash memory has a US$159.25 BOM, for a total cost of US$166.75.
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Reuven Cohen has an interesting post up on Forbes’ site, which asks, “Free Versus Open: Does Open Source Software Matter in the Cloud Era?” He writes: “I like open source as much as the next guy but, from a value proposition standpoint, just being ‘open source’ doesn’t sound all that compelling to me. This has become especially true in the emerging cloud computing landscape where APIs and Big Data have become some of the most valuable currencies.” In fact, though, as the transition to the cloud and Big Data continue, open source software is playing an absolutely critical role.
Cohen notes that Big Data has become one of the “most valuable currencies,” but isn’t the open source Hadoop platform–used to sift insights from extremely large data sets–one of the flagship pieces of software driving the Big Data trend? Hadoop has given rise to promising startup companies such as Hortonworks, focused on training and services surrounding it.
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There is an increasingly common refrain I keep hearing from startups. These young companies, with their generally un-original software products, claim that its solution is just like (insert the market leader) except open source. Don’t get me wrong. I like open source as much as the next guy but, from a value proposition standpoint, just being “open source” doesn’t sound all that compelling to me. This has become especially true in the emerging cloud computing landscape where APIs and Big Data have become some of the most valuable currencies.
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The business intelligence landscape is changing to accommodate broader interactivity and ease of use. This is nothing new; one of the key trends is the increase in data discovery though self-service BI models.
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Get everyone who works on open-source software together and put them in a little room in your brain. Now take a look around at what you just created. They’re smart. They come from all different countries and educational backgrounds, but it’s a stag party in there. They’re almost all men.
Now imagine arriving as a woman.
“It’s like going to a party where you know no one. That’s not a party you want to be at,” says Maírín Duffy, a blogger and senior interaction designer at Red Hat in Boston. Duffy is one of the few women who have shrugged off intimidation and walked right into the open-source community. Not many others have followed.
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Web Browsers
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SaaS
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Business
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Semi-Open Source
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The latest release of the commercial bug tracking system, JIRA 5.1, is the “fastest JIRA yet” according to its creators, Atlassian. The release notes explains that the previous “soft limit” of 200,000 issues has been removed thanks to a 40% improvement in performance; a new scaling guide provides more information.
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Funding
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A Kickstarter campaign to raise money for the launch of an open source games console based around the Tegra 3 chipset and Android operating system has surpassed its $950,000 fund raising target in less than 24 hours. At the time of writing, the project has raised $2.22 million dollars and has 28 days to go before the funding period closes. This makes it the most successful Kickstarter campaign to date.
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Public Services/Government
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The IT department of the city of Helsinki claimed in a report to the city board that migrating to OpenOffice would cost is over 21 million euros. On 10th of April 2012, FSFE filed a Freedom of Information request, asking the city how it had arrived at a surprisingly high cost estimates for running OpenOffice (now LibreOffice) on the city’s workstations. The city of Helsinki has now denied this request and has stated that it will not release any details about the calculations.
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Openness/Sharing
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According to Don Tapscott’s “Four Principles of an Open World” TED talk, we are experiencing one of the most significant times in human history. Through the Internet and other innovations, we are able to collaborate like never before, and that change is having a profound effect on society.
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Staff working on opening and closing ceremonies allowed to eat chips served outside branches of fast food chain
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Regular readers of this blog will know how central broadband targets are to our digital agenda. By 2020, I want half of all Europeans with broadband subscriptions at 100 Megabit/s or higher.
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Send this to a friend
07.11.12
Posted in News Roundup at 7:57 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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There’s been some talk recently about how we’re now beyond using the command line. Nonsense!
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Desktop
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Windows may still be the default operating system on the vast majority of mainstream PCs thanks to Microsoft’s many longstanding OEM partnerships, but that’s not to say it hasn’t been possible for some time to buy desktop machines with Linux preloaded.
No, indeed! Thanks to vendors such as System76, ZaReason, EmperorLinux and others, Linux fans have long been able to get desktops, laptops, netbooks and more preloaded with a variety of Linux distributions — and that’s not even counting several on-again, off-again efforts by Dell, Wal-Mart and others to sell Linux boxes on their retail shelves.
Over the past few months, however — coinciding, perhaps, with Windows 8′s appearance on the horizon — there have emerged some very encouraging signs that consumers’ Linux-based options are going to be increasing soon.
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Server
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The machine, called the PowerLinux 7R1, is a single-socket machine that complements the two-socket PowerLinux 7R2 rack and tower server, and the Flex System p24L half-width node for PureSystem modular servers.
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When Microsoft killed Windows Small Business Server (SBS) ahead of the Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC12), The VAR Guy wondered: Can Linux somehow invade the small business server market in a big way? After a week of thought, The VAR Guy seriously doubts it. Here’s why.
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Kernel Space
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In conjunction with a new version of X Server, Linux 3.5 will offer better support for hybrid graphics. The Radeon driver will be a bit faster and support HDMI audio transport on more graphics chips. The audio drivers will support the Xonar DGX and Creative’s SoundCore3D.
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Graphics Stack
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Now that X.Org Server 1.13 RC1 is out there with the initial support for PRIME and other exciting features, dependent projects can also now move forward.
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This week Silicon Motion fired off an email to the X.Org developers with a patch that introduces 38,463 lines of new code for their open-source Linux graphics driver.
While the patch is entitled new driver for siliconmotion, it appears to be extending the existing xf86-video-siliconmotion DDX driver as opposed to writing a new driver from scratch. The e-mail itself is a bit of a mess, but there’s a nearly 40,000 line patch that’s attached.
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Keith Packard announced earlier today, July 10th, the immediate availability for download and testing of the first Release Candidate of the upcoming XOrg Server 1.13.
The final version of XOrg Server 1.13 will be available in September, and it will have features like support for PRIME DRI2 offloading, RandR 1.5 with support for provider object, support for GLX_ARB_create_context in OpenGL 3.0, new GLX extensions, DDX driver API improvements, USB GPU hot-plugging, better GPU hybrid support, and much more.
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There’s now open-source GPU-based 2D hardware acceleration support for the AMD Radeon HD 7000 “Southern Islands” graphics cards using the xf86-video-ati driver.
This 2D acceleration for the half-year-old Radeon HD 7000 series graphics cards isn’t using traditional 2D EXA acceleration within the X.Org DDX, but the 2D is being piped over the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver using Intel’s GLAMOR.
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Just days after making a number of improvements to Mesa/Gallium3D, Marek is back this week so far with 22 patches to improve Gallium3D and specifically to benefit the AMD Radeon “R600g” graphics driver.
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Developed by a few developers, reportedly with Intel engineers, is a sliding layout effect for Weston. There are shortcuts on it above the background like launchers on the panel that can then be activated by a single click. These shortcuts can then be dragged to the trash for removing them. The layout/shortcuts can also be configured using the weston.ini configuration file.
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Applications
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While I’ve never been giddy with praise over a project-planning application, GanttProject has enough going for it for me to consider using as a regular go-to planning tool. Its user interface is structured clearly so it is easy to understand. GanttProject lets you break down a project into a tree of tasks and assign available human resources to work on each.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Rekonq, the promising KDE WebKit-powered web-browser, is nearly ready for its version 1.0 release.
One month after the Rekonq 1.0 Tech Preview release, Rekonq 1.0 Beta is now available, as mentioned on a Rekonq developer’s blog. It’s also been confirmed on the project’s mailing list.
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With the plethora of open source desktop environments available at the moment, it’s hard to keep track of all the different features sets. And since KDE, which has recently become my interface of choice, arguably enjoys less media love than alternatives such as GNOME and Unity, it seems only fair to highlight some of the feature changes in its next upcoming release, KDE 4.9. Read on for a look — and, just maybe, a few compelling reasons to give KDE a try.
To be honest, I’ve always had a bizarre uneasiness describing myself as a KDE user, a hesitancy I owe mostly to KDE developers’ obsession with inserting the letter “K” wherever possible. That’s a trait I associate with a certain producer of oversugared donuts, not to mention products such as “krazy” glue. It doesn’t make me think of quality software.
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The KDE Team have released the second release candidate of KDE 4.9 Workspaces, Apps and Development Platform. This release mainly focuses on fixing bugs and further enhancing new and old KDE components. Development of KDE API, dependencies and new features have been omitted in this release.
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GNOME Desktop
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You know this guy, right? It was hard to make a prologue for this interview because Allan talks for lots of things, but I highlight two of them. Do not compare Gnome3 with Gnome2, Gnome 3 is something completely new..
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Today we are pleased to announce the next generation of operating systems and the most advanced release of OS4 to date, OS4 12.5. OS4 12.5 has been designed from the ground up to satisfy the needs of casual PC users all the way to the professional user. It is available in 32 and 64 bit releases..
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Roberto J. Dohnert informed us a few minutes ago that the OS4 12.5 Linux operating system was made available for download for both 32-bit and 64-bit platforms.
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Following up yesterday’s article about how Enlightenment is soon to be released, we will check out what Linux distributions you should choose to enjoy this magnificent window manager + set of libraries.
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The roadmap for ROSA Desktop 2012 has been approved. ROSA Linux is a line of Linux distributions published by ROSA Laboratory, a Linux solutions provider based in Moscow, Russia. The distribution is derived from Mandriva Linux.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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The Fedora Project developers approved yesterday, July 9th, in a FESCo meeting the 256-color terminal support for their upcoming Fedora 18 operating system.
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Debian Family
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Aside from bringing up the successor to Debian 7.0 Wheezy and Debian’s plans for UEFI SecureBoot support, Debian developers in Managua also discussed on Monday the size of this next Debian release and other release plans.
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Debian developers are working towards an official armhf image for the Wheezy release and they’re also gearing up for official 64-bit ARMv8 / AArch64 support in the “Wheezy + 1″ release.
On Tuesday of this year’s DebConf in Nicaragua there were two sessions concerning the ARM architecture support within the Debian world. Both sessions were led by Steve McIntyre, the former Debian Project Leader and is currently employed by ARM Holdings out of Cambridge.
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Back in March it was shared that LLVM’s Clang compiler can build much of the Debian archive. This week at DebConf a status update was shared on using LLVM/Clang as an alternative compiler to GCC within Debian.
Sylvestre Ledru’s presentation was entitled “Build Debian with another compiler” and was described at the Managua, Nicaragua event as “After extending Debian with two new kernels, Debian will soon be able to be built with a new free C, C++ and objc compiler called Clang. Based on LLVM, this compiler is now close to gcc on many different aspects (performances, build time, level of support of C and C++). This talk will present the current status of a clang-build version of Debian, the next steps and evolutions.”
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Phones
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Android
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Amazon’s devices are not ‘generic’ Android tables or phones as you may want. They are portal devices, which means these devices give you a screen and processing power to consume Amazon content. It’s a walled garden just like Apple’s iOS.
One of my biggest gripes with Amazon Kindle Fire is the way they block access to Google Play Store which has a far bigger number of apps as compared to Amazon’s own App Store.
Which also means you are locked into Amazon devices unlike Google Android where you can pick the device you want and still have all that content that you bought from Google Play Store.
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The VTech InnoTab is an inexpensive, rugged tablet designed for children. It has a 5 inch color touchscreen display and it’s designed to run educational games, display eBooks, and play media files.
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Google is pushing out the Android 4.1 “Jelly Bean” upgrade on Wednesday, but only to customers who have the unlocked version of the Samsung-built Galaxy Nexus mobile.
According to a post on the Nexus team’s Google+ page, owners of Galaxy Nexus HSPA+ devices should receive a prompt to download the update “over the next several days.”
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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The company — primarily known for smartphones — has had little success with tablets, but is apparently giving it another go.
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Wondering how you can recruit open-source contributors for your project? Here’s how.
Donnie Berkholz, a council member and developer for Gentoo Linux as well as an analyst at RedMonk, has presented on the topic of recruiting open-source contributors.
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Following on from the release of the Moog Synthesizer Doodle code, Google has now released the JavaScript of its Turing Machine puzzle.
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Ecotrust this week released an open source software platform that the nonprofit group hopes will be used to support collaborative processes for complex decision making.
The software, called Madrona, builds on Ecotrust’s 20 years of experience using mapping, database and other software tools to tackle complex topics like marine reserves and forest management.
“Madrona is essentially a packaging of features into a single platform,” said Tim Welch, senior developer for Ecotrust.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Regarding Fabián’s concerns about Ubuntu and Thunderbird, I can assure you that Canonical’s stance has not changed: we will continue to ship the brightest and best Free Software by default in Ubuntu. In terms of email clients, today’s choice is considered to be Thunderbird…at another time it may be another app.
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SaaS
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Big Switch Networks is not even out of stealth mode and has not yet revealed its aspirations and products for software defined networks – SDNs, in modern parlance – and yet the company is nonetheless contributing to the open source efforts to build more flexible and virtual network infrastructure and hoping to build awareness ahead of its eventual launch.
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The OpenNebula project has announced the release of OpenNebula 3.6, code named “Lagoon” after the Lagoon Nebula (Messier 8). The latest stable version of the open source cloud computing toolkit brings performance improvements and better virtualisation management.
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Data
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Software Defined Networking and Cloud computing are two of the biggest trends in networking today. They are now both coming together in the Floodlight 0.85 release. Floodlight is an open source Software Defined Networking (SDN) controller, backed by networking startup Big Switch.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Healthcare
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OSEHRA, (Open Source Electronic Health Record Agent) the nonprofit dedicated to advancing open source electronic health records and accelerating innovation in health care information technology, announced today it has surpassed 1,000 authenticated users.
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Business
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Semi-Open Source
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Rod Johnson, who wrote the first version of the open-source, Java-based Spring framework, and later co-founded SpringSource, has left his position as SVP and GM of VMware’s SpringSource product division. Johnson joined the Palo Alto, Calif.-based virtualization company when it acquired SpringSource in 2009, where he then served as CEO.
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VMware plans to make a beta version of an upgrade to its Zimbra Collaboration Server available for download on Wednesday, with shipments in final form scheduled for later this quarter, the company said.
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BSD
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With Debian Wheezy now frozen for its release sometime next year, here are some early benchmarks comparing the performance of Debian 6.0.5 “Squeeze” to the latest packages for the Debian 7.0 “Wheezy” release. For this Squeeze vs. Wheezy comparison, both Debian GNU/Linux and Debian GNU/kFreeBSD were benchmarked from an Intel 64-bit system.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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One of the long-advertised features of LLVM’s Clang C/Objective-C/C++ compiler has been that it offers more user-friendly diagnostics than the GNU Compiler Collection. Historically this has been true, especially against GCC 4.2 — the last GPLv2 compiler release. However, GCC developers have been working to improve this situation. With GCC 4.8, it looks like more of this work will come to fruition.
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Licensing
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Openness/Sharing
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Facing nearly 2 million new tuberculosis cases every year — more and more of them drug-resistant — India has a bigger stake in finding a better treatment for TB than any other country.
Yet until recently, obstacles hindered Indian scientists’ efforts to conduct advanced research.
The reason? India’s university professors are bogged down with teaching, and few have the laboratory facilities needed to do cutting edge work. And every year, more of the best minds are lured away by the pharmaceutical industry — which has little interest in TB, from which there is little money to be made.
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Open Access/Content
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Forty years ago, John Holt wondered whether an educational revolution as profound as open education could survive unless it became part of a wider and deeper movement of social change. Until open source and the concept of an open education began to take hold, John Holt’s vision of an open education seemed to be a pipe dream.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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The Pentagon considers awarding war medals to those who operate America’s death-delivering video games
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Finance
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This may be one of the most important stories ever ignored by the so-called “lame-stream, liberal” media. It’s unlikely you’re losing sleep over US trade negotiations, but the unfolding business agreement among the US and eight Pacific nations -the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) – should cause every US citizen, from the Sierra Club to the Tea Party to get their pitch forks and torches out of the closet and prepare to “storm the Bastille.”
The TPP negotiations have been going on for two years under extreme secrecy, no information has been made available to either the press or Congress about the US position. But on June 12, a document was leaked to the watchdog group, Public Citizen, revealing the current US position and the reason for the secrecy. The contents are surreal, shocking and prima facia evidence for how corporations have become the master puppeteers of our government.
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As the world’s most powerful investment bank Goldman Sachs is no stranger to fighting all sorts of battles, but the city of Oakland, Cailf. is challenging the firm like no one ever has before.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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The Internet Society welcomes the European Parliament’s rejection of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) as a strong message in favour of open and transparent processes in negotiations dealing with policy issues pertaining to the Internet. The vote followed widespread protests throughout Europe, with Internet campaigners claiming that it posed threats to online freedoms. ACTA was originally meant to address, among other things, the issue of online piracy and the sale or promotion of counterfeit goods via the Internet.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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On January 20, New Zealand police showed up in style at the mansion of flamboyant Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom, swarming over the property and bringing along two police helicopters. They cut their way through locks and into the home’s “panic room,” where Dotcom was hiding in apparent fear of a kidnapping or robbery. They seized 18 luxury vehicles. They secured NZ$11 million in cash from bank accounts. And they grabbed a whopping 150TB of data from Dotcom’s many digital devices.
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Last week’s vote on ACTA – although hardly a surprise for those who’ve been following – was a reminder about the big debate currently going on, about how to balance intellectual property rights with Internet freedoms
For me it’s about making it easier for artists to promote their work widely, and make a living from it: without constraining the immense innovation of the online world. And, for me, the current copyright system achieves all of those objectives poorly.
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ACTA
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The European Treaties, however, provide for this loophole which was created for the WTO TRIPs agreement. I agree with Ante Wessels that the Article 207 process should not be used for bypassing national and European legislators. While the European Parliament disagreed with the adoption of measures in ACTA, De Gucht’s administration has other bilateral agreements in the pipeline to the same ends. They deserve the watchful eyes of concerned parties.
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Last week, the European Parliament voted overwhelmingly to reject ACTA, striking a major blow to the hopes of supporters who envisioned a landmark agreement that would set a new standard for intellectual property rights enforcement. The European Commission, which negotiates trade deals such as ACTA on behalf of the European Union, has vowed to revive the badly damaged agreement. Its most high-profile move has been to ask the European Court of Justice to rule on ACTA’s compatibility with fundamental European freedoms with the hope that a favourable ruling could allow the European Parliament to reconsider the issue.
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My post yesterday on how the EU plans to use the Canada – EU Trade Agreement (CETA) as a backdoor mechanism to implement the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) provisions has attracted considerable attention with coverage from European media and activists. The European Commission refused to comment, stating that it does not comment on leaks.
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The EU – Canada trade agreement (CETA) contains the same draconian civil and criminal measures as ACTA, see Michael Geist. He recommends: “With anti-ACTA sentiment spreading across Europe, Canada should push to remove the intellectual property chapter from CETA altogether.”
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Posted in News Roundup at 7:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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After several months of reconstruction, the popular Linux.org site quietly relaunched what it terms an “alpha release” on May 4.
Though the site’s Twitter feed makes reference of an announcement to be made on May 7, no such announcement seems to be visible on the usual Internet news sources.
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The Mini X is a small Android device that plugs into a TV to let you run Android apps on the big screen. But since it’s powered by the same Allwinner A10 processor found in the Mele A1000 and MK802, the Mini X can also run a range of Linux-based operating systems including Ubuntu, Fedora, and Puppy.
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Desktop
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Lately, there have been some signs of rejuvenation for Google’s Chrome OS and Chrombooks based on the platform. As noted here, Chrome OS and Chromebooks got off to a shaky start due to the fact that they require users to use applications and store data in the cloud–a two-fisted approach that alienated some users who wanted local apps and data storage.
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Kernel Space
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This week we talk to Linux stable kernel maintainer and Linux Foundation Fellow Greg Kroah-Hartman. This is the fifth profile in our 30-week series that shares the stories of 30 Linux kernel developers. You can see all the profiles to date on our Special Features page.
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Graphics Stack
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Changes that will improve Linux support for hot-pluggable, hybrid graphics hardware have been merged into the development tree for X.Org’s X Server. Support for this feature is currently considered to be lacking in Linux and was one of the reasons behind Linux creator Linus Torvalds’ recent headline-grabbing “NVIDIA, fuck you!” outburst.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Desktop Environments
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It appears that a stable release of the E17 desktop interface may finally be on its way, despite having been beaten to release by Duke Nukem Forever. According to a blog posting by Jeff Hoogland, developer of the Enlightenment-based Bodhi Linux, the developers of the E desktop environment are apparently preparing for a major stable release.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Over 30 bugs have been fixed in this release, 9 of which caused digiKam to crash. Also, support for a lot of cameras like Canon 5D Mark III, G1 X, 1D X and Powershot SX200, Nikon D4, D800/D800E and D3200, Fuji X-S1 and HS30EXR, Casio EX-Z8, Olympus E-M5, Panasonic GF5, Sony NEX-F3, SLT-A37 and SLT-A57, Samsung NX20 and NX210 have been added in this version. You can download the latest digiKam from this link.
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Version 2.7.0 of the digiKam Software Collection has been released and is now compatible with a variety of new camera models. The developers say that the update to the open source digital photo management application for KDE has improved RAW file processing thanks to it using the latest 0.14.7 release of the LibRaw image decoder library.
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For those of you who don’t know what this is about, this post should clear things up. Essentially, I now have another computer upon which I can do tests of installed distribution sessions for several days at a time. There will be three more posts like this one this summer; I may or may not be able to continue it through the semester. For reference, I used the 64-bit minimal CD for live testing and installation. Follow the jump to read my experiences with Chakra over more than a week of use.
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Whilst writing my reviews of the various variations of Puppy LINUX I have repeatedly suggested that Puppy would not be the sort of distribution you would use on your main computer.
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The LXDE file manager, PCManFM is on the way to get a stable release. This news comes after we posted earlier that the LXDE art team is busy building a revamped LXDE.
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New Releases
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Open source users are a powerful bunch. The core freedom that open source licenses provide enables developers and users to avoid lock-in. It also enables projects that otherwise would die, to get a second life.
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Red Hat Family
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On July 9th, Karanbir Singh announced the immediate availability for download of the CentOS 6.3 operating system for both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures.
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Fedora
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At today’s FESCo meeting it was approved that Fedora 18 will aim for 256-color terminal support by default.
As mentioned at the end of June, there was controversy surrounding 256 color terminals by default for Fedora. Most software can handle 256 color terminals rather than only providing a color palette of 8 colors, so it really shouldn’t be a problem, but today it received the official approval.
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Debian Family
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Debian developers are still deciding on the name for the successor to “Wheezy + 1″, but should be announcing a name within the next month.
Debian Wheezy, a.k.a. Debian 7.0, won’t be released until early next year after having just been frozen. However, at the DebConf 2012 event in Managua, Nicaragua, questions were raised today about the name for Wheezy’s successor.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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With the recent development of cloud computing, many big companies have already launched their cloud sync services. The most conspicuous examples are Dropbox, Sugarsync and Google Drive. And Ubuntu, the most popular Linux distribution currently, also offers its own cloud sync tool. this is Ubuntu One. With 5GB of free storage, Ubuntu is better than Dropbox and equal to Sugarsync and Google Drive. If you want more storage, then you will have to pay for the additional storage space. The good thing about Ubuntu is that their paid storage is split into small 20GB pieces and the cost is more affordable than other service. Also the storage space of Ubuntu One is unlimited so you can just keep adding more and more 20GB bundles to your account in order to have as much storage as you need.
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Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, announced their plans of brining Ubuntu to smart TVs earlier this year. We have not heard much about the status of Ubuntu after the initial announcement. Users are curious about how the project is moving forward.
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Google’s new Chromebox has some compelling features for large-scale IT shops. Capable of providing solid, secure performance at a reasonable price with almost no administrative overhead, they will no doubt find their way onto trading floors and into hospitals and universities, among other places. For many of the rest of us, the Chromebox, and the Chromebook before it, are a waste of perfectly good hardware. The Chromebox given out at Google I/O, for example, comes with a Core i5 processor, 4GB of RAM, and a 16GB SSD. It also has plenty of USB and video ports as well as a built-in speaker. That’s more than enough muscle to run a full-on OS like Linux instead of trying to live within the tight, web-only, confines of Chrome OS.
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The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced a programming contest for children, to take place over the summer holidays. The only requirement for entering the contest is that the submitted application runs on the Raspberry Pi. The foundation is providing $4,000 total in prize money divided between the six best entries in each category. The contest runs until 1 September, being scheduled over the summer to cover as much of the holidays in countries in the northern hemisphere as possible.
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Phones
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Finnish start-up Jolla Ltd has announced that it aims to continue “the excellent work that Nokia started with MeeGo”. Despite having one MeeGo-based phone, the critically applauded N9, on the market, Nokia is committed to developing Windows Phone based devices now. This has left the descendant of Nokia’s Maemo mobile operating system, which was merged with Intel’s Moblin to create MeeGo, at a developmental loose end.
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Anyone who has been paying any attention to the MeeGo mobile operating system over the past year or so can surely be excused if they’re suffering this week from a severe case of deja vu.
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Nokia may still be fighting some pretty major fires on its burning platform, but it’s also building some bridges — namely the Nokia Bridge incubator program — to help those running from the flames, with financing of up to €250,000 ($308,000) to pursue new startups, before they’ve even paid a visit to VCs and angel investors.
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Android
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Google is releasing Android 4.1 Jelly Bean source code to the Android Open Source Project today. This will allow device makers to bring the latest version of Android to their phones and tablets. It will also make it a lot easier for independent developers to design custom firmware based on Android 4.1 for existing phones and tablets.
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Jean-Baptiste Queru, Technical Lead for the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), has announced that Google is in the process of releasing the Android 4.1 source code to the AOSP repository. Android 4.1, code-named “Jelly Bean”, was released at the Google I/O conference at the end of June.
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Void of any green ball logo or Xperia branding, the ST26 will be an entry-level device.
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Since I originally posted this story three hours ago, the Kickstarter campaign to fund the Ouya Android console doubled its funding total. The campaign is fully funded with more than $990,000 raised, and by the time I press the publish button, the total will likely be more than $1 million. I guess the little startup Ouya struck a nerve.
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It may be close to 220 MB, but for the American app developers’ community, the news couldn’t be any better. Samsung recently made the source code for Verizon’s version of the Galaxy S3 available for download on their open source website.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Staples expects to ship the tablet between July 12 and July 17. Consumers can opt to have the tablet delivered to their homes or to their nearest Staples store. Either way, shipping is free.
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Dr. Sameer Verma first learned about open source software when a college friend gave him a weekend crash course in Linux. Now a professor of information systems in the College of Business at San Francisco State University, Verma has taken those lessons to heart—and is teaching his own students the open source way.
Recently, we talked with Verma about the challenge of open source pedagogy, about integrating open source technologies and values into the college classroom, about the benefits of learning open source project management, and about his work with One Laptop Per Child.
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Open source hasn’t made huge inroads in web search but Apache’s Lucene/Solr platform is beginning to make gains in enterprise search, particularly in light of the acquisition binge of proprietary giants.
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Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is based on a principle: Software Freedom. It is given away under a license that allows you to do with the software as you please. You can modify it, redistribute it, and never pay a penny for it so long as you abide by the terms of the license. This model has worked very well for FOSS. But this model doesn’t work for everything.
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Apache TomEE aims to provide application developers with a best-of-breed technology stack that can be deployed to a simple and lightweight Java EE container. In this return to the Open source Java projects series, author Steven Haines introduces TomEE, explains how it differs from Tomcat, and helps you set it up in your development environment. He then walks through the process of configuring TomEE to integrate resources such as database connection pools and JMS destinations — bread and butter for today’s enterprise apps.
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Events
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The Gnome Foundation has announced the schedule for GUADEC to be held from July 26 to August 1st in Coruña, Spain this year. The event will consist of over 46 talks, with 4 keynotes and a number of lightning talk sessions.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Google Chrome team has made life easier for web developers and users. Google has implemented getUserMedia API in the beta channel of Chrome browser which allows users to grant web apps access to their camera and microphone right within the browser, without a plug-in. It opens doors to immense possibilities for developers to create ‘open’ and standard based apps which can use your webcam and microphone.
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Mozilla
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Usage is down, users are unhappy, and a former developer has no kind words for the once popular number two Web browser. Can we hope for a Firefox revival?
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Like TechRepublic’s Jack Wallen, we are not migrating our email to the cloud. We’ll still use desktop email clients to download mail from our POP3 server. Fortunately, we still have alternatives. ZDnet suggests five: Opera, eM Client (Windows only), SeaMonkey, Eudora OSE**, and Zimbra. I’m sure I’ll turn up others in the next few weeks.
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SaaS
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Today Whamcloud announced that the company has been awarded the Storage and I/O Research & Development subcontract for the Department of Energy’s FastForward program. FastForward is set up to initiate partnerships with multiple companies to accelerate the R&D of critical technologies needed for extreme scale computing. To learn more, I caught up with Eric Barton, Whamcloud’s CTO.
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Hadoop is all the rage in enterprise computing, and has become the poster child for the big-data movement. But just as the enterprise consolidates around Hadoop, the web world, including Google – which originated the technology ideas behind Hadoop – is moving on to real-time, ad-hoc analytics that batch-oriented Hadoop can’t match.
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Big Switch Networks is not even out of stealth mode and has not yet revealed its aspirations and products for software defined networks – SDNs, in modern parlance – and yet the company is nonetheless contributing to the open source efforts to build more flexible and virtual network infrastructure and hoping to build awareness ahead of its eventual launch.
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AbiWord/LibreOffice
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That LibreOffice continues to respond to requirements of end-users became truly evident when news of it being developed for Android OS arrived a few months ago. And now with screen shot of the progress made so far being released by its developers, LibreOffice’s progress is good to note.
In the developers own words, the screen shot only “look like – well, that gives a fairly horrific, bolts and all, barely usable (even with keyboard and mouse) office suite on your tablet.”; However, despite the lackadaisical images of the screen shot, the host of features that will finally come through for an Android OS are evident.
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Semi-Open Source
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New Big Data analysis lands in Jaspersoft’s open source business intelligence suite as data caching accelerates information delivery.
The whole point of using business intelligence applications is to get better insight out of data, a task made easier by better engaging end users. Given this, the ability to visualize and interact with data is a key focus for open source business intelligence vendor Jaspersoft in its latest 4.7 release out today.
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Funding
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“When you look at the size of this investment, you have to look at why GitHub is special,” said Forrester’s Jeffrey Hammond. “And that’s because of their focus on open source. It is becoming the core of the system, and GitHub is at the center of that. We’re looking at the evolution of open source. It really drives the industry right now.”
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Ouya might have assembled the right ingredients to make its open source entry into the video game console competition a success. “It is a good time, and I’m glad to see it start,” said M2 Research analyst Billy Pidgeon. “This is one area where third parties can easily build on top of Android and do so freely.”
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I’m no expert on how software gets made, but over the years I’ve learned that, more often than not, rather than write brand-new code, it’s more efficient for developers to assemble an application from existing building blocks.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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If you use Gnucash on your PC to track your expenses and accounts, here is great news for you. Now you will be able to do the same from any Android powered device. This application has been ported to Android and should run on Android version 2.2 and above.
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Project Releases
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Over the weekend, the TeX Users Group (TUG) released a new 2012 edition of the TeX Live distribution. New features this year include many detailed improvements. For instance, the MetaPost program can now be called by default when compiling a file in the \write18 primitive’s restricted execution mode. Output files from the pdftex TeX extension and the dvips driver can now be larger than 2GB, and dvips automatically embeds the 35 default PostScript fonts in the output file to ensure that typesetting is consistent on all systems.
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Public Services/Government
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Licensing
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A lack of clarity on the part of Red Hat open source licensing and patent counsel Richard Fontana as to whether he has, or has not, created a fork of the GPLv3 free software licence has led to well-known free software advocate Bradley Kuhn dissociating himself from the project.
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“I am puzzled as to why this might be thought a newsworthy story at all,” says Richard Fontana, talking about his new licensing project, Copyleft.next (formerly, GPL.next). “Copyleft.next is just a toy research project, motivated initially by a mere desire on my part to learn more about using Git.”
Fontana is perhaps being mildly disingenuous. Although the importance of Copyleft.next has been greatly exaggerated, he is not ruling out the possibility that it might play a role in the development of future versions of copyleft licenses such as the GPL family of licenses.
If nothing else, the project seems to reflect the critique of GPL licenses that Fontana has been quietly making for some months now, which deserves wider recognition and discussion.
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Hardware
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ARM announced a few days ago, on July 6th, that they posted a set of Linux kernel patches, implementing support for the AArch64 architecture, also known as the ARM 64-bit architecture.
The initial support for the ARMv8 64-bit architecture has been added by ARM in the Linux kernel via a set of 36 patches.
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Finance
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In his 1933 inauguration address, Franklin Delano Roosevelt attacked the “callow and selfish wrongdoing” in banking and business. Roosevelt told the crowd of over 100,000 that attended that the “rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed” and that “unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion”. Some 80 years later, the money changers have not “fled their high seats in the temple of our civilisation”. “Ancient truths” have not been restored to that temple. Something corrupt and rotten continues to fester at the heart of high finance, economic life and, indirectly, modern society.
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For almost 1,000 years, the City of London Corporation has resisted virtually every attempt by monarchs, governments or the people to rein in its vast wealth and influence. From the murder of peasant revolt leader Wat Tyler by the lord mayor of London and his men in 1381, to the dispatching from the City to Northern Ireland of rural refugees forced off their land in 17th-century land reforms, the corporation has long been a guiding hand in British history.
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Copyrights
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ACTA
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A leaked version of the Canada-EU trade agreement (CETA) contains the worst parts of ACTA. The EU Commission appears to be once again trying to bypass the democratic process in order to impose ruthless repression online. Commissioner De Gucht cannot ignore the decision of the EU Parliament on ACTA. CETA must be cancelled altogether (or its repressive ACTA parts must be scrapped), or face the same fate as ACTA in the Parliament.
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Send this to a friend
07.10.12
Posted in News Roundup at 9:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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CERN has “played a major role in bringing together scientific technologies and know-how regarding Linux in their Scientific Linux project, which acts as a clone and extension of Red Hat Enterprise Linux,” noted Slashdot blogger Chris Travers. “This goes *way* beyond the normal high performance computing usage of Linux. CERN is in the forefront of bringing Linux to the scientific community.”
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FixMeStick is a USB flash drive with a rudimentary version of Linux and a set of malware-removal tools. Insert it into a Windows-based PC infected with viruses or spyware and you’re able to boot from the basic OS on the drive. It will then scan your PC and attempt to remove the malicious code so your PC is functional again.
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I read an article on ZDNET. You can read it for yourself here. The Author was raising the point about companies who release Linux based services but fail to even mention Linux or their services’ heritage and what provides the actual base for their service. The Author points the finger specifically at Google’s Android and Canonical’s Ubuntu. I just want to extend on the Authors’ thoughts a little more.
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Desktop
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Google has announced the launch of new Chromebook laptops and a new Chromebox desktop running version 19 of Chrome OS, a major software update to the minimalist Linux-based operating system built around the Chrome web browser. Chrome OS, the proprietary version of the open source Chromium OS, is designed primarily for accessing the web and cloud applications such as the company’s Google Apps web-based productivity suite. According to Google, the new devices and version of the OS represent “the next step”.
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In fact, the company is so proud of their product they sell it at a premium price. That is justifiable because of the huge touch-screen, the freedom from worry about software updated and viruses and the great ease of use. It’s still a small computer, though, an all-in-one. No big box at all, and with fewer cables.
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Server
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Isnt’t that a laugh? M$’s charges more money in relation to how much of your own IT you can use? Do we have parking meters in our garages? Do we have coin-slots on our refrigerators? Do we pay to use our tools? Those are silly concepts. So is that other OS in IT.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Dan Risacher, a self-styled “policy wonk” in the directorate for enterprise services and integration under the office of the Department of Defense Chief Information Officer and open source advocate, spoke May 24 before Mil-OSS LANT, a military open source adoption conference.
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Kernel Space
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With the help of uprobes, performance monitoring tools can now monitor userspace software. The ongoing overhaul of the ARM code is showing tangible success.
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Several Phoronix readers have written in that Eugeni Dodonov, a former Mandriva developer who since last year has been working for the Intel Open-Source Technology Center on their Linux graphics driver, lost his life this weekend.
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Applications
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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The Amarok Development Team is looking for beta testers ahead of the release of version 2.6 of the open source Amarok music player.
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Starting with version 2.6, digiKam features the Tools → Maintenance menu which gives you access to tools designed to perform a variety of housekeeping tasks: from scanning for new photos to running a face recognition action. Here is a brief overview of the available tools.
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GNOME Desktop
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Elena Petrevska is a fresh member of GWOP* and GnomeWeb Team from Macedonia. Recently Gnome decided to give a new look to all pages and Elena is a part of the team responsible for these changes.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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I have heard a lot of good things of PCLinuxOS and yesterday, finally I decided to try it out. I downloaded the stable version 2012.2 (KDE) from the PCLinux FTP. The ISO is about 690 MB and I booted it up in my VirtualBox. The initial liveCD boot was easy, it asked a couple of questions on my keyboard and location and finally landed on the desktop.
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As Mandriva SA plans its future roadmap, the company will be taking a unique and bold step with its commercial offerings: using and participating in two separate upstreams for its product lines.
According to CEO Jean-Manual Croset and Director of Community Charles Schulz, the Mandriva server products will be based on the Mageia distribution of Linux, while desktop and OEM products will be based on the historical Mandriva Linux distro.
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The heads of Mandriva SA have decided to base upcoming server versions of Mandriva on Mageia, the community run Mandriva fork
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Gentoo Family
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Every year members of the Gentoo project hold their annual Gentoo screenshot contest, and it’s that time of year again right now. And just as the name implies, it is indeed a contest for the prettiest, coolest, or whatever-vague-criteria-is-used-but-isn’t-published-anywhere Gentoo desktop setup. All you need is a Gentoo install and an Internet connection to win.
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Red Hat Family
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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ARM employee Catalin Marinas has released a set of 36 patches that will extend the Linux kernel to provide support for ARM’s AArch64 64-bit architecture. This 64-bit ARM support will be provided by the ARMv8 instruction set, which was announced in the autumn of 2011 and is expected to be first used in processors in 2014.
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I feel a certain kinship with newer Linux converts. Switching to Linux on the desktop is definitely a unique experience that many of us tend to forget. For instance, the need to stop and think about where a tool’s located can be challenging for newbies.
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THE INQUIRER sat down with Eben Upton, executive director of the Raspberry Pi Foundation this week to hear about why he became involved with the project and how the development of a cased model of the small, inexpensive computer for schools is coming along.
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Phones
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STOCKHOLM—Finnish start-up Jolla Ltd. is in talks with various hardware makers and hopes to unveil within the next six months a smartphone that runs Nokia Corp.’s largely-abandoned MeeGo operating system, the company’s chief executive said Monday.
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Nokia’s MoeeGo team has left the company and created a start-up called Jolla Ltd to build on top of MeeGo. Nokia has been severely criticized for ditching all of its open source projects and turned the company into a Microsoft’s Pizza delivery boy. Instead of going with Android or company’s own MeeGo, ex-Microsoft execute Stephen Elop adopted Microsoft’s failed Windows platform. MeeGo based N9 was a massive success, but Elop declared that even if N9 succeeds they will not divert from their Microsoft plan. N9′s success proved that MeeGo holds great potential.
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When it lost support from both Intel and Nokia, the MeeGo mobile platform appeared to be dead in the water. But it seems the OS still has a few faithful friends. JollaMobile, a company made up of former Nokia employees, aims to create a smartphone that will propel MeeGo back into the market. Whether it will find a warm welcome there remains to be seen.
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Android
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HP will reportedly hand over a portion of the team behind its Enyo HTML5-based webOS framework to Google.
As reported by The Verge, several Enyo team members – including leader Matt McNulty and many of those behind the software’s code – will leave the troubled HP and join the search giant.
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Sony Mobile has just rolled out the open source code for the Xperia S Android 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich firmware version number 6.1.A.0.452. This particular version will carry all the relevant files required if you are a budding third-party developer who intends to construct a kernel that hopefully, will be worthy of making its way to the public as your very own ROM for the Xperia S.
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Your procurement rules have gradually built up as you’ve played the procurement game with your suppliers. At its rawest, the vendors’ game is a chase to obtain as large a share of your IT budget as possible, preferably locked-in so that it becomes recurring revenue, while exposing themselves to the least cost and risk possible. Your suppliers’ tools of choice are proprietary software, proprietary data formats, and as much complexity as can be slathered into the solution.
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The announcement by NYSE Technologies, the commercial technology division of NYSE Euronext, that it is expanding the terms of its partnership with the Warsaw Stock Exchange, illustrates how the exchange company expects to significantly increase revenue by commercializing its own technology.
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The open source Puppet configuration management system is widely used to get software onto servers. Now the developers behind Puppet are going a step further, taking aim at bare metal provisioning in an open source effort with EMC called Razor.
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The term ‘open source’ comes from computer programming. It refers to a computer program that isn’t owned by any company and is freely available to the general public. Microsoft Word, by contrast, is ‘closed source’ — the Microsoft Corporation owns the code for its software and will never make it available or give it away for free.
A little-known program called Open Office is a freely available alternative to Microsoft Office with many of the same features. A loose group of programmers around the world created Open Office and constantly tinkers with it to make it better. They do this for free with no benefit besides the pleasure of providing a useful service for anonymous users.
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There has been a long standing belief (or perhaps more accurately, fear), that developers who chose to release the source code for their software under a free and open license can’t turn their project into a viable source of income.
It’s not hard to see how this negative connotation has developed. Those who may not be well versed in the various free and open licenses may believe that they are literally prohibited from charging for their software. Others may fall victim to the failed logic that, if the source is freely available, people won’t pay for the convenience of a binary build.
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On August 1st, Berlin-based filmmaker Sam Muirhead is abandoning all copyrighted products and switching to Open Source software, hardware, and services for one year, as the subject of his own series of online documentary videos.
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Network security companies looking for an open-source-based intrusion detection and prevention engine have a next-generation tool that can be incorporated into their existing or new offerings: Check out the latest beta of the Open Information Security Foundation’s (OISF) Suricata Engine.
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Collide, which lets multiple programmers tap into a software development project, is open-source software now that Google has cast it off. One project member hopes it’ll inspire related projects.
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Electronic business has many levels. No surprise then that e-business (or e-commerce if you prefer) is served by e-accounting, which itself comprises of e-payments and (before that) e-invoicing… and every other level of e-accounting if you have the stomach for an endless stream of new-age e- prefixes.
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The discovery of the Higgs boson is of course a monumental achievement. But also noteworthy is how the physics community has evolved to get things done – and what this trajectory suggests for other scientific fields and fast-changing industries.
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Google has been developing a Web-based editor for computer code–what’s known as an integrated development environment, or IDE–for several years now. Mark S. Miller, an engineer for the company, revealed the existence of the project, known as Brightly, in a post to a mailing list in November 2010 about Google’s Dart programming language.
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Events
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Mozilla
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With the recent news that Mozilla will no longer be innovating with new versions of Thunderbird, many Ubuntu users might be left wondering what this will mean for their favorite distribution’s default suite of software. In fact, it seems like Canonical has had it’s hands full over the last two years trying to find a winning combination. Canonical has thrown it’s hands up in the air before and changed default software on a whim, most famously switching from enterprise friendly Evolution to user-friendly and mainstream Thunderbird. Also, it chose to abandon the stellar Banshee player in favor of the more homely and less feature-rich Rhythmbox.
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Mozilla’s current success is born out of a decision made over a decade ago to split up the Mozilla Browser Suite. The original Mozilla Browser (now continued in SeaMonkey) has both email and browser which was split out into separate projects: Thunderbird and Firefox.
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SaaS
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NASA was one of the primary driving forces behind OpenStack, an effort to provide an open source alternative to Amazon’s popular cloud services. But as OpenStack takes off in other places, the space agency is turning away from the open source platform — and into the arms of Amazon.
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Open source software is driving innovation in cloud computing, mobile apps and big data, CloudPro reports.
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Databases
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Increasingly the third standard within enterprises for databases, MongoDB, has been claiming a lot of victories lately. In relative terms, it has become the second-hottest skill to have on one’s resume, right after HTML5, according to Indeed.com job trend data. And despite plenty of hating on its technology, with one person telling me recently that “it sets database technology back 25 years,” MongoDB continues to get deployed for numerous, large mission-critical applications.
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Just a few short years ago, MySQL was the undisputed king of the open-source database hill. But with the NoSQL market emerging at an 82 per cent compound annual growth rate (CAGR), it’s looking like MySQL may get bulldozed by its NoSQL peers.
While this shift toward NoSQL provides an interesting commentary on where the industry is heading, it’s even more instructive about the frenetic pace of innovation that open source is driving.
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CMS
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Joomla!, one of the world’s most popular open-source content management system, has recently launched a website for Joomla! World Conference.
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Education
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Meanwhile, the responsibility of the government is to provide “source code”, the basis for teaching that can be tweaked and changed.
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Earlier this year, Department for Education secretary Michael Gove said that the lessons would be altered to include “an open source curriculum” and “rigorous computer science courses.”
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Business
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We all know that PEPPOL focuses on e-procurement, but it is no secret that pan-European adoption of e-invoicing is also high on the project’s agenda. The technological PEPPOL developments have taken another step towards this goal. And this all thanks to Norwegian SendRegning.
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Under development for the past 19 months, Zurmo is the brainchild of McKay, cofounder Ray Stoeckicht, and Jason Green, cofounder and lead architect, who are all part of the leadership team at Intelestream, an open source enterprise applications developer and professional services firm.
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Company hopes gamification principles in its CRM application, now in beta, will make it stand out and better engage users
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Sirius is launching an Open Source Open Day programme to educate Government, Public Sector and business organisations on how to get the most benefit from using Open Source software within their technology infrastructure.
With the UK in double-dip recession, no let-up in the Government drive for austerity, and the old-fashioned idea of economic growth making a comeback, Western economies have much to learn from the BRICS in utilising Open Source to combine public austerity with private growth. Extensive usage of Open Source is a signature of those economies which are thriving despite the global downturn and contrast markedly with the malaise throughout European economies.
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Funding
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10gen, creator of the open source MongoDB database software, has raised $42 million in new capital in a venture round led by New Enterprise Associates, says Forbes.
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Project Releases
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The developers of the open source web analytics engine Piwik have released versions 1.8 and 1.8.1 of their software. Version 1.8 brings several key improvements to the user interface and introduces Do Not Track (DNT) support. The 1.8 release is also rated as a critical update after a security review identified a “limited” XSS vulnerability, a cookie denial of service vulnerability and a local file inclusion vulnerability. The Piwik developers recommend updating to the latest version as soon as possible, with the latest version being 1.8.1, released a few days after 1.8 after a number of regressions were found.
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In the latest major update to their open source BitTorrent client, the developers at the Transmission Project have mainly focused on enhancements that affect Mac users. The 2.60 release of the peer-to-peer file sharing client adds support for the new Retina display (HiDPI) in Apple’s latest MacBook Pro laptop and is, the developers say, now ready for the Gatekeeper security feature in Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, which is expected to arrive later this month.
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The FFmpeg developers have announced the first major update to the open source audio and video codecs package since January. FFmpeg 0.11, code-named “Happiness”, includes several new encoders and decoders for additional video formats including Blu-ray and Apple’s ProRes. A significant number of bugs have also been fixed.
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Public Services/Government
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As government agencies and departments expand their capabilities for collecting information, the volume and complexity of digital data stored for public purposes is far outstripping departments’ ability to make sense of it all. Even worse, with data siloed within individual departments and little cross-agency collaboration, untold hours and dollars are being spent on data collection and storage with return on investment in the form of information-based products and services for the public good.
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The October 2009 memo on Defense Department use of open source software may have inadvertently created an additional roadblock to it, said attendees of a conference on military use of open source.
The October 2009 memo (.pdf), widely seen as a landmark for its assertion that open source software qualifies as a “commercial item” under federal and Defense acquisition policy definition of the term (and so removing a previous barrier to is wider use), also stipulated that program managers before using open source software must “ensure that the plan for software support…is adequate for mission need.”
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Talk within the Defense Department of creating a government open source foundation hopefully will become reality despite the climate of budget austerity that might prevent its formation.
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The European Commission wants to improve its free and open-source software repository system using an enhanced metadata specification meant to help E.U. countries exchange more information about their free and open-source software projects.
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The European Commission wants to improve its free and open-source software repository system using an enhanced metadata specification meant to help E.U. countries exchange more information about their free and open-source software projects.
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Licensing
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The first NHS Hack Day has highlighted applications which could help the UK’s National Health Service provide better, more customisable services for people. The event was won by a group who developed an electronic patient task list for doctors.
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Openness/Sharing
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Avination Virtual Limited announced today that it has released code for llCastRay to the open source OpenSimulator project, as promised at Linux Day in Berlin last month.
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If you’ve ever watched ski or snowboard films and thought “I could do that”, Teton Gravity Research (TGR) have now given you the perfect excuse to prove it. They’ve put up a $100,000 cash prize for the best segment submitted to TetonGravity.com during the 2012/13 season.
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The future of the UK economy depends on the switch to ‘open-source banking’, according to Alistair Milne, Professor of Financial Economics at Loughborough University.
Speaking at today’s launch of the Loughborough University Centre for Post-Crisis Finance, which is part of the School of Business and Economics, Professor Milne advocated radical change in the structure and process of banking, defining ‘open-source banking’ as having open access to banking information and systems.
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Open Data
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TomTom makes its money from navigation solutions, so it’s not a huge surprise that it’s not terribly fond of open source maps on a general level. It has been accused, however, of overstating the error potential in competing open source map sources as part of a blog post discrediting them.
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Satnav manufacturer TomTom has written an article strongly criticising cartographical open data projects like OpenStreetMap for their “accuracy and reliability”.
“Open source mapping has really come into the limelight in the past few years, and many businesses have started to experiment with its use in industry,” says TomTom on its website. “The limelight, however, brings with it closer scrutiny, and recent reports on the accuracy and reliability of open source maps make for uncomfortable reading.”
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Open Access/Content
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Science-publishing ventures continually battle for market space, yet most operate on one of only two basic business models. Either subscribers pay for access, or authors pay for each publication — often thousands of dollars — with access being free. But in what publishing experts say is a radical experiment, an open-access venture called PeerJ, which formally announced its launch on 12 June, is carving out a fresh niche. It is asking its authors for only a one-off fee to secure a lifetime membership that will allow them to publish free, peer-reviewed research papers.
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Open Hardware
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3D printing may still seem like a science fiction concept to the uninitiated, but to those who are willing to open their eyes, it is very apparent that it is here, it is now, and it is exploding in popularity. Don’t take my word for it.
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In the 20th century, getting your child a toy car meant a trip to a shopping mall. In the 21st century, it can mean going to your computer, downloading a file and creating the toy on your 3-D printer.
Only that is not quite revolutionary enough for Massimo Banzi, who spoke at the TED Global conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, in late June. As Banzi pointed out, the 3-D printer a friend of his used to build a toy car was itself an open-source device — one that could be produced by anyone from freely available plans.
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Medical device design is heavily regulated for obvious safety reasons. But a number of researchers–including those with support from the Food and Drug Administration–are developing “open-source” healthcare equipment. The idea is to offer completely transparent, shared software code and mix-and-match interface and hardware designs. While this might seem risky, the goal is to spark faster and more effective innovation in the medical device field, while making it easier to spot potential programming bugs and other device failures.
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Medical technology: Applying the “open source” model to the design of medical devices promises to increase safety and spur innovation
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Standards/Consortia
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Alas, I’m not surprised that the customers of the various services will view this as “business as usual.” We’ve all become accustomed to the idea that web sites go down, emails go astray, computers fail, and in general Internet services are mostly available.
Many years ago, I worked for a short while on telephone switching systems. Those were the days of Ma Bell, and Ma was very demanding. As I recall, switching systems were required to have a Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) of ten years, and a Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) of thirty minutes. It wasn’t easy, but those specifications were met…and rare indeed was the occasion when you picked up a telephone and were met with total silence. (Telephone offices typically had 48 hours of backup power.)
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Finance
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Wall Street employees, who dispense financial advice to individuals and companies, aren’t following a basic investing tenet with their own money: diversification.
Workers at the five largest Wall Street banks saw the value of company stock in their 401(k) accounts, sometimes the biggest holding of those plans, decline more than $2 billion last year, according to annual filings. Those losses don’t include shares received as bonuses.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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This month, a former leader of the Internal Revenue Service filed a complaint that the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has violated the terms of its nonprofit status by operating primarily for the private benefit of its corporate members, based on documents and research from the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), which manages PRWatch, ALECexposed, and SourceWatch. The complaint, which also alleges that ALEC misrepresented itself in tax filings, raises additional allegations beyond those in earlier IRS complaints filed by Common Cause.
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Privacy
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Civil Rights
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DRM
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A few months ago, we outlined a few of the major moments in the history of digital rights management (DRM) in the music industry. This time, we’re talking about TV, video, and the events in the ongoing fight over copying. We’re still calling it the “DRM graveyard”–but as you’ll see, the failures that DRM has seen in the music world aren’t quite yet as plentiful when it comes to video.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Every year, I teach the AMOS class, a lab course on “Agile Methods and Open Source” that combines lectures with a real software project that ideally turns into a startup (see the AMOS Project concept, in German). To explain open source, I have to introduce students to intellectual property rights, of which most have been blissfully unaware of until then. Nothing teaches concepts better than a colorful story, and so I have been using the IP strategies around Java to make this dry topic come alive. For fun, comments, and corrections, I’m providing the short version of my talk below, including commentary. (You can also download a PDF version of the talk, licensed as CC-BY 3.0. If you find this useful for teaching, please tell me.) Students at this point have a basic working understanding of intellectual property and exclusion rights. Please let me know what you think! Finally, IANAL.
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Copyrights
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In a move that scares the pants off of online software distribution such as Steam, the Court Of Justice of the European Union has just ruled that people should be able to resell downloaded games.
While this does not effect the Land of the Free, where its French-backed Junta wants its people to pay many times for software they own.
However, the ruling means that what it might say in the EULAs you are allowed to sell your old software. Steam, Origin, and GamersGate will now have their work cut out trying to work out a way to restore some rights to those who buy software online.
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Send this to a friend
07.09.12
Posted in News Roundup at 5:42 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Some background: I have 10+ years of programming experience on Windows (almost exclusively C/C++, but some .NET as well), I was a user of FreeBSD at home for about 3 years or so (then had to go back to Windows), and I’ve never had much luck with Linux. And now I have to develop software for Linux. I need a plan.
On Windows, you can get away with just knowing a programming language, an API you’re coding against, your IDE (VisualStudio) and some very basic tools for troubleshooting (Depends, ProcessExplorer, DebugView, WinDbg). Everything else comes naturally.
On Linux, it’s a very different story. How the hell would I know what DLL (sorry, Shared Object) would load, if I link to it from Firefox plugin? What’s the Linux equivalent of inserting __asm int 3/DebugBreak() in the source and running the program, and then letting the OS call a debugger? Why do release builds use something, called appLoader, while debug builds work somehow different? Worst of all: How to provision Linux development environment?
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Tired of playing tech support for your older, less computer savvy relatives? Then you may want to consider getting them a Linux-powered WOW! Computer.
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Desktop
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Dell is tempting Linux developers with the promise of a cut-price XPS 13 Ultrabook running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.
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Dell has a skunks works project underway to offer a Linux-based laptop made for developers. Dubbed “Project Sputnik,” the effort has started to gain some traction.
As part of its development, Dell has launched a beta program called the Sputnik Beta Cosmonaut program. Selected participants will receive the Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook with Ubuntu 12.04LTS pre-loaded at a discounted price.
Project Sputnik signals Dell’s changing focus to offer open-source technology that it can integrate into its servers, storage and networking offerings and solutions.
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Kernel Space
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ARM has today posted their set of patches that implements core Linux kernel support for AArch64, the ARM 64-bit architecture.
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The latest noteworthy patch-set coming out of the Intel Open-Source Technology Center is Mesa support for CMS MSAA for Ivy Bridge hardware.
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As Valve Software’s Linux efforts continue to advance, they uncover Linux bugs. Fortunately, at least one Valve-spotted Linux kernel bug has now been corrected by NVIDIA.
As mentioned back in March, Valve’s encountered OpenGL Linux performance problems. Those problems haven’t been for the open-source Mesa/Gallium3D drivers that are riddled with issues and incomplete functionality, but with the proprietary AMD and NVIDIA Linux drivers. I haven’t checked recently but I hope those performance issues are now worked out with the latest upstream binary blobs. I would assume those OpenGL performance problems have been worked out with Valve Software showing their Linux client to partners. Aside from Linux OpenGL, Valve is now evidently uncovering non-graphics related problems.
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Linus Torvalds announced yesterday, July 7th, that the sixth Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux 3.5 kernel is now available for download and testing.
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Fixes are being readied to fix the problem in Linux that caused problems when an extra second was added to clocks at the end of June, according to a senior kernel developer.
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Graphics Stack
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The latest noteworthy patch-set coming out of the Intel Open-Source Technology Center is Mesa support for CMS MSAA for Ivy Bridge hardware.
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Curaga announced in this forum thread the open-source RadeonTop utility. RadeonTop allows for monitoring of undocumented performance counters on Radeon graphics hardware from the R600 series and newer.
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Applications
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The vast majority of computer users depend on a graphical user interface, and fear the command line. However, the command line holds significant power and versatility. Commands issued from a shell offer system administrators a quick and easy way to update, configure and repair a system. The benefits of the command line are not only confined to system administration. The ability to transverse the file system quickly, give more information about files and directories, automate tasks, bring together the power of multiple console tools in a single command line, and run shell scripts are just a few examples of how the command line can offer a potent, multifarious toolbox.
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If you needed an application in KDE to study starts, galaxies and constellations, here is a nice application that may appeal to you. KDE developer Samikshan Bairagya posted some screenshots of the progress he made with KStars. The images below shows a feature he implemented. What’s Interesting is it suggests stars, planetary objects, constellations and deep sky objects to the user.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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At the end of June I mentioned Alien Arena: Reloaded would be released next week. Today in fact that was made a reality with the release of this open-source CRX-engine-powered game.
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Sintel The Game is a video game adaptation of popular open movie Sintel by Blender Foundation. The game showcased its pre-demo in Blender Game Contest 2010 and stood at second place.
Sintel – The Game takes place within the events of the movie. Sintel finds herself just outside the town of Garway. She bumps into some bandits who attack her and she is taken into the care of a kind stranger. You play as Sintel and follow her on her journey through Garway. On the way you will discover that the guards of Garway are corrupt, and help town folks to rise against them.
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Desktop Environments
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I’ve been pushing the Enlightenment desktop for some time now and for as long as I’ve been promoting it I’ve also been warning folks that it is under heavy development. Well folks – Duke Nuke’em Forever might have beat them to a release, but E team is prepping for a major (stable!) release themselves.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Almost all communication between KDE community members happens online, and includes people from all around the world. At Akademy, KDE people meet each other and work together in person. Virtual communication is necessary and valuable for day-to-day work; working face-to-face is much more effective. And Akademy provides much more than that.
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The date for the release of the next milestone in KDE’s 4.x series is quickly approaching. Developers, testers and bug chasers have been busy putting the final touches on the latest version of our software, so it is once again time to get together and celebrate our community’s accomplishment.
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The KDE community is one of the largest and most influential Free Software communities world-wide with thousands of volunteer contributors and countless users. Most of the software written by KDE is based on the Qt toolkit. With the recent strategy changes within Nokia—the largest contributor to Qt, there is uncertainty about the future of Qt that concerns KDE. This is the position of the KDE community regarding the future of Qt…
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If, unfortunately, you did not get selected for GsoC, SoK offers a great opportunity to started and work on an open source project and win yourself a KDE t-shirt and certificate.
What if there is a tool which makes it easier to manage and organize your participation on SoK? Sayak Banaerjee, a KDE developer, has created an app called “KDE Students Program”, code named Pandora, which does exactly that. The app will be soon available on season.kde.org.
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You have probably heard last week that Peter stepped down as Dolphin maintainer. I would like to thank him for the good collaboration that we had during the last years. It was a great pleasure to work with him, and I think that his departure is a big loss for KDE.
He entrusted the future maintenance of Dolphin to me, so I will do my best to keep it in good shape. I think that ease of use and stability are what users appreciate most about Dolphin, and I want to make sure that it stays that way.
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GNOME Desktop
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As GNOME 3.6 release date comes closer, its development is picking pace. New features are being added and bugs squashed in the process. GNOME always lacked a clock and alarm application, but good news is it will be soon integrated in the next Gnome release. The screemshot below shows how the timer of Gnome will probably look like.
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If you frequently use Gnome for chatting through Empathy, you might have come across a bug which shows the tray background when a banner pops up. Recently, this bug has been fixed by Ana Ris, a developer working on Gnome shell.
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Accessibility is one of the key goals in the Gnome Project. Gnome developers have always sought to make computing accessible to everyone. One of the accessibility tools, the magnifier recently got an update that will make Gnome shell more comfortable for people with low vision.
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It’s been a long while since Linux distros have tried to emulate the look and feel of Windows. Most distributions thought it would be the best way to get Windows users who are fed up with the constant virus and malware threats to switch to Linux and it has not been a successful run back in the day with Linspire and Xandros closing up shop a long time ago.
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Doudou is a French Debian based distro for kids 2-12 years old and a quite popular actually. Few days ago they released version 1.2 and I thought to have a quick look at it.
I’ll be totally honest. Doudou looks very promising and is really useful distro, but.. but it suffers from old school Linux developing attitude. What’s that? It’s handy made.
Developers just packed lots of software in a poor environment and the only modern thing here is the GCompris platform. They say that target up to 12 years old kids. Oh well, my opinion, do not gift this to a 12 years old kid, he will hate you. You better buy him a barbie
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The Zorin Group has released the latest version of Zorin OS which is optimized for multimedia consumption, creation and editing. The team recently released Zorin OS for Home and Business users.
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New Releases
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Tails, The Amnesic Incognito Live System, version 0.12.1, is out.
This is a brown paper bag release aimed at fixing two major problems introduced in Tails 0.12. While upgrading is recommended, it’s not strictly necessary for users that haven’t experienced any issues with Tails 0.12.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Mandriva is in the final stages of launching the community edition of Mandriva Linux. And they are asking for your input – to help choose a name for that community edition.
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Red Hat Family
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RHEL 6 was officially released in November of 2010, and with Red Hat Enterprise Linux receiving a major update approximately every two years, RHEL 7 is due to be released sometime in 2013.
Tim Burke, vice-president of Linux Engineering at Red Hat, noted that key themes for RHEL 7 will include data center operational efficiency, virtualization and cloud enhancements as well as advancements in the integrated developers’ tools.
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Open-source software developer Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) has introduced its JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6, a cloud-based platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering designed to help enterprises and their developers decrease speed application delivery.
Red Hat’s new platform lets enterprises move application development and deployment to the cloud without the need to diverge from open industry standards, according to the company. It can be deployed in on-premise, private and public clouds to suit the needs of enterprises in various stages of cloud migration.
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2012 Red Hat Summit: RHEL Roadmap, Intel, Etc
This news is a few days tardy, but the videos from the 2012 Red Hat Summit are now available.
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Open source provider Red Hat claims it is gaining traction in the New Zealand market.
Red Hat credits this in part to the establishment of a presence here with the opening of an office in Auckland in April, 2011.
But with last month’s global rollouts of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6, and upgrades to its JBoss Data Grid and Enterprise Business Rules Management System, the company sees itself in a better position to compete for business with middleware ISVs, systems integrators and resellers.
“Traditionally, organisations have looked to IBM and Oracle for this, and we’ve struggled to gain legitimacy because we lacked a presence and a track record,” says Max McLaren, Red Hat’s MD for Australia and New Zealand.
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Debian Family
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DebConf 2012, this year’s Debian event, will begin on Sunday and run through next week.
DebConf 2012 is being hosted in Managua, Nicaragua at the Universidad Centroamericana.
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Debian project leader, Stefano Zacchiroli, has announced his plans to get Debian added to the list of FSF approved free software distributions.
Zacchiroli explains the reason Debian is not listed in the FSF approved list, “Historically, one of the main argument to exclude Debian from the free-distro list (argument we have share with essentially all other popular distros) has been non-free firmware in main. This argument has become moot since the early days of Squeeze development (early 2010).”
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Derivatives
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Experienced Linux users would know that when a Linux system initializes, it starts a lot of services, some of which are either unnecessary or not needed immediately (printing, for instance). So unless you know how to turn them off, it can be very frustrating to wait for the Linux desktop to fully load and become usable.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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While there’s still more than one month until the Ubuntu 12.10 feature freeze, Canonical/Ubuntu developers continue to work towards their concept of having Wayland serve as a system compositor for this next Ubuntu Linux release due out in October, but will they make it?
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A long-time Windows user and an avid gamer, I never felt the need to install Linux on any of my systems. That was until I required a server box to handle automated build compilation, source control and backups for my programming work. The idea of buying another copy of Windows for a machine I’d never be in front of seemed ludicrous and so a copy of Ubuntu was installed instead. Having used Windows and Linux side-by-side for almost a year has given me an entirely new perspective on both operating systems.
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Flavours and Variants
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For those who have been following you will know that I have recently embarked on a three part review of Puppy Linux. For those who haven’t been following, I have recently embarked on a three part review of Puppy Linux.
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PetRockBlog founder Florian has found a cool way to play with his new credit-card-sized Raspberry Pi PC: turn it into a universal gaming console.
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Phones
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A group of ex-Nokia staff and MeeGo enthusiasts has formed Jolla (Finnish for “dinghy”), a mobile startup with the aim of bringing new MeeGo devices to the market. According to its LinkedIn page, Jolla consists of “directors and core professionals from Nokia’s MeeGo N9 organization, together with some of the best minds working on MeeGo in the communities.”
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Nokia’s MeeGo software, which was dropped by the company in favor of Microsoft’s Windows Phone, is to live again after a group of former Nokia employees have set up a company to use the Linux-based mobile operating system.
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Just last week, it was announced that Nokia’s MeeGo team—the same team responsible for the revered OS used on the N9—walked away from the company. Although everyone has stayed hush on the matter, it is believed Nokia’s 10,000 job cuts had something to do with it.
But it’s not that easy walking away from a labour of love. Those unfamiliar with MeeGo should know it’s built upon Linux, a programming language that is free and can be used by anyone with the skillset, ultimately promoting innovation before financial gain. That’s why most of the Nokia team have gone into business for themselves, creating a company called Jolla to continue bringing MeeGo powered devices to the market.
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A six-man group of open-source diehards from Nokia have teamed up to form Jolla Mobile, a company focused on building phones using the Linux-based MeeGo operating system.
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Android
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Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) is developing a smartphone that would vie with Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s iPhone and handheld devices that run Google Inc. (GOOG)’s Android operating system, two people with knowledge of the matter said.
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Good news, Android fans. A developer over on the forever awesome XDA Developers forums has figured out how to extract Google Now from Android Jelly Bean and port it over to devices running Ice Cream Sandwich. The process for doing so requires a slightly geeky skill set, of course. You have to have a rooted device and you’ll need to be comfortable navigating through the Android file system, for starters. But assuming that’s you, then you can be among the first to try Google Now in (nearly) all its glory.
In case you’re wondering what the big fuss is about, Google Now is only the most innovative, futuristic, and even downright creepy updates to Google’s search service ever to come. Instead of presenting a blank box where you type in text and hit enter, Google Now flips the search paradigm on its head. It alerts you to things you’ll want to know about before you search for them. Yes, really. Billed as a smart personal assistant to rival Apple’s Siri, Google Now comes pre-loaded on Android 4.1 Jelly Bean devices (the most recent version of Android, introduced at Google I/O), and proactively alerts you to things like weather changes, flight times and delays, sports scores, interesting places near you where you might like to eat, shop or visit, and more.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Archos is creating some stiff competition for Amazon’s Kindle Fire. The company has announced its 9-inch tablet for US$250 to compete with Amazon’s Kindle Fire.
If compared with Amazon Kindle Fire, Archos has an edge in almost every department:
- It allows users to access the Google Play Store which has more than 600,000 apps compared to Amazon’s smaller profile. Amazon blocks access to Google Play Store.
- Amazon Kindle Fire has only 8GB internal storage with only 6GB for content. On the contrary Archos Carbon has 16GB of internal memory with SD card support so you can keep all your music, movies and games without worry.
- 9-inch (1280×786) display as compared to 7-inch screen of Kindle Fire.
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What does “open source” mean? With open source software being so prevalent in our lives (Android, WordPress, Mozilla Firefox are almost fixtures), you would think that it would be simple enough to find somebody who can explain the term around here. A quick survey around the office turned out dismal results, however. A fellow intern told me “open source software” simply meant that the source code is open for view; another insisted that it means the software is free to use. I personally had the impression that it meant the code was crowd sourced and created by volunteer developers–the idea was immediately shot down by the other two. So what, really, does “open source” mean?
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Despite being still in the testing stages, Diaspora* is arguably the most well-known distributed social network at the moment. The brainchild of four NYU students, Dan Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer and Ilya Zhitomirskiy, the project was able to fundraise over $200, 000 in 2010 through Kickstarter (Mark Zuckerberg was a donor). The code is open-source and hosted on Github, where it is worked on by volunteer developers. In Diaspora*, users set up a personalized server, termed “pods”, using the Diaspora* software. This server can then be used to port content from
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Despite some well-known open source projects undertaken by NASA, the space agency lacks a framework for understanding the use and production of open source software at the agency level, say a clutch of computer programmers and technologists.
In an article published earlier this spring by IT Professional, information technology professionals led by Chris Mattmann, a senior computer scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, say that when they tried to open source a JPL project, they “entered uncharted territory.”
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First there was “open” – open source, open tech, open journalism. And now? Prepare yourself for “radical openness”.
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Sponsored by companies in the local open source community, the awards have been running since 2007. They “work to raise awareness of the free and open source advantage for New Zealand by telling powerful success stories based on real achievements that are already making a difference for our country,” say organisers on the awards website.
Award categories recognise outstanding use of free open-source software in the public sector, the private sector, education, the arts and social services – including charities and community organisations.
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he Internet world changes quickly. Open source, the practice of promoting free redistribution and access to an end product’s implementation, was little known and often unpopular.
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The use of open source in trading systems is at an interesting stage. Financial markets participants are now starting to look at open technologies for financial markets, particularly those targeted at trading, to supplement the general open source systems they are already using, such as Linux, Apache and MQ systems.
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Events
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If you’re looking for a good way to close out the summer on a high note, keep in mind that the LinuxCon and CloudOpen conferences are taking place together in San Diego, Calif., August 29-31. And, The Linux Foundation has finalized the complete programs and keynote confirmations for the events. Here are the details on what looks like a good time if you’re into Linux and the cloud.
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Open Source software continues to grow in terms of acceptance. In fact, it has become the leader in software segments like cloud computing, mobile applications and enterprise mobility. That’s based on a survey sponsored by North Bridge Venture partners and conducted by Black Duck Software and the 451 Group.
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The deadline for submitting paper proposals for Linux.conf.au 2013 in Canberra was originally supposed to be last Friday, but has now been extended by a fortnight. Am I bitter that I set aside time to make sure I submitted my proposal before the deadline? No. (Grinds teeth.)
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Recently, LXer carried a story that highlighted several Firefox extensions that are a “must have” for any browsing experience. While there were a few in that list that I find newly-useful, it was lacking in some basic extensions that make life ever-so-much-easier for computer commandos.
There is a set of extensions we add to every Reglue computer we place and I have trouble understanding why they didn’t make this list. Here are a few of them that should have made the cut. I’m sure that you are aware of most of them but I put them here to be passed along to your less savvy friends,
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Mozilla will be announcing Monday that they will be basically stripping away their resources towards the advancement of the Thunderbird e-mail client.
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Mozilla is not “stopping” Thunderbird development, it has just decided that: “continued innovation on Thunderbird is not the best use of our resources given our ambitious organizational goals.” And it’s pulling people off the project. But it’s not stopping? Right.
This, according to a letter shared with “Mozillians” ahead of the official announcement to be revealed on Monday. Recipients were asked not to share the letter, blog or tweet about the news until then, but obviously someone out there didn’t agree with that plan.
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The open source community and human rights organizations have joined forces to find a software developer who has been missing for months following the recent civil unrest in Syria.
Bassel Khartabil, a 31-year-old computer engineer, was the project leader of Aiki Framework, an open source tool for building web applications. He also contributed to various community-based online projects, including Creative Commons, Fabricatorz, Mozilla Firefox, Open Clip Art Library, Sharism, and Wikipedia.
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Mozilla has decided to freeze the features and concentrate on web/cloud stuff. That annoys some who have grown to depend on Thunderbird, particularly those with many e-mail accounts. Thunderbird makes sense for its ability to concentrate those accounts in one application.
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An email leaked on Friday forced Mozilla to reveal its decision to reduce resources for the Thunderbird email client ahead of a planned announcement next Monday. The early announcement from Mozilla Foundation chair Mitchell Baker explained that the organisation felt that, as an open source, cross-platform email client, Thunderbird was unlikely to be a “source of innovation” and future leadership. Mozilla’s officials say they have concluded that what is important for Thunderbird is ongoing stability and that “continued innovation in Thunderbird is not a priority for Mozilla’s product efforts”.
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SaaS
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You may not remember the angst of the early- to mid-2000s, when the open source debate raged hot and heavy. Many times I witnessed IT professionals vociferously denigrate open source in favor of established proprietary vendors. I heard endless arguments about the quality disadvantages of open source, the lack of “professional ability” among open-source developers, the absolute requirement that a large company stand behind a software component used in a corporate system, the dangers of lack of indemnification, and on and on. According to large numbers of IT organization staff, open source was a toy, fine for unimportant hobby systems, but woefully inadequate for “real” corporate IT applications.
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Today’s cloud computing landscape has no clear leading vendor; but rather is a mosaic of services. While the commercial opportunities are enormous, open source clouds are beginning to dominate the private cloud side of the market.
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Education
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Semi-Open Source
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There’s no shortage of software out there designed to help foster collaboration in businesses large and small, but this past week a key open source contender got a major update that makes it particularly worth considering.
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Funding
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BSD
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Here’s a look at some of the planned features that are being worked on for the FreeBSD 10 release.
The FreeBSD 10 features that have already been talked about on Phoronix include:
- FreeBSD 10.0 will deprecate GCC and switch to the LLVM/Clang compiler by default. GCC will likely remain within FreeBSD ports, but LLVM/Clang is the future for FreeBSD rather than using the GPLv3-licensed GCC. Other BSD distributions are also working towards migrating from GCC to LLVM/Clang.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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It’s almost a cliche in Western culture. For some reason, those swanky-looking leather-bound backgammon sets became either the mark of tasteful distinction or the default Christmas gift when you don’t know what else to get. I see them in households everywhere. Unopened. Unplayed. Checkers still in the little sealed plastic baggies. Unloved. I don’t know, I guess backgammon sets got advertised in the back pages of Playboy during the ’70s or something; it has that kind of aura.
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Project Releases
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The Etherpad Foundation has released a new version of their collaborative web based editor, Etherpad Lite. This release features a lot of bug fixes along with support for node 0.8, new hooks and API endpoints, resolution of various security issues, Postgres support and better Microsoft Windows support out of box.
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The version 2.60 comes with all tickets closed, which means all the open bugs and requests have been resolved. Some of the key changes in this release include better support for magnet links, better scraping behavior for various trackers, notifications for seeding and downloading completion on the web client and various other small bug fixes.
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Transmission 2.60, the open source cross-platform BitTorrent client that strives to be as simple as possible, has been released last evening, July 5th.
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Pidgin, a popular cross-platform IM client, has got a new release. This version fixes a major bug that required users to triple click on the buddy list to open the messaging window.
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Public Services/Government
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The Department of Veterans Affairs has awarded Ray Group International of Tampa, Fla., a $4.9 million contract to support the open source community that is contributing software code to the VA and Defense Department integrated electronic health record system.
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The central IT department for the French government has granted a €2 million contract to support 350 different open source tools throughout fifteen different ministries. The three to four year contract, which was officially tendered last year, was awarded to consulting companies Alter Way, Capgemini and Java specialist Zenika.
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Forty three out of the 63 provinces and cities have installed and used open source software. It is estimated that 7300 officers have been trained in the plan to build up the labor force to support the open source software application.
In many localities, open source solutions have been developed and utilized by the local budget. Quang Nam province, for example, has 90 percent of electronic information websites of the local state agencies developed onJoomla open source. Meanwhile, two districts and three departments in the province are using the one-stop-shop software based on Drupal open source.
Tuyen said that Vietnam encourages organizations and agencies to use open source software because of its outstanding advantages. It is clearly more economical to use open source software than close sourced software which is always very expensive.
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Licensing
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One of the principal authors of version 3 of the Gnu General Public License (GPL) has spun off his own version of the license without the participation of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), in a move that could ruffle feathers in the often-cantankerous free software community.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open source computer, open source mobile phone, open source toothbrush, open source jeans, open source video codec, open source camera, open source beer and even open source toilet paper: these are just a few things you need if you decide to make every aspect of your life open source for a year. A 28-year-old filmmaker from New Zealand living in Berlin is going to try just that.
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USA has about 10% of the world’s infected machines. China which has about the same number of on-line users has 1/7 as many infected PCs as USA. India which has four times the population of USA has 1/3 as many infected PCs. To keep the problem at home in USA, the world should just stop using that other OS. It’s not needed and not worth the trouble it cause
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Finance
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On Tuesday, the Goldman Sachs group lost an appeal against a $20.6 million award won by creditors of Bayou Group, the now bankrupt hedge fund. Goldman’s argument was rejected by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals which found Goldman’s assertion without merit in claiming that the arbitrators making the award had disregarded the law. The three-judge panel appeals court observed, “The manifest disregard standard is, by design, exceedingly difficult to satisfy, and Goldman has not satisfied it in this case.”
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The “toxic culture of greed” on Wall Street was highlighted again last week, when Greg Smith went public with his resignation from Goldman Sachs in a scathing oped published in the New York Times. In other recent eyebrow-raisers, LIBOR rates—the benchmark interest rates involved in interest rate swaps—were shown to be manipulated by the banks that would have to pay up; and the objectivity of the ISDA (International Swaps and Derivatives Association) was called into question, when a 50% haircut for creditors was not declared a “default” requiring counterparties to pay on credit default swaps on Greek sovereign debt.
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PMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon’s appearances in the last two weeks before Congressional committees — many members of which received campaign contributions from the megabank — beg the question: For how long and how many ways are average Americans going to pay the price for big bank hubris, with our own government acting as accomplice?
On this week’s Moyers & Company, Rolling Stone editor Matt Taibbi and Yves Smith, creator of the finance and economics blog Naked Capitalism, join Bill to discuss the folly and corruption of both banks and government, and how that tag-team leaves deep wounds in our democracy. Taibbi’s latest piece is “The Scam Wall Street Learned from the Mafia.” Smith is the author of ECONned: How Unenlightened Self Interest Undermined Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism.
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Privacy
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Imagine a cheap, tiny, hovering aerial drone capable of being launched with the flick of a person’s wrist and able to provide manipulable 360-degree surveillance views.
It’s real, it’s inspired by maple seeds, and the company behind it, Lockheed Martin, envisions a future in which swarms of the new drones can be deployed at a fraction of the cost and with greater capabilities than drones being used today by the military and other agencies.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Will Internet companies help or hinder government authorities that try to restrict their citizens from using the Web freely? And will their customers, investors or shareholders care enough to do something about it?
That debate was freshly stirred on Thursday as the United Nations Human Rights Council passed a landmark resolution supporting freedom of expression on the Internet. Even China, which filters online content through a firewall, backed the resolution. It affirmed that “the same rights that people have offline must also be protected online, in particular freedom of expression, which is applicable regardless of frontiers and through any media of one’s choice.”
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Several international civil liberties organisations have put their weight behind a Declaration of Internet Freedom. The first signatories included the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the Center for Digital Democracy, and Mozilla. Both individuals and organisations can sign the declaration which reads, in full:
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Verizon pressed its argument against the Federal Communications Commission’s new network neutrality rules on Monday; filing a legal brief with the United States Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit. The company argued the FCC’s rules not only exceeded the agency’s regulatory authority, but also violated network owners’ constitutional rights. Specifically, Verizon believes that the FCC is threatening its First Amendment right to freedom of speech and its property rights under the Fifth Amendment.
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DRM
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iOS and OS X users are experiencing crashes due to corrupted binaries pushed out by Apple’s servers over the Fourth of July holiday, according to Instapaper developer Marco Arment. The problem appears to be linked to Apple’s FairPlay DRM scheme, which is added to apps downloaded via the iOS App Store or Mac App Store. While Apple appears to be working to correct the issue, the problem is ongoing as of Thursday.
Arment discovered the problem late Tuesday night after pushing an update to his Instapaper app to the App Store. “I was deluged by support e-mail and Twitter messages from customers saying that it crashed immediately on launch, even with a clean install,” Arment wrote on his blog.
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Send this to a friend
07.06.12
Posted in News Roundup at 7:16 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Scientists working at CERN, Geneva have announced the discovery of Higgs boson which is considered to be one of the most important scientific feats in understanding the creation of Universe.
Higgs boson is a a new subatomic particle that enables particles in atoms to gather mass, the basic building blocks of the universe. It is called ‘God particle’ because its existence is fundamental to the creation of the universe.
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Last night I’m afraid to say I failed the LINUX community.
My wife’s Aunty and Uncle came up from Glasgow to Aberdeenshire to visit my mother in law for a few nights and en route stayed at our house for a meal.
After the meal my wife’s Uncle asked whether he could use our PC to check his emails etc. My wife asked my son to give the Uncle his laptop to use which is running Windows 7 but I saw the instant opportunity to demonstrate the power of LINUX by letting him loose on my laptop running Mageia 2.
Now the reason I am running Mageia 2 is that I had an unfortunate incident last weekend whilst playing with the partitions on my laptop whereby I accidentally destroyed the version of Zorin I was running previously. This however was not I thought an issue because I had set up Mageia meticulously with the KDE 4 plasma desktop and I think it looks really impressive. I have even installed Compiz to add some whizzy effects. Add to this the Chromium browser and you would think you have a really good setup to demonstrate to a non Linux user.
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One CERN physicist, though, went out of his way to give Linux some credit where credit is due, and posted a complimentary thanks to the operating system on Reddit.
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After Linux was founding wanting over last weekend’s leap second server hiatus, some better news – it helped CERN physicists track down the mysterious Higgs Boson.
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Desktop
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Dell has today made a number of resources live for developers that might be interested in their new system under the Spunik Project, which sees Dell and Canonical partnering to create developer specific Ultrabooks.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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It seems that among Linux enthusiasts, Intel is gaining market-share thanks to their increasingly powerful integrated graphics backed by a fully open-source driver while NVIDIA is losing ground.
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While the GLX_ARB_create_context and GLX_ARB_create_context_profile extensions were already pulled into the GLX code for X.Org Server 1.13, with the merge window being extended to allow the landing of Airlie’s RandR 1.5 work, a few more GLX extensions have now landed too.
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Daniel Vetter has pushed out new -next and -testing branches for Intel’s open-source Linux graphics DRM driver with a few highlights worth noting.
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It has been fourteen years since the ATI Rage 128 graphics cards were released, but some within the open-source community are still using this vintage graphics hardware and even advancing the ATI driver.
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It has been fourteen years since the ATI Rage 128 graphics cards were released, but some within the open-source community are still using this vintage graphics hardware and even advancing the ATI driver.
With XAA 2D acceleration finally being killed within the X.Org driver, the old DDX drivers that don’t have EXA support are basically left to use the ShadowFB acceleration on the CPU. XAA hasn’t accelerated much modern software and it was just time to kill off the old hardware support.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Whether or not you are going on a vacation this summer, it is always good to take a break. And if you are using Linux, what is better than playing video games under the sun? (Except going out, of course.) So, in continuation with Travis’ work, let me present you five more games to distract yourself during the summer. From action to reflection, and through racing, these games are assured to bring you the fun that you deserve. And to add to the cocktail, all of them are completely free!
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Desktop Environments
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People who strongly resist data indicating that human-induced climate change could spell catastrophe aren’t ignorant about science or numerical reasoning. Quite the opposite, a new study finds: High science literacy actually boosts the likelihood that certain people will challenge what constitutes credible climate science.
Who will be receptive to climate science, the study found, depends more on cultural factors such as attitudes toward commerce, government regulation and individualism than on scientific literacy.
“Simply improving the clarity of scientific information will not dispel public conflict” over climate, the study’s authors conclude online May 27 in Nature Climate Change.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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The Dolphin project is looking for more developers, bug reporters, documentation writers and forum volunteers.
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GNOME Desktop
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The GNOME project have released the third update to the development cycle heading for GNOME 3.6. This is an unstable release and though usable, its mainly for testing and hacking purposes. The major changes in this release are a new API framework for Evolution Data Server, new widgets in GTK+ and a new Empathy interface to integrate well with the Gnome 3 style.
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Those of us who type in Latin characters may easily overlook what it takes to get text into windows or command lines in other writing systems. Entry of characters not found on one’s keyboard requires the use of an input method (IM) which turns multiple keystrokes into characters. There are plenty of capable projects, but they often lack deep integration into the desktop environment or widget toolkit. In April, GNOME developer Rui Matos proposed a feature for the upcoming GNOME 3.6 release that would integrate the IBus framework into the core GNOME desktop, tackling this precise challenge. IBus is a framework that allows the user to select — and switch between — multiple IMs. The plan spawned considerable debate, not only on the merits of IBus, but on the wisdom of tightly integrating a single component into the desktop environment. Complicating matters is the divide between the bulk of the GNOME developer community and those users who depend on input methods, primarily from the Chinese-Japanese-Korean (CJK) language communities.
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Alan Baghumian announced last night, July 4th, the immediate availability for download of the first test version of the upcoming Parsix GNU/Linux 4.0 operating system.
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Shotwell is an image organizer designed to provide personal photo management for the GNOME desktop environment. In 2010 it replaced F-Spot as the standard image tool for several GNOME-based major Linux distributions like Fedora and Ubuntu. Shotwell’s power is its simplicity, ease of use and speed.
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The ARM platform is exploding like a mad wet cat out of the bath. Here are four good distros cram-full of ARM fun.
Linux has had ARM support since forever, but it’s been bumpy. There are hundreds of vendors of ARM devices (see Tiny Pluggable Linux ARM Computers Are Red-Hot for a sampling), all shoving their own personal hacked code out the door as fast as possible. This made Linux support complicated and unwieldy, to the point that Linus Torvalds threatened to stop accepting ARM changes in the mainline Linux kernel.
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I’ve been a fan of #! ever since I tried version 9.04.01. It’s quite lightweight, yet the UI doesn’t feel antiquated, and it’s quite well-stocked with features that normal users would find useful. Two months ago, the first testing images of version 11 “Waldorf” went online, so I am previewing that now.
#! is a Debian-based Openbox distribution. It used to be based on Ubuntu, and at one point, it gained [and then later lost] an Xfce edition. It aims to be quite lightweight yet have the niceties of other distributions with more mainstream DEs.
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New Releases
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Last week when Schulz posted his diagram of the general structure of the new Mandriva foundation, he used the name OpenMDV as a placeholder for the new community distribution. It sounded liked like a good name to me, I even liked the spelling. However, Schulz being the community minded sort he is, decided to put it to an open vote. So, now, you too can help pick the name of the new Mandriva community distribution.
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Mandriva is going through a complete overhaul. The company recently decided to turn this once #1 GNU/Linux distribution into a community driven distribution. Now, they are seeking a name change for the distribution (and the foundation governing the development of Mandriva) to separate its identity from the company Mandriva S.A.
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Red Hat Family
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RHEL 6 was officially released in November of 2010, and with Red Hat Enterprise Linux receiving a major update approximately every two years, RHEL 7 is due to be released sometime in 2013.
Tim Burke, vice-president of Linux Engineering at Red Hat, noted that key themes for RHEL 7 will include data center operational efficiency, virtualization and cloud enhancements as well as advancements in the integrated developers’ tools.
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From Deltacloud to OpenStack to a new public cloud offering, Red Hat is on a mission to accelerate the cloud while keeping it open
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Aren’t you frustrated at having to wait for all of an operating system’s services to load before you get to a usable desktop? Experienced Linux users would know that the system initialization of a Linux system, until recently, (by default, unless you know how to customize it) starts several services (some of which are either unnecessary to the user OR some are not needed instantaneously on startup, e. g. printing). Sounds familiar?
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Just a quick reminder that in just over a week we will be hosting the Community Leadership Summit 2012 in Portland, Oregon on from Sat, July 14, 2012 – Sun, July 15, 2012. The event happens the weekend before the OSCON conference, so this is a great opportunity to attend both events.
The Community Leadership Summit 2012 brings together community leaders, organizers and managers and the projects and organizations that are interested in growing and empowering a strong community.
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Since last year when spotting a major Linux kernel power regression and subsequently finding the cause of the power problem that affected a large number of mobile Linux users, plus other regressions, it’s been fun to look at the Linux power performance situation. How though is the latest Ubuntu Linux code performing when it comes to power efficiency? Here are some early tests of Ubuntu 12.10.
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Phones
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Sotiris Makrygiannis, MeeGo’s Head of Development has announced that the entire MeeGo team will be parting ways with Nokia.
MeeGo announced this just after releasing the MeeGo PR1.3 update for the Nokia N9, which was the first and last MeeGo phone by Nokia. The Finnish mobile manufacturer will be now concentrating fully on the development of Windows Phones with the help of Microsoft.
MeeGo was very closely involved in the launch of various handsets by the Nokia, such as N770, N800, N810, N900, N950 and the N9. MeeGo, as you know, is a Linux-based open source operating system designed for various hardware platforms such as netbooks, desktops, tablets, and mobile computing. It is currently being spearheaded by the Linux Foundation.
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Android
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According to reports, Amazon is working on its own Smartphone running a forked version of Android. Amazon already has its own Kindle Fire tablet which runs on Android. However, Amazong has cut Google out of its platform as user’s can’t buy content or apps from Google Play Store. On the contrary Google allows Amazon to sell their content on Android devices. So, an Android powered Amazon phone can be a lucrative market for Amazon as it has the entire ecosystem in place.
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Long time ago I argued that Linux is not an OS the way many people think. Most people, when they say “Linux”, think of a singular operating system like Windows and Mac OS X when it in fact refers to a multitude of distributions each of which practically qualifies as its own OS. I argued that a better way to present “Linux” is as a brand representing a rather sizable family of operating systems with a common core: the Linux kernel. Back then I actually called it a “market of operating system components” out of which various Linux based operating systems are made.
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Jean-Baptiste Queru, Technical Lead on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and man after my own heart announced the return of the Nexus S 4G (Sprint) back into the main AOSP tree. In a post in the Android building group on Tuesday, Queru stated, “We’ve been able to resolve the issues around Nexus S 4G, and we can now properly distribute its CDMA and WiMAX binaries. That allows Nexus S 4G to work with AOSP just as well as Nexus S”. As a Nexus S user on Sprint, I can say that I did a few virtual cartwheels, but what is the current status of all Nexus phones within AOSP?
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Blender was created as a rewrite by a Belgian company and spun off in its own company Not a Number Technologies. They expanded too fast and went bankrupt. Blender lives on under the umbrella of a non-profit organization The Blender Foundation. A failure it is not. About every two years, the organization produces a new animated movie and continues to thrive on donations and other revenue.
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While many banks still ponder the benefits of using open source technology for their coding needs, nascent BankSimple has gone full steam ahead.
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For the past couple of months, I’ve been playing with a laptop from ZaReason, a small, GNU/Linux-based system builder founded in Oakland, CA (though it has expanded to New Zealand). ZaReason’s deal is that they build computers themselves, using components that are guaranteed to have free and open drivers, and pre-install your favorite free/open operating system at the factory. They offer full support for the hardware and the software, and promise that they’ll never say, “Sorry, that component just doesn’t work right under Linux.” So unlike buying a ThinkPad or other commercial laptop and installing a free operating system on it (which can be a bit of a gamble, and will shortly become more of one, see below), ZaReason’s machines arrive ready to run. And unlike buying a commercial laptop from a freedom-friendly vendor like Emperor Linux (who’ll sometimes warn you that certain features of your hardware aren’t supported), ZaReason can promise you that every single capability of every single component in your system will just work.
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Amid the recent brouhaha over Twitter’s future — which some say is aimed at restricting what developers can do with the real-time information network, in an attempt to monetize it more easily — a number of critics have proposed duplicating the network using open-source tools and principles. This idea, which has also been proposed in the past by blogging pioneer and programmer Dave Winer, seems to have a lot of merit: after all, if a short-messaging utility like Twitter is a useful service for society to have, then why not recreate it as an open-source project? The only problem is that others have tried to do exactly that, and have mostly failed to achieve any traction. For better or worse, we seem to be stuck with Twitter.
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Google is handing over control of its GWT (Google Web Toolkit) for browser application development to a steering committee. A release candidate of GWT 2.5, the final Google-directed release, is also available and features compiler optimizations.
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Days after Human Rights Watch revealed that the Syrian government was putting political detainees through 20 torture techniques in 27 locations around the country, EFF learned that open source developer Bassel Khartabil has been detained by Syrian authorities.
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Processing bioimaging data has just become easier, thanks to new open-source software for multidimensional image visualisation, processing and analysis, developed by a team of German and Finnish researchers. In the making for the last 10 years, the so-called BioImageXD software is facilitating the analysis of cell and tissue functions, including how molecules move on cell surfaces and how they bond together. Presented in the journal Nature Methods, the study was funded in part by a grant under the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7).
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Simply put – it represents a real chance to have a single market data abstraction that clients can commit to, resulting in significant benefits arising from code reuse, reduced support and better tooling when compared to supporting the multiple platforms that many organisations have today. In addition, they will be able to turn to a large number of vendors externally who are committing to OpenMama.
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Events
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The Drupal team has announced the dates for DrupalCon scheduled to be held in Munich this August. The conference will cover topics like Coding and Development, Community, Frontend, Business and Strategy, Site Building and other aspects of creating and maintaining a website in over 80 sessions.
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Web Browsers
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SaaS
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Version 3.1 brings enterprise-grade cloud computing to open source
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Customer relationship management (CRM) software is generally hard to get excited about, but Jeff Strachan a founder of Footprints Recruiting[1], an English as a second language (ESL) placement agency, verges on evangelical. And little wonder: Being burdened with a legacy system built using forms in Microsoft Outlook and being burnt by the lock-in of proprietary software would be enough to make an open source evangelist out of most people.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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CMS
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Open source refers to software that it is distributed freely and additionally offers access to the product’s design – essentially opening the source code to collaboration and further ingenuity from outside developers. Horton has taken note of the growing popularity of this type of web development software and has embraced open source CMS as valuable resources for offering clients better marketing and advertising tools.
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Semi-Open Source
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Dutch company Intermesh has announced the availability of version 4.0 of its Group-Office groupware solution. The open source Community edition of the suite of online applications includes address book, email, calendar, task and notes functionality, as well as file sharing, email templates and a newsletters module. Support and other features such as projects, a helpdesk system, and synchronisation with Microsoft Outlook and mobile devices are available in the commercial Professional version.
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Do you ever wonder if and how you could call a halt to your performance review process? Do you think traditional processes are marred by the distribution curve (and forced rankings), huge time investments and low impact on performance improvements? Maybe you agree that your processes have their faults, but you think that it’s not sensible to abolish performance appraisals altogether or replace them with coaching sessions.
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Licensing
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While you were getting ready to stick a fork in a burger for the Independence Day holiday, Red Hat employee Richard Fontana was making a fork of the GPL. Fontana previously worked at the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), a nonprofit law firm providing pro bono legal services to free and open source projects. He’s now the open source licensing and patent counsel at Red Hat, but he’s been careful to explain that the GPL fork is a personal project.
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Red Hat is now officially a storage vendor. The open source operating system vendor released it first commercially supported storage system, dubbed Red Hat Storage 2.0, this week at the company’s annual user conference event.
Red Hat Storage 2.0 first appeared as a beta in April of this year. The solution is built of top of Gluster, a company Red Hat acquired October of 2011 for $136 million.
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Openness/Sharing
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Spurred by the progress of the Open Source Drug Discovery (OSDD) scheme, the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) is planning to expand its scope of work to include more areas like drug development and delivery.
The OSDD programme, which has emerged as a new platform for innovation in the domain of affordable healthcare, will expand to cover Open Source Drug Discovery, Open Source Drug Development, Open Source Drug Delivery, Open Source Disease Diagnostics during the current Plan period, sources said.
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The White House is in the process of creating an open source version of its “We the People” online petition platform, says Chris Vein, deputy federal chief technology officer.
The effort will fulfill one of its objectives under the National Action Plan it revealed as a member of the international Open Government Partnership. One OGP member country, Latvia, plans to use the platform as soon as it’s available, said Vein June 20 at NASA’s Open Source Summit in Washington, D.C.
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Hardware
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It’s call OpenROV, an open source robotic submarine designed to bring the inner Jacques Cousteau out of even the greenest landlubber ashore.
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Programming
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The results of this years Eclipse Open Source Developer Survey include some interesting finding about what motivates participation in open source projects and motivates developers to build apps in their free time.
Compared to previous years, the survey noted that corporate policies are becoming more positive towards open source participation with only 0.6% of respondents choosing the “Does not allow the use of any open source software” to describe their organizations policy.
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An Apple App Store server spat out broken copies of several high-profile titles this week, the iPad maker has admitted.
Updates for popular software including Instapaper and Angry Birds in Space were corrupted when downloaded, causing the programs to crash when fanbois attempted to use them.
Instapaper dev Marco Ament chronicled his nail-gnawing frustration after a flood of punters blamed him for the error even though he was powerless to fix it. Deleting the app and installing it from scratch fixed the problem on individual devices, but Apple’s cock-up meant a new version of Instapaper received a rash of one-star reviews.
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Finance
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The US Federal Deposit Insurance and Federal Reserve released public summaries of plans for quick liquidation of nine of the world’s largest banks in the case of an emergency, without government bailouts.
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Forget Bernie Madoff and Enron’s Ken Lay—they were mere amateurs in financial crime. The current Libor interest rate scandal, involving hundreds of trillions in international derivatives trade, shows how the really big boys play. And these guys will most likely not do the time because their kind rewrites the law before committing the crime.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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With millions of small business owners in the United States, why can multiple news outlets find only one small business owner to say that federal health care reform will negatively impact business?
When national news outlets want to know how ordinary small business owners feel about the U.S. Supreme Court upholding the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), they apparently all turn to just one man: Joe Olivo, owner of Perfect Printing in New Jersey. In recent weeks, Olivo has been quoted by both NPR and NBC News as a representative small business owner concerned that the ACA will make him reluctant to hire more employees.
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Censorship
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But shortly after my purchase, Cisco pushed a firmware update to this router that limited owners’ ability to administer the devices ourselves. The update led me (and many others) to install an older version of the firmware in order to regain all the control we had in the first place. More on just how to do that in a bit. First let’s explain what Cisco did, and why many people are upset.
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Civil Rights
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WikiLeaks has started publishing 2.5 million emails from Syrian political figures, ministries and associated companies.
The emails date from August 2006 to March 2012 and come from 680 “Syria-related entities”, including the Ministries of Presidential Affairs, Foreign Affairs, Finance, Information, Transport and Culture, WikiLeaks said.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Defending the Internet — and the corporations that invest in it — from government regulation is the new “End the Fed,” Paul advisors tell BuzzFeed exclusively.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Philip Matesanz, a 21 year old student of applied computer science and the sole owner of the YouTube-mp3.org website, has ignored “cease and desist” letters from Google and has instead launched a public campaign against the company.
Matesanz operates an mp3 conversion service which extracts the audio tracks from content hosted on YouTube. After being threatened with a court case, he consulted legal professionals and now claims that Google had no right to block his website from accessing YouTube. He has also launched a petition which has already collected 334,361 signatures.
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When the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that Oracle couldn’t block the sale of used software over the Internet, did it open the door to sales of used e-books, digital music, and video?
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In a twist that will surprise no one except the RIAA, MPAA, BREIN, and other anti-piracy lobbies, the amount of BitTorrent traffic has stayed the same or increased in Europe following the blockade of The Pirate Bay in the UK, Netherlands, and other countries.
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ACTA
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If you watched the stream of the plenary session in the European Parliament yesterday, you will know that what we saw was an incredible parade of politicians from all parties denouncing ACTA – with one exception. The centre-right EPP Group is asking for a decision on ACTA to be postponed until after the European Court of Justice hands down its judgement on the compatibility of the treaty with EU law. That’s likely to take a year or two, and amounts to a massive delaying tactic, as I’ve explained before.
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