10.07.10
Posted in News Roundup at 2:02 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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I have better options, however. My shop is mostly GNU/Linux so I can use NFS or SMB as I need and SSHfs, too. I really do not need the printing capabilities of SMB. I have CUPS. I do not need a particular driver for every printer in my place because they mostly use PostScript or something for which I have a translator. I did use SMB for sharing reports last semester when some teachers had XP but this year all the teachers in high school use GNU/Linux so it is no longer necessary for interoperability.
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Fujitsu Semiconductor Europe has announced the implementation of a new Linux fast-boot technology in Fujitsu’s MB86R0x-SoC devices, known as the ‘Jade’ family. Based on Fujitsu’s proprietary 90nm CMOS process technology, ‘Jade’ devices are, according to the vendor, optimized for applications requiring high CPU performance combined with sophisticated 2D/3D graphics. They feature the ARM926EJ-S, a fully synthesizable processor with a Jazelle technology (Java Acceleration) enhanced 32-bit RISC CPU, 16kB instruction cache, 16kB data cache, 16kB ITCM, 16kB DTCM and a memory management unit (MMU).
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Desktop
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I hear it all the time: “Linux can’t do this or Linux can’t do that”… or: “You have to jump through a million hoops to get something simple to work in Linux.” The litany of FUD and myth is as deep as Bill Gates’ pockets. But it’s not the cornucopia of un-truths that concerns me, it’s the certainty of the people who spout them. So I figured I would take a moment to dispel these issues before anyone else can spread their vicious tone further. Not all of these issues are known as deal-breakers. But as a whole, they could easily combine to keep anyone from jumping on the Linux bandwagon.
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As I write I have 8 students in the lab all logged into the terminal server and the system rocks. No one feels they are getting second-rate service. It beats anything they have seen in a thick client. Keeping the thick client may do two things better than thin clients: prop up the monopoly and show video. Some of us use televisions/projectors for that and some of us do other work than writing reviews of movies at work.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Bradley and Karen announced that the Software Freedom Law Show is over. Karen and Bradley announced a new show, called Free as in Freedom, that is a joint effort by Karen (still at the SFLC) and Bradley (no longer at SFLC).
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With Ubuntu 10.10 coming up there will be a change in the standard photo managing program. It will change from F-Spot to Shotwell. I installed the release candidate of Ubuntu in a virtual machine and gave Shotwell a try.
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Ballnux
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During the demonstration, the RIC Android lifted its head to reveal its brain, a CPU running Google’s Android operating system.
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Kernel Space
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So I decided to break my a-week-is-eight-days rut, and actually release -rc7 after a proper seven-day week instead. Wo-oo!
And yes, that’s probably as exciting as it gets, which is just fine by me. This should be the last -rc, I’m not seeing any reason to keep delaying a real release. There was still more changes to drivers/gpu/drm than I really would have hoped for, but they all look harmless and good. Famous last words.
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As was anticipated seven days ago when releasing the Linux 2.6.36-rc6 kernel, there is a Linux 2.6.36-rc7 kernel to come and it’s just been released. The good news is that Linus Torvalds believes this will be the last release candidate before the Linux 2.6.36 kernel is officially released.
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Applications
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FreetuxTV is a TV player for Linux that lets you watch free Web TV Channels and listen to Radio. The application that runs on VLC as backend comes with lots of pre-added channels for many languages.
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Scribus possesses professional-strength features and facilitates ease in creating stationery, fliers and brochures. The control of color separations and color management for PDF files and other file formats that is sent for commercial printing is done effortlessly. Publishing needs are catered to by the Character options that is present in the Insert Menu of Scribus and the options include mart hyphen, non-breaking dash, bullets, middle dot, em and en dashes, quotation dash, mark variations, space and breaks as well as ligature.
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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If you’re looking for a way to discover some great Linux games, then search no more: PenguSpy is a Linux games portal which includes both free open source and commercial games, nicely displayed in categories. Each games has a video, description, rating and you can vote and comment on each game.
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Ubuntu Gamer reader Ryan recommended that I try out a game called Ryzom which he thought was a tad nicer than Planeshift so I thought I’d give it a look over.
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Desktop Environments
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GNOME Desktop
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Imagine logging into your Ubuntu desktop and being greeted by the slick tones of the themes below.
Well, it’s easy to achieve thanks to designer ~jurialmunkey who has packaged them up into one ‘mega-pack’ for easy download and installation.
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Had a GNOME advisory board meeting where we updated them on all the things going on and asked them for feedback. We had discussions about hackfests and events (including plans for the Desktop Summit 2011), the Outreach Program for Women, 2011 budget planning and GNOME a11y. The advisory board meets once a month; let me know if you have suggestions for meeting topics.
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October traditionally kicks off the year-end release festival for Linux users. Almost all of the major distributions have a new version in its final stages of development and ready to be launched into public. Among these are Ubuntu, Fedora and OpenSuse.
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Reviews
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Slax is a popular Slackware-based Linux distro which excels as as Live OS to carry around on a pendrive or bootable disc. It rightly calls itself a “Pocket Operating System”.
Slax has an extremely modular design which makes it incredibly easy to install applications, even before the OS is installed! The Slax website offers an online interface for customizing your distro before downloading it and burning it to a disc / putting it on a pendrive. Through the online interface you can customize your distro adding and removing software packages to get exactly the combination you want. Once you are done customizing, your custom build can be downloaded as a tar file or an iso file.
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Debian Family
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Today I have read a post from Raphael Hertzog, taking about the possibility of a new Debian branch to be created. Debian already has three branches for those not familiar with it, O.K. maybe four branches. More here
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Speaking on the Ubuntu One Blog Canonicals’ Matt Griffin outlined the numerous changes, which see a ‘modular’ approach to account upgrading, with users able to add 20GB blocks of space for only $2.99 a month.
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A month ago, Mark Shuttleworth announced a dedicated page for user contributed videos covering various aspects of the upcoming Ubuntu 10.10 “Maverick Meerkat”. And similar to the user contributed Ubuntu Artwork wallpaper pool at Flickr, the movie section is also getting a lot of attention from the users. Here is a nice collection of videos from the original submissions.
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Shotwell is better at importing and organizing photos than its predecessor, F-Spot, but only by a little. It’s much easier on the eyes, and better at recognizing cameras and storage devices, but if you’re particular about how you organize your photos, you’ll likely bump heads with Shotwell’s designers. Our recommendation, and that of many commenters? Install gThumb instead.
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It’s October, and that means it’s time for a new Ubuntu release. This year, it’s the big 10.10, the Maverick Meerkat, and on the surface, it’s a beautiful piece of work. The new default theme is sublime, muted, a pleasure on the eyes, and the new Canonical designed font, also named “Ubuntu” is likewise beautiful. In most respects, it seems that Ubuntu is making good on the promise of Mark Shuttleworth to raise the bar for desktop Linux from simply stable and usable to art.
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Phones
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HP will not license WebOS to rival smartphone and tablet vendors, the head of the company’s PCs and gadgets division has said.
Speaking at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference yesterday, Todd Bradley, executive VP of HP’s Personal Systems Group, emphatically said the company will not make the operating system, acquired when HP bought Palm, available to anyone else.
We’re not surprised. Palm’s decision in the 1990s to spin off its operating system operation as PalmSource – it became PalmOne – muddied the then-strong Palm brand and arguably hindered both companies’ development.
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Android
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Another day, another 7in Android tablet. This one’s from Disgo and follows the usual pattern.
So we have a 7in, 480 x 800 touchscreen; Android 2.1; 1GHz ARM CPU – an iMap X200 – 256MB of memory; 2GB of storage which can be augmented with Micro SD cards; 802.11n Wi-Fi; a pair of mini USB ports; 3.5mm headphone socket; and a mini HDMI port.
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The £180 gadget packs in 8GB of Flash storage, a 1GHz ARM processor, 802.11b/g Wi-Fi connectivity, one or two USB ports depending on which spec list you read, a Micro SD card slot, and a headphone socket.
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Motorola announced two Android phones for Verizon Wireless: the business-oriented, QWERTY-enabled Droid Pro, featuring Android 2.2 running on a 1GHz processor, plus a more modest three-inch “Citrus” phone. Meanwhile, Motorola announced a three-inch QWERTY slider with Android 2.1 called the Spice, and says that plans are going forward to split the company in 1Q 2011.
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PayPal the popular online money exchange website that’s used in many online retailers and eBay, may soon be coming to the Android Market. Word is that come October 26 at PayPal’s developer conference in San Francisco, we may hear an announcement of such a deal being implemented.
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LG has delayed the release of its anticipated Android-based tablet having decided that the current version of the Google OS isn’t up to snuff when it comes to such devices.
“We plan to introduce a tablet that runs on the most reliable Android version,” a company spokesman told the Reuters newsagency today. “We are in talks with Google to decide on the most suitable version for our tablet and that is not Froyo 2.2.”
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Now a week after the announce of The Documentation Foundation and LibreOffice, I found some time to show you that amazing activity we had during that first week. I created a small script to merge all the logs of the LibreOffice git repositories. Then I gave this log to gource in order to produce a nice video. I really hope this activity will continue and boost the project!
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Out of 279 machines, 147 have had OpenOffice.org installed on them.
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The open source community is vibrant, continually growing, and just loves to create applications and tools to make lives easier. Here are 50 of our favorite open source apps that help us do everything from managing pictures on our computer to learning about Jupiter and Mars.
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Dalibor Topic was the one to give me this idea, though I’m not sure if he’d remember the tweet. He was, however, the one who pointed me at MarkMail‘s archive of open source list traffic, which I’d seen before, using a by domain constraint, which I hadn’t. The idea is simple: MarkMail maintains a searchable index of the mailing lists for a number of open source projects (these, specifically). As a means of demonstrating the value of its MarkLogic Server, it parses the individual messages into XML and renders them queryable according to specific dimensions.
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With the ongoing public sector push for increased use of open source and the unexpected (in some quarters) detailed roadmap for open source mobile platform Java ME by proprietor Oracle recently, it could be argued that open source software has finally come of age.
And as Matt Aslett of open source analyst firm The 451 Group said: “It looks as though scepticism about open source, at government level in particular, has finally been overcome. This is because people are starting to get their head around the licensing models.”
The open source license models differ from tradition paid for proprietary licenses in that although they are free they may contain general restrictions of use. There are around 70 different types of license in total. Approved open source licenses are those approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI). Most open source vendors or foundations will provide guidance on licenses where it is required.
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Events
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The original author of the mail transport agent Sendmail, Eric Allman, has been confirmed as one of the keynote speakers at the Australian national Linux conference in 2011.
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The New Zealand Open Source Awards has announced its finalist list. The judges were impressed by the high calibre of candidates and how far many of the companies and projects had come in the past two years. Entries for the ‘Open Source Use in Business’ Award were particularly strong.
This year there are 31 finalists across eight categories.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has continued the delay of Firefox 4 Beta, 7, the critical feature freeze release of the browser preview.
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Oracle
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Developer Snapshot OOo-Dev DEV300m89 is available for download.
DEV300 is the development codeline for upcoming OOo 3.x releases.
If you find issues within this build please file them to OpenOffice.org’s bug tracking system IssueTracker.
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Funding
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People who work on open source projects are clearly not motivated solely by money. However, with every project there are associated operating costs, which is just a fact of life. Many open source projects use PayPal to accept donations from grateful users who could not contribute otherwise, such as in the form of development or testing. That being said, it has come to our attention that one of our projects here, TortoiseSVN, is no longer allowed to use PayPal to accept donations for their project.
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Government
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I expect, if carried out, this report would really increase use of GNU/Linux and thin clients in government. Use the latest tech in the server rooms to minimize maintenance and energy consumption and the most economical fanless thin clients on desktops to take a big chunk out of captital cost, maintenance and energy consumption in offices.
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Openness/Sharing
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Science writer Steven Johnson’s latest book, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation is, in some ways, a classic Johnson book: drawing from diverse sources across many disciplines, Johnson recounts historical scientific breakthroughs and draws from them parallels to modern technology, particularly networked computers and the way that they shape the societies around them.
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Where is crowdsourcing at in 2010? How is crowdsourcing different from open source journalism, and which is appropriate for what types of stories? This is listing of links to try and illustrate the differences and similarities between crowdsourcing and open source journalism. How you structure a project with many participants will have a significant impact on the end results.
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Open Data
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It seems that our new Government has little patience with these concerns. They are proposing to amend the FOI Act “to ensure that all data released through FOI must be in a reusable and machine readable format, available to everyone and able to be exploited for social and commercial purposes”. Fair enough, but let’s hope they consider any reasonable concerns from public authorities and address them in their new amendments.
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As your say in your report, we are all experiencing the “rising tide of information” today. This growth of scientific data gives us an ever-growing power to understand our world and address key societal challenges. It provides for a radically new perspective on the way science is conducted.
Science has always been based on exchange of information and intense interactions between researchers. Today, thanks to the availability of global communication networks, we profit from truly global and massive scientific collaborations.
Your presentation was not limited to the aspects of access, storage and preservation of the exponentially increasing volume of scientific data. While these are difficult challenges in their own right, I am glad that your vision goes beyond that. You say we should make scientific data available as an open infrastructure of a new kind on which science, entrepreneurship, civic initiative and government can thrive.
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What does it do? It “zips up your information, emails you when the files are ready, and then [allows] you [to] download them.” Facebook will actually move all of your data into a single file, making the download very, very simple.
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The Smithsonian Commons would make publicly available digital content and information drawn from the magnificent Smithsonian collections, allowing visitors to interact with it, repost it, add to it, and mash it up. It begins with being able to find everything about, say Theodore Roosevelt, that is currently dispersed across multiple connections and museums: photos, books, the original Teddy bear, recordings of the TR campaign song, a commemorative medal, a car named after him, contemporary paintings of his exploits, the chaps he wore on his ranch…But Michael is actually most enthusiastic about the “network effects” that can accrue to knowledge when you let lots of people add what they know, either on the Commons site itself or out across the whole linked Internet.
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Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude told the Conservative party conference in Birmingham that the Freedom of Information Act will be amended so that all data released through FoI must be in a reusable and machine readable format.
The change in the law will mean that FoI data is “available to everyone and able to be exploited for social and commercial purposes”, he said on 3 October 2010.
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Programming
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THE IEEE has ratified the energy-aware P802.3az standard, which promises to cut down on energy waste when running networked devices.
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Oracle boss Larry Ellison was uncharacteristically lost for words, after Hewlett-Packard hired ex SAP CEO Leo Apotheker as its new chief late last week. But the silence didn’t last long.
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This is probably not the news you want to read if you have just splashed out the cash on a solid state drive. Texas Memory Solutions, a firm that flogs gear to multinational companies and the military, has upgraded its 10TB flashed based storage area network (SAN), dubbed the Ramsan 630.
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When America’s book publishers wrested control of e-book prices from Amazon earlier this year, I expected two results. First, prices would go up. Second, I’d buy fewer new Kindle books. I got that part right.
What I didn’t expect, however, was that publishers would be so incredibly foolish as to start raising e-book prices to the point that they were close to, and in a few cases above, the hardcover prices. Here’s a non-literary term for this policy: nuts.
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Science
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Security
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The conviction of a former University of Tennessee student for breaking into Sarah Palin’s webmail account during the 2008 presidential election campaign has been upheld.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Motorcyclist Anthony Graber was charged with illegal wiretapping for recording plainclothes state trooper J.D. Uhler jumping from his unmarked sedan and drawing his gun — and waiting a good five seconds before identifying himself as a police officer. The tape was shot with a conspicuous, helmet-mounted camera that captured the video and audio of the confrontation.
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“I need to express the seriousness of the attack against this media organization,” he said according to the AFP. “The Pentagon has demanded… that we destroy, totally destroy, our previous publications, including that Afghan publication. The Pentagon is trying to get up an espionage case and destroy our organization.”
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The Pentagon has warned that Assange may release an additional 15,000 documents that are even more explosive than the first batch. The status of those plans is unclear.
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IN PERHAPS the longest delay to an asked question ever, a co-CEO at Research in Motion (RIM) has finally told nosey governments everywhere that it can’t give them its encryption keys.
The Indian government wants them, as do the UAE and the US, and the UK doesn’t care, since it can probably demand them with its RIP Act anyway, but apparently, the keys aren’t RIM’s to give.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Finance
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State-owned Royal Bank of Scotland is cutting another 500 jobs from its investment banking division.
The bank was unable to say if IT jobs would be hit.
The bank is already looking for 1,000 to leave its technology services division. Negotiations with staff and unions are still ongoing but insiders have told The Register that voluntary redundancies alone are unlikely to cover the losses.
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If you still have a job and you can put food on the table and you still have a warm house to come home to, then you should consider yourself to be very fortunate. The truth is that every single month hundreds of thousands more Americans fall out of the middle class and into poverty. The statistics that you are about to read are incredibly sobering. Household incomes are down from coast to coast. Enrollment in government anti-poverty programs sets new records month after month after month. Home ownership is down, personal bankruptcies are way up and there are not nearly enough jobs to go around. Meanwhile, the price of basics such as food and health care continue to skyrocket. Don’t be fooled by a rising stock market or by record bonuses on Wall Street. The U.S. economy is not getting better. After World War II, the great American economic machine built the largest and most vigorous middle class in the history of the world, but now America’s middle class is disintegrating at a blinding pace.
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I have not been the first to report on this as I have been busy reading all of the other reports on this topic. PANDORA’S BOX HAS FINALLY BEEN OPENED.
This “robo- signer” fraud is only the tip of the iceberg that ICE Legal (no pun intended) in Royal Palm Beach, Florida (Palm Beach County) discovered during “discovery”. His deposition caused GMAC (ALLY Bank) to halt foreclosures in 23 states. This action was then followed by JP Morgan Chase and as of this past Friday, Bank of America. I am sure we will see many other of our major banks follow suit as this practice of submitting fraudulent documents to the courts is wide-spread.
While this news is finally showing how banks are committing fraud in our courts by submitting fraudulent Affidavits attesting to personal knowledge of each foreclosure case and mortgage account, I believe, is only the beginning.
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When a French judge on Tuesday sentenced Jérôme Kerviel, the former Société Générale trader, to three years in prison and ordered him to repay €4.9 billion in restitution to the bank, the collective gasp from the courtroom clearly signaled that the question of who bears responsibility for banks’ aggressive risk-taking in the build-up to the global financial crisis is far from resolved.
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Public employees are facing a backlash that has intensified with the nation’s economic woes, union leaders say, because of their good job security, generous health-care and pension benefits, and right to retire long before most private-sector workers.
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The uproar over bad conduct by mortgage lenders intensified Tuesday, as lawmakers in Washington requested a federal investigation and the attorney general in Texas joined a chorus of state law enforcement figures calling for freezes on all foreclosures.
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More than 30 House members from California are calling on federal regulators to investigate whether mortgage companies broke the law by using paperwork that may have contained errors.
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The government’s giant bank bailout may well have averted a second Great Depression, economists say, but a lot of voters aren’t buying it. Support for the program is turning into a kiss of death for many in Congress.
Longtime Republican lawmakers – tarred by their votes for the emergency aid to banks, insurance and auto companies – have been sent packing in primaries. Fresh political attack ads are lambasting candidates from both parties for supporting the $700 billion package that Republican President George W. Bush pushed through Congress at the height of the financial crisis in October 2008.
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The $700 billion financial bailout will cost about $50 billion, the Treasury Department said Tuesday.
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If you’re a little confused about how or if your life will change thanks to the Justice Department’s payment card announcement on Monday, you’re not alone. So let’s review what we know and engage in some mild speculation.
The government simultaneously filed suit against — and revealed a settlement with — Visa and MasterCard. As a result, merchants are now free to offer consumers incentives to use certain Visas or MasterCards that cost the merchants less to accept than other Visas and MasterCards.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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“The average American doesn’t realize how much of the laws are written by lobbyists” to protect incumbent interests, Google CEO Eric Schmidt told Atlantic editor James Bennet at the Washington Ideas Forum. “It’s shocking how the system actually works.”
In a wide-ranging interview that spanned human nature, the future of machines, and how Google could have helped the stimulus, Schmidt said technology could “completely change the way government works.”
“Washington is an incumbent protection machine,” Schmidt said. “Technology is fundamentally disruptive.” Mobile phones and personal technology, for example, could be used to record the bills that members of Congress actually read and then determine what stimulus funds were successfully spent.
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Citing a desire to gain influence in Washington, the American people confirmed Friday that they have hired high-powered D.C. lobbyist Jack Weldon of the firm Patton Boggs to help advance their agenda in Congress.
Known among Beltway insiders for his ability to sway public policy on behalf of massive corporations such as Johnson & Johnson, Monsanto, and AT&T, Weldon, 53, is expected to use his vast network of political connections to give his new client a voice in the legislative process.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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More and more people are carrying computers enabled with geo-location technology, says Christopher Parsons in his Technology, Thoughts, and Trinkets
They are?
They are.
And they’re calling home without you knowing.
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Today Facebook announced three new features that help move the social networking giant closer to satisfying EFF’s Bill of Privacy Rights for Social Networking. While EFF continues to have outstanding issues with Facebook, we greatly appreciate these important steps toward giving Facebook users more transparency and control when it comes to how the information they post to Facebook is shared, and more power to take their Facebook data with them if they ever choose to leave the service. While Facebook has taken some good steps here, and we recognize that this is just the first iteration of the new features, we do have several additional recommendations, noted below. We will continue to dialogue with Facebook on these issues.
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The government wants to sniff the hell out of your electronic presence. Phone companies wants to sue you to hell over texting and media sharing. Brave new world huh. So why bother with all this tech and web business? Might as well surrender it to the politicians so they can shove it into their skeleton closets to keep it safe. Sad really to see how a beautiful invention as the web elicits so much fear in people. They feel the need to control it.
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A Quebec court has enforced a billion dollar award that Facebook obtained against Adam Guerbuez, a Montreal-based spammer. Facebook was awarded US$843 million by a court in California in 2008 and the social network proceeded to ask the Quebec court to enforce the judgment. The court granted the request, ordering Guerbuez to pay Facebook C$1,068.928,721.46. It also ordered Guerbuez to stop all Facebook related activity, including creating, maintaining or using a Facebook account or profile.
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Responding to a cacophony of opposing voices, citing free expression and global governance concerns, the proposed Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) has been slowed down for now. COICA is now scheduled to be taken up during the lame duck session following the November elections, which makes this “intergalacticly bad idea” still very dangerous. For those legislators who won’t be returning there is nothing to lose, they might as well placate the well-funded and powerful intellectual property lobby behind it.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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BT claims that this will identify “hot spots” where the demand for fibre is high. BT will have brought fibre broadband within reach of four million premises by the end of 2010, but it wants to connect to 12 million more households.
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House Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, who shelved the proposal late on Wednesday in the face of Republican opposition, said, ‘If Congress can’t act, the FCC must,’ and called this development ‘a loss for consumers.’
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In the case of “digital locks” discussed in the context of copyright, this is understood by the most prominent proponents. They state that they need legal protection for these digital locks precisely because they recognise how easy it is for them to be circumvented.
I believe that these digital locks are more controversial than analog locks because some people, not understanding digital technology, want to treat digital locks entirely different than they would treat physical locks they can see and understand.
Take that lock on your home. Politicians aren’t saying it should be illegal for you to unlock your own home, or illegal to change the locks on your own home. Whether it is illegal to circumvent the lock is directly tied to who owns the thing that is locked. We don’t have laws that protect the lock separate from the reason for circumventing the lock: we have laws against trespass, against property damage, and against theft.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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BULLYING LAW FIRM ACS:Law could be receiving a few threatening letters of its own after its security breach at the hands of Internet vigilante group 4Chan.
The fallout from the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against ACS:Law’s website has gone far beyond just punting the firm’s website offline. After the attack, the website came back online with a 350MB file containing emails and a list of over 5,000 Sky Broadband customers that the firm has claimed illegally downloaded pornography.
It is this file that looks to have placed ACS:Law in trouble with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). The regulatory body primarily deals with the Data Protection Act, though it also concerns itself with various other privacy and information laws, and earlier this year was given the power to investigate and issue fines of up to £500,000 for such a breach of the Data Protection Act.
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Off-the-cuff bravado aimed at internet pranksters has led to what must already rank as one of the worst ever data leaks, by the anti-filesharing solicitors ACS:Law.
The personal details of thousands of ISP customers accused of unlawfully sharing pornography, as well as video games, are now freely available online. The sensitivity of such data makes the leak a particularly serious matter under the Data Protection Act.
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Gallant Macmillan works in much the same way as ACS:Law, sending out threatening letters to those who it believes are the owners of IP addresses it alleges to have been involved in copyright infringement.
Simon Gallant told the BBC that while his firm’s process is “contentious”, it is “aware of all the concerns people have raised”. After seeing what happened to ACS:Law, it’s probably Mr Gallant who should be concerned.
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Gallant Macmillan had vowed to continue the controversial methods, instigated by Davenport Lyons and then ACS:Law, of mass mailing threatening letters to alleged copyright infringers. It is due to appear at the High Court today and demand that Plusnet hand over hundreds of customer records in order for Gallant Macmillan to send them a load of junk mail asking for money. Given the current state of its website, we presume that Gallant Macmillan won’t be asking to receive the records by email.
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Andrew Crossly from ACS:Law claims that the firm contacted him for help, which he provided, but instead of just using his templates as a guide, Tilly, Bailey and Irvine began to use them as their own without consent.
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IFFY LAW FIRMS that send out junk mail to those it accuses of alleged copyright infringement have more than just 4Chan to worry about, as HP announced its latest network security software.
The firm produces Tipping Point, a suite of security applications for its enterprise customers and claims that its Application Digital Vaccine (AppDV) has helped Leeds University students avoid getting letters from law firms alleging copyright infringement. AppDV is essentially firewalling and content filtering software that comes with a bunch of pre-configured filters from HP.
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AFTER TURNING OVER shedloads of its customers’ personal data to the so-called ‘anti-piracy’ law firm ACS:Law, ISP Sky has pulled the plug on co-operating with the outfit.
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The bassist and businessman behind the legendary rock band KISS was on hand at the MIPCOM convention in Cannes, France on Tuesday. And Gene Simmons had a message for aspiring entertainers everywhere: sue first, think later.
“Make sure your brand is protected,” Simmons warned during a panel discussion. “Make sure there are no incursions. Be litigious. Sue everybody. Take their homes, their cars. Don’t let anybody cross that line.”
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In what appears to be another shocking attempt to constrain and limit the functioning of the internet, US lawmakers are currently pushing an MPAA-backed bill that threatens to block American internet users from accessing sites that are deemed to be ‘dedicated to piracy’.
What bill S. 3804 aims to do is twofold: first, for a site based in the US, it would force any US-based registrar (i.e. the people who hand out domain names) to shut a site down if it appears to be dedicated to piracy. And secondly, for sites not in America, it would insist that ISP’s block the domain from their traffic.
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Filmmakers know they’re going to need to recover costs by selling the first 50,000 copies. As a result, some are releasing their films in two, three or four parts, hoping to sell an initial 50,000 copies of each. A few days after the film has been released, the film is likely to start appearing either as a pirated copy, or as part of a compilation. Compilations, one of our participants told us, are generally produced in China and can include up to 100 low-quality films on a DVD.
For whatever underlying reasons, the Yoruba-language film world – where the average film sells 50-100,000 copies – seems to have better distribution systems. Original films are produced in larger runs and often meet market demand before unauthorized copies enter the market. This may be a function of the fact that the Yoruba-language film industry preceded the English/pidgin market and has had more time to work through financing and distribution issues.
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You may recall that, in the fight over the Digital Economy Act in the UK, those who were against the three strikes proposal had an unexpected ally: law enforcement. They were specifically worried that a three strikes plan would lead to more people using encryption, which would make it harder to spy on everyone.
It looks like the same thing happened in France. With Hadopi now underway and sending out its first warning letters, the news is leaking out that US intelligence agencies, like the NSA, “yelled” at the French government over the plan, for the same reason. They know that a three strikes law will only increase encryption usage, making it more difficult to spy on people.
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We’ve got loads and loads of music and movies stored away, and the people who have those recordings typically have no incentive to go to the efforts necessary to preserve them because they don’t own the copyright and often can’t even determine who does. But it’s even worse than the fact the people (libraries, individuals, corporations, etc.) don’t have the promise of being able to sell the recordings. They even fear that copying the recordings so that they are stored on media that aren’t deteriorating can alone get them in trouble. As Dubber points out in quoting a recent San Francisco Chronicle story:
Did you ever imagine you could be held liable for copyright infringement for storing your music collection on your hard drive, downloading photos from the Internet or forwarding news articles to your friends?
If you did not get the copyright owner’s permission for these actions, you could be violating the law. It sounds absurd, but copyright owners have the right to control reproductions of their works and claim statutory damages even when a use does not harm the market for their works.
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Information (citations and quotes from emails and past publications) listed in the blogs is presented out of context and outrageous interpretations, twisted arguments and a catalogue of wholly untrue statements are made regarding myself (lack of capabilities and honesty in research process), my work (lack of research history in areas I consult on), and my relations with my contractors and academic colleagues/co-authors (dubious hiring process and the suggestion that we are somewhat ‘activists’).
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ACTA
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The ACTA negotiators have just released a near-final version of this anti-counterfeiting agreement. It is still very dangerous. The release of this text should not give the illusion of transparency by hiding the fact that the whole negotiation process was carried on out of public scrutiny. Moreover, ACTA could profoundly alter the Internet ecosystem by turning technical intermediaries into a copyright police of the Net.
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Talk about a cave-in. The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has been three years in the making, and at one point included language advocating “three strikes” regimes, ordering ISPs to develop anti-piracy plans, promoting tough DRM anticircumvention language, setting up a “takedown” notification system, and “secondary liability” for device makers. Europeans were demanding protection for their geographic marks (Champagne, etc). Other countries wanted patents in the mix.
That’s all gone in today’s release of the “near-final” ACTA text (PDF). US Trade Representative Ron Kirk, whose office negotiated the US side of the deal, issued a statement this morning about the “tremendous progress in the fight against counterfeiting and piracy,” but the real story here is the tremendous climbdown by US negotiators, who have largely failed in their attempts to push the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) onto the rest of the world.
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*
So… what’s in the actual document? We’ll go through a few different reviews that highlight some of the differences in the document, and where many of the problem areas are. Michael Geist points out that the anti-circumvention stuff that sought to effectively export the US’s draconian DMCA anti-circumvention clause has been greatly watered down and provides much more flexibility in how countries set their anti-circumvention plans. It’s still ridiculous that anti-circumvention is in this thing, but at least it’s not as bad as it was, and it leaves open the possibility of setting up anti-circumvention rules that recognize fair use (unlike the DMCA currently). This seems like a clear case where the US caved to other parties.
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Earlier today, the text of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) was released. You can read it here.
The following statement is attributed to Gigi B. Sohn, president and co-founder of Public Knowledge:
“The final text of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) should be seen as a qualified victory for those who want to protect the digital rights of consumers around the world. Some of the most egregious provisions from earlier drafts have been removed on topics ranging from digital protection measures to the liability of intermediaries like Internet Service Providers and search engines. The agreement would give more flexibility to the signatories than did previous versions.
“We can attribute these changes in part to the willingness of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) to open the ACTA discussions to public-interest groups in a way that had not been done before. We appreciate the inclusiveness USTR has shown in the negotiations.
Google’s Summer of Code Classes & Open Source Software Discussion | Mass High Tech
Credit: TinyOgg
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10.06.10
Posted in News Roundup at 11:45 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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Desktop
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As we approach the release of Ubuntu 10.10, Jon Melamut vice president of sales and product management at Canonical has released this bomb shell: Lenovo is shipping over 1 million Ubuntu PCs in China in 2010. This may seem like a small number but just six months ago Canonical claimed to have just twelve million users worldwide. In 2008, the total number was 8 million. This new number comes from a single manufacturer: Lenovo. The total number of Ubuntu PCs shipping worldwide from others including Dell is unknown.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Not only have we been busy testing Mesa 7.9 with the Intel and ATI/AMD drivers along with the Gallium3D drivers (including LLVMpipe), but the Nouveau driver that continues to be developed by the open-source community for NVIDIA GPUs received a fresh round of tests too. Our first published benchmarks of the Nouveau Gallium3D driver were back in February when it was nearing a decent state in terms of supported features and stability. Its DRM also finally entered the mainline Linux kernel earlier this year thereby allowing many Linux distributions to now use the Nouveau KMS driver even though not many have yet adopted the Gallium3D driver for OpenGL acceleration. We delivered updated Gallium3D benchmarks in June with the latest Mesa code at that point, but since then there was the integration of a new GLSL compiler into Mesa and many Nouveau changes, so here are our most recent OpenGL benchmarks from this open-source NVIDIA driver.
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Applications
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Proprietary
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You’ve been asking us for it – and now it’s here. Skype is now available on a wide range of Android phones, so you can save money and stay in touch when you’re out and about. Visit skype.com/m on your phone to download, or read on to find out what’s inside.
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Games
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While Razer and Logitech manufacturer some terrific mice for computer gamers along with other gaming peripherals, they unfortunately do not provide any official Linux support. There have been community projects like Lomoco for supporting Logitech’s extra mouse features under Linux and RazerTool for supporting some Razer mice, but without any full-featured support from the vendor. The smaller gaming peripheral vendors like Mionix are also no better at providing Linux support, but there is now at least one new vendor supporting such efforts.
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Desktop Environments
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Back in July we reported that there would be a 2011 Desktop Summit, a joint conference between the GNOME and KDE developers via combining their GUADEC and Akademy events, respectively, to one location at one time. There was a 2009 Desktop Summit held in the same fashion, but up until now all we knew is that there would be a 2011 Desktop Summit in Berlin during August, but the details were yet to be announced. Now we have the details for this open-source event.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Today, KDE has released a series of updates to the Plasma Desktop and Netbook workspaces, the KDE Applications and the KDE Platform. This update is the second in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.5 series. 4.5.2 brings bugfixes and translation updates on top of KDE SC 4.5 series and is a recommended update for everyone running 4.5.1 or earlier versions. As the release only contains bugfixes and translation updates, it will be a safe and pleasant update for everyone. KDE SC 4 is already translated into more than 55 languages, with more to come.
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Red Hat Family
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For those of you who know me or read this little blog of mine know I am a CentOS user and it is by choice. Now I am often asked why I use CentOS, most people say its too old, or doesn’t keep up with the trends. Some people just ask why I use a enterprise distro. Well I thought I would put my thoughts out there on why I use CentOS and some of my experiences so far with it.
I often hear people say that CentOS is too old, well its setup for stability and security, not the latest trends or bleeding edge software. While some may see this as a downside I see it as a very positive upside. I for one am a very busy person, with seven kids and a wife, I often times have alot on my plate and never enough time to do everything. So the fact that CentOS is stable and rock solid is a gigantic plus for me as I don’t have to worry about running updates on my machine. They have been tested and proven to work before they are released. So I know when I update, things are not going to be broken. You cannot go a week without seeing a blog post by someone saying they updated said distro and X stopped working or some other application turned out to be broken or some other such thing. I really cannot afford to be tinkering around fixing things everytime a new round of updates come out. Like I said I am very busy and when I get a chance to sit here I want to work on my projects not google all night for fixes to things that someone else has broken. It always puts a smile on my face to come home and walk in my office and my machines are purring away just waiting for me to get to work.
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Phones
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Android
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Yesterday, some T-Mobile stores began selling its newest mobile device, the G2, an Android-based smart phone originally slated for an October 6 release while AT&T is slated to release it later in the year. This device truly is representative of the next generation of mobile devices. The hardware capabilities surpass the abilities of most available netbook computers, including the ability to play High Definition video seamlessly. Unfortunately, the G2 also comes with built-in hardware that restricts what software a device owner might wish to install.
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Tablets
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The iPad has been hacked numerous times to run pieces of code never meant for the device, such as Flash or even Windows 95, but so far, the hacks were limited in term of added capabilities. A coder who downloaded the Chrome OS source code on the chromiumos.org website managed to tweak the source of the Google operating system to work on an iPad, and compiled it. The result? A Chrome OS powered iPad, a hack that most engineers in Cupertino must be cringing about.
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One full week has gone by since the announcement of The Document Foundation, and we would like to share some numbers with the people who have decided to follow us since the first day.
The beta of LibreOffice has been downloaded over 80.000 times. The infrastructure has expanded dramatically from 25 to 45 working mirrors in 25 countries (in every continent), including islands in the Pacific Ocean. This number is close to half the mirrors achieved by OpenOffice.org during ten years of history of the project.
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One full week has gone by since the announcement of The Document Foundation, and we would like to share some numbers with the people who have decided to follow us since the first day.
The beta of LibreOffice has been downloaded over 80.000 times. The infrastructure has expanded dramatically from 25 to 45 working mirrors in 25 countries (in every continent), including islands in the Pacific Ocean. This number is close to half the mirrors achieved by OpenOffice.org during ten years of history of the project.
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For many blind people, computers are inaccessible. It can cost upwards of $1000 to purchase “screen reader” software, but two blind computer programmers have solved this problem.
[...]
To date, there have been over 50,000 downloads. With the number of blind and low vision Australians expected to double to 600,000 in ten years’ time (according to Vision Australia), NVDA has the potential to impact a significant number of lives.
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Chris Lattner has just announced the release of version 2.8 of LLVM, the Low-Level Virtual Machine. LLVM 2.8 is only being released about six months after the release of LLVM 2.7, but it boasts many notable changes, including the Clang compiler offering feature-complete C++ support against the ISO C++ 1998 and 2003 standards.
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A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to meet Molly Dix and Jeff Cope, who run the Open Innovation Advisory Services group at RTI. For those not familiar with RTI, it is one of the world’s preeminent research institutes, founded by a group of scientists in 1958 and now employing almost 3000 people helping businesses and governments in more than 40 countries around the world.
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Mathematica is at version 7 at the time of writing, seemingly on the verge of version 8, and there is yet to be any release of source code. As an aside, while Maple does not give the source code to its kernel, it does give some source code for functions that were written in Maple itself, sans any comments or documentation.
[...]
Wolfram taking legal action for the announcement and description of a mathematical proof: a note.
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Events
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Last week I went along to the Open World Forum in Paris. By that, I don’t mean to imply I just bowled along there on the off-chance it might be a groovy place to be. I went there because I had been asked to chair a round-table discussion on the subject of “Open Democracy”, about which more anon (disclosure: the conference organisers paid the majority of my travel and hotel costs as a result).
[...]
Alongside these relatively short talks, there were some more substantial tracks, including one that I attended called “Open BRIC – Digital leadership: shaping the future.” As well as representatives from the traditional BRIC countries – Brazil, Russia, India and China – there was also someone from Tunisia.
[...]
I was more aware of what had been happening in the other BRIC countries. As you might expect, both Brazil and India emerged as real hotspots of free software, but China remains as inscrutable as ever (to me at least – anyone know of any good sites about free software there?). The Chinese representative on the panel outlined a number of impressive initiatives, but it was still hard to gauge the importance of open source in his country, and how widely it is used.
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FOSS.IN is a 10 year old series of annual events that focuses on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) development and contribution, especially from India. From a “small, regional event”, it has grown to a large, well attended international conference, whose participants often represent a “Who is Who” of the FOSS world. You can find out more about the event at http://foss.in.
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Government
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“We just shipped a study for the European Union on the future of software in Europe. Each year the EU gives help to the Information Technology (IT) community – 1.2 billion Euros just last year. (About $1.6 billion.)
Why? “Software and IT is becoming more of the added value on everything you build. It was 20% of the value of the airplane, now it’s 30%. It’s 20% of the value in an auto.” It’s an immense cost that needs to be shared, he said, even with American competitors. “Airbus has put all their Java into Eclipse. They are encouraging Boeing to join their community.
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Openness/Sharing
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Welcome to the crowds crowd…the Crowdsortium. Within each business we face new challanges as growth and evolution occur. This is where the Crowdsortium comes in. As a group we take what we know best, crowdsourcing, and use this to ask questions, create solutions and form the best practices.
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As those of us deeply immersed in the cultures of openness and sharing know, engaging in these activities is almost literally effortless: it takes probably a few seconds to share a link, a thought or a picture. It might take a few minutes for a blog post, and a few hours for Wikipedia article, but the barriers are still low.
And the rewards are high. Even simple “thank yous” from complete strangers (on Twitter or identi.ca, say) are immensely gratifying. Indeed, I’d be willing to bet that there are some serious hormonal consequences of getting this kind of feedback. For they are sufficiently pleasant that you tend to carry on sharing, and probably more intensely, in part to get that special buzz they engender.
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Open Data
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Six months ago, the World Bank Group was widely praised for opening its vault of development data for all to use. As leaders gather for the World Bank-IMF Annual Meetings this week, the Bank is deepening its commitment to an ‘open development’ agenda that is swiftly moving the institution in a new direction.
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The fact is, most governments already have the necessary policy infrastructure for managing the overwhelming majority of risks concerning open data. Your government likely has provisions dealing with privacy – if applied to open data this should address these concerns. Your government likely has provisions for dealing with confidential and security related issues – if applied to open data this should address these concerns. Finally, your government(s) likely has a legal system that outlines what is, and is not legal – when it comes to the use of open data, this legal system is in effect.
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Open Access/Content
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Educators, like researchers, face enormous pressure to keep up with the rapid pace of scientific discovery. But educators must also find compelling ways to communicate the latest scientific findings to their students.
To help biology teachers find – and share – the best teaching tools, resources, and methods, PLoS Biology is launching a new series of articles on education. The Education Series combines open education – which freely shares teaching methods, initiatives, and materials – with open access publishing to present innovative approaches to teaching critical concepts, developments, and methods in biology. It will cover fundamental areas of biology, from evolution and ecology to cell biology and biochemistry, and take full advantage of Web-based open-access research and multimedia tools to create an interactive, dynamic resource to further understanding of fundamental questions in biology and of current methods to investigate them.
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Standards/Consortia
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I think you will enjoy this graphic. Click for a larger view. This is a chart of all of the standards that ODF 1.2 refers to, what we standards geeks call “normative references”. A normative reference takes definitions and requirements from one standard and uses it, by reference, in another. It is a form of reuse, reusing the domain analysis, specification and review work that went into creating the other standard. Each reference is color coded and grouped by the organization that owns the referenced standard, W3C, IETF, ISO, etc., and placed on a time line according to when that standard was published
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A few weeks back, we pointed to reports suggesting that Rupert Murdoch’s paywall experiments with The Times and Sunday Times in London were a disaster, as nearly everyone — readers, journalists, advertisers and publicists — were bailing on the publications.
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[A]s Lessig notes, in the movie, a totally different portrait is painted. One where execution is meaningless, and only ideas and lawyers seem to matter:
In Sorkin’s world–which is to say Hollywood, where lawyers attempt to control every last scrap of culture–this framing makes sense. But as I watched this film, as a law professor, and someone who has tried as best I can to understand the new world now living in Silicon Valley, the only people that I felt embarrassed for were the lawyers. The total and absolute absurdity of the world where the engines of a federal lawsuit get cranked up to adjudicate the hurt feelings (because “our idea was stolen!”) of entitled Harvard undergraduates is completely missed by Sorkin. We can’t know enough from the film to know whether there was actually any substantial legal claim here. Sorkin has been upfront about the fact that there are fabrications aplenty lacing the story. But from the story as told, we certainly know enough to know that any legal system that would allow these kids to extort $65 million from the most successful business this century should be ashamed of itself. Did Zuckerberg breach his contract? Maybe, for which the damages are more like $650, not $65 million. Did he steal a trade secret? Absolutely not. Did he steal any other “property”? Absolutely not–the code for Facebook was his, and the “idea” of a social network is not a patent. It wasn’t justice that gave the twins $65 million; it was the fear of a random and inefficient system of law. That system is a tax on innovation and creativity. That tax is the real villain here, not the innovator it burdened.
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Science
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FOR his 76th birthday, Oliver Sacks received an ounce of osmium, the densest natural element in the periodic table. “I like density, and it’s the only really blue metal, it’s rather beautiful,” he says. The year before he got a “nice rod of rhenium” and the year before that it was a piece of tungsten.
You may have worked out that the gifts were chosen because the place they occupy in the periodic table corresponded to his age. Sacks’s office in downtown Manhattan, New York, is littered with samples of elements. “I like to have some of my metals around me all the time,” he says. It is an impressive collection, though perhaps a little unexpected for a man who is famous for his amazing collection of case histories in neurology.
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Security
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The domain was seized by the Libyan domain registry for reasons which seemed to be kept obscure until we escalated the issue. We eventually discovered that the domain has been seized because the content of our website, in their opinion, fell outside of Libyan Islamic/Sharia Law.
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Bit.ly, HootSuite (with its Ow.ly service), Ad.ly and perhaps even Smel.ly could well be at risk of having their domain names sudden.ly taken away by the Libyan government.
Ben Metcalfe blogs that his domain name vb.ly was recently seized by NIC.ly (the domain registry and controlling body for the Libyan domain space) because the content of his website, at least in their opinion, was in violation of Libyan Islamic/Sharia Law.
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To defeat the system, the counterfeiter has to copy the bar codes. If the stores selling to customers are in on the scam, it can be the same code. If not, there have to be sufficient different bar codes that the store doesn’t detect duplications. Presumably, numbers that are known to have been copied are added to the database, so the counterfeiters need to keep updating their codes. And presumably the codes are cryptographically hard to predict, so the only way to keep updating them is to look at legitimate products.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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A teenager has been jailed for 16 weeks after he refused to give police the password to his computer.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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A ruptured reservoir of sludge near an alumina plant in Hungary is threatening the Danube, the largest river in the EU. The government of Hungary has declared the state of emergency, while Danube countries remain on alert. EurActiv’s network reports.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Back in 1983, approximately 50 corporations controlled the vast majority of all news media in the United States. Today, ownership of the news media has been concentrated in the hands of just six incredibly powerful media corporations. These corporate behemoths control most of what we watch, hear and read every single day. They own television networks, cable channels, movie studios, newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, music labels and even many of our favorite websites. Sadly, most Americans don’t even stop to think about who is feeding them the endless hours of news and entertainment that they constantly ingest. Most Americans don’t really seem to care about who owns the media. But they should. The truth is that each of us is deeply influenced by the messages that are constantly being pounded into our heads by the mainstream media. The average American watches 153 hours of television a month. In fact, most Americans begin to feel physically uncomfortable if they go too long without watching or listening to something. Sadly, most Americans have become absolutely addicted to news and entertainment and the ownership of all that news and entertainment that we crave is being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands each year.
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I did register a complaint with the TPS, I have also called Weatherseal to demand they remove me from a list I should never have been on. They claim to have done so, but time will tell. My thinking is that if you have enough proof that a call actually took place, they have very little choice but to honour it. This is why I am listing the details of the call here.
Who: Jack McDonald
Where: 08458 638308
When: Wed 6th Oct 2010 @ 13:57
Within around 30mins of that call, my complaint was registered with the TPS, and I’d phoned Weatherseal on 0800 041 041 to get my number removed. I did notice that the top result in Google for “weatherseal scotland” was a blog called “The Shit Companies Blog”. Considering the reason I was looking for Weatherseal’s information this amused me. I also noticed various companies listings didn’t have contact information for Weatherseal, thankfully Yell.com did.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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A Declaration on network neutrality has ben adopted by the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers which underlines its commitment to network neutrality on the Internet and insists that any exceptions to this principle would need to be justified by overriding public interest.
Users should have the greatest possible access to Internet-based content, applications and services of their choice, whether or not they are offered free of charge, using suitable devices of their choice, the Committee says. It also declares that a competitive and dynamic environment may encourage innovation, increasing network availability and performance, and lowering costs, and can promote the free circulation of a wide range of content and services on the Internet.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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While the resolution claims that it needs to ratify any such agreements, I don’t know if that’s the case. In the US, for example, the administration will avoid needing Senate approval (which it needs for treaties) by designating it as an “executive agreement” instead of a “treaty.” Of course, if you talk to legal scholars, they point out that the only real difference is that an executive agreement doesn’t need to be approved by the Senate. I have no idea if Mexico has a similar setup. Also, this is just a “non-binding resolution,” so may not mean much in the long run. However, it is nice to see that some actual politicians are equally disturbed over how the ACTA negotiations took place and the fact that some final agreement is just being dumped on politicians at the last minute.
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One of the biggest stories over the three year negotiation of ACTA has been the willingness of the U.S. to cave on the Internet provisions. When it first proposed the chapter, the U.S. was seeking new intermediary liability requirements with three strikes and you’re out used as an example of an appropriate policy as well as language that attempted to create a global DMCA. The draft released today is a far cry from that proposal with the intermediary liability provisions largely removed and the DMCA digital lock provisions much closer to the WIPO Internet treaty model. In its place, is a chapter that is best viewed as ACTA Ultra-Lite. For Canadians, this is crucial since it now leaves an ACTA that is far more flexible than even Bill C-32. In fact, the Canadian copyright bill now exceeds the requirements under ACTA and could be amended in a manner that will allow for greater balance on digital locks and still be ACTA compliant.
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Copyrights
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Events/Shows
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4 weeks, 6 cities, 30 speakers, 250+ attendees, countless questions and 280+ tagged tweets and the CC Roadshows are now over! The blog post is a few reflections from the ccAustralia on the roadshows.
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Jan Nieuwenhuizen – “An Introduction to Lilypond”
Credit: TinyOgg
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10.05.10
Posted in News Roundup at 7:37 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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So, in conclusion I must say I am very satisfied with my migration. It was much less painful than I expected and much more rewarding, too. Of course, there’s still a lot to learn, but I’m going one step at a time.
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# Mailbag
# 2-Cent Tips
# Talkback
# News Bytes, by Deividson Luiz Okopnik and Howard Dyckoff
# Henry’s Techno-Musings: User Interfaces, by Henry Grebler
# Away Mission – PayPal Innovate, by Howard Dyckoff
# A Nightmare on Tape Drive, by Henry Grebler
# Making Your Network Transparent, by Ben Okopnik
[...]
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Fedora 14 “Laughlin” beta was released last week, introducing Red Hat’s SPICE virtual desktop infrastructure, ipmiutil — which adds features including Serial-over-LAN and identity LED management, and a preview of systemd, a replacement for SysVinit that acts as a system and session manager and that will ultimately allow faster boot times.
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One of the contributions that I have lent to LPI, and of which I am very proud, is the constant drum beat about making LPI multinational. From the very beginning I remember talking about the issues in various countries around the world in terms of language, costs of certification and ease of finding and taking the tests.
As in other interactions with LPI, I acknowledge that others also spoke and were concerned about these issues, but for me they were the heart-blood. Either LPI was going to be an international organization with an international certification, or it would be ineffective for the needs of Linux and FOSS.
[...]
I had been to Brazil before 2002, and even before 1999. Two years after I had met Linus Torvalds and a few months after Red Hat Software’s Alpha Linux distribution was first distributed, I was flown to Sao Paulo in 1996 to speak at the University of Sao Paulo (USP), and saw my first Beowulf high-performance computing system running Linux at that university. USP had 160 PCs hooked together to do real-time computer graphics of “Toy Story” quality. While others were using Beowulf clusters to render animation frames over time, USP was doing it in real time. USP was also using their Beowulf to shorten the time needed to analyze a mammogram for cancer from close to a day to a few minutes. And finally they were using Linux to help manage remote Windows systems. “When the windows systems do not boot we tell the user to boot Linux, then we FTP a new copy of Windows onto their system. Is this a legitimate use of Linux?” asked the school’s president. I told him that every use of Linux was a legitimate use of Linux.
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Desktop
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Finally, in this statement the author summarize what I am trying to say: “I think it would still be better to have a Linux workstation if you manage Linux servers, due to the type of functionality required.”. It all depends on what you want to do, Windows can work for anyone trying just to read email, use some applications like, skype, messengers, and work with an office suite.
But to say that it does not crash, or that it does not slow down over the time, just because you’re dealing with delicate, is not fair for me.
If one put Windows (any flavor) and Linux (any flavor) side by side and over moths, you install and un-install applications to test them, one is going to fail someday, and that is going to be Windows.
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So I’ve moved on to a different organization. Once at the new office, I received a new laptop: a Dell Latitude E6410. This is a pretty nice machine. A bit heavy and bulky for my tastes, but more than enough power for the things I need to do (write documents, edit spreadsheets, read e-mail, browse the web, etc.)
[...]
Easily, I’d say Linux “won” this one. But it would be dishonest of me to ignore that I’ve had some issues.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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In this episode: Both Mandriva and OpenOffice.org have been forked, while Microsoft sues Motorola for bits of Android. Try the results of our text adventure challenge and hear your own comments in our Open Ballot.
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Kernel Space
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AppArmor, entry points for on-access virus scanners, a rewritten Out-of-Memory (OOM) killer, as well as basic support of Xen-Dom0 code, are among the most important advancements of version 2.6.36 of the Linux kernel. Due to various restructuring measures, this version will be slightly smaller than the previous version despite several hundred thousand new lines of code.
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Drivers in 2.6.36 include considerably improved support for infra-red receivers and remotes, optimised USB drivers, and a solution for a much discussed problem that Android developers, in one way or another, had solved long ago.
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This month Linux kernel legend Jon Masters talks about the release period of 2.6.35 and the opening of the merge window. Also this month: old security vulnerabilities, AppArmor, SELinux and the ongoing suspend blockers debate continues…
The release last month of the 2.6.35 kernel brought with it the implicit opening of the ‘merge window’, the time following a kernel release during which Linus Torvalds will accept intrusive changes for what will become the 2.6.36 kernel, in another month or so.
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Graphics Stack
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Mesa 7.9 has been released.
The tag in the GIT repository for Mesa 7.9 is ‘mesa-7.9′.
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Applications
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If you use Lubuntu or another LXDE / Openbox based Linux distribution, you could give ADeskBar – a lightweight application launcher for Openbox -, a try. Even though it’s especially designed for Openbox, ADeskbar also works great under Gnome or XFCE.
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The innovative idea behind collaborative video editor ‘Novacut’ has been a hot topic of conversation with many members of the open-source and multimedia communities in the last few weeks.
I had the pleasure of chatting with Jason Gerard DeRose, the lead developer of Novacut, and asked him whether he was disappointed with the failure to meet the crowd-sourced funding target and what this means for the future of the video editor project that has gotten everyone talking….
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qxv is a single binary, and does not depend on any other files (despite, of course, dynamically linked libraries, whatever they are).
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For my senior design project in school, I decided to design and write a program for teaching sign languages on Linux. It was in a “working prototype” stage when I presented it in school in April. I had a few more things I wanted to get right before announcing it to the whole FOSS world, but I just got confirmation from Nigel Babu that the last known bug in RC3 is fixed, so it’s time to release!
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UFW (Uncomplicated Firewall) is the default firewall (iptables) configuration tool for Ubuntu and while it’s a great tool, it might scare those not very familiar with the command line. Gufw on the other hand (a graphical user interface for UFW) makes UFW truly an uncomplicated firewall for Ubuntu and lets you easily allow or block pre-configured services, common P2P or individual IPs or ports and so on.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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As I’ve mentioned before, I used to be really excited about KDE. It’s been a while since I last looked at KDE. Well, technically, I couldn’t really do much there. But there’s this time I was able to look at it. Let me just say that I no longer agree that it’s uglier than Gnome.
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I have also come to realise that Linux is like ice cream. You can have any flavour you like, unlike Microsoft’s Windows where all you get to choose are which version is going to crash the least and how many cups of tea you can make while it boots up. PCLinuxOS comes with different versions of the desktop (e.g. KDE, Gnome, LXDE) which means you can choose what you like best in terms of look & feel, and applications, for example. There are other versions of Linux, for which the lingo is ‘distros’, like Ubuntu (the most popular), Fedora, Linux Mint and OpenSUSE.
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Gentoo Crowd
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In this Podcast dabbott aka comprookie2000, talks about Thomas Kahle’s (tom111) arch tool tatt, logtailer, a multi log tailer, iptables and asterisk and a bash mail script.
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Sabayon 5.4, released at the end of last month (September, 2010), is the latest version of the Gentoo-based, multi-purpose Linux distribution. This is the third release this year. The other two releases, Sabayon 5.2 and 5.3 were released in March and June respectively. Going by the recent history of this distribution (there were four releases in 2009), do not be surprised if we get one more release before the end of the year.
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I’ve done quite a bit of experimenting/learning with BSDs over the past couple of years, and I definitely recommend that Linux users set aside a box, do some installs and set aside some time to configure and use BSD.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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In the October 2010 issue:
* LXDE: Configure LXPanel
* LXDE: Get To Know Obconf
* LXDE: Add Wallpapers, Panel Decorations
* OpenOffice 3.2, Part 5: Draw
* PCLinuxOS Takes Center Stage
* Repo Spotlight: Know Your System With Systeminfo
* DeaDBeeF: A Lightweight Linux Audio Player
* Computer Languages A to Z: Pascal
* Reading Barnes & Noble eBooks On PCLinuxOS
* Getting Help In The Forum
* Firefox Add-ons: Rain or Shine, Forecastfox Tells All
* Two new testimonials
* And much more!
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Mandriva’s XFCE is a lightweight distro but I don’t think so because it failed to install in my PC that supports KDE 4.5, Windows 7 and Vista. then How can I say it as light weight.But it installed successfully on my friend PC who has high end Configuration.
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Red Hat Family
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Debian Family
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The Ubuntu 10.10 CDs (Ubuntu and Kubuntu desktop as well as Ubuntu server) are available for purchase in the Canonical store.
Canonical will still provide free CDs through ShipIt (not yet available for Ubuntu 10.10 – already available for Ubuntu 10.10) but if you can afford it, you could buy the CD and help Canonical and Ubuntu.
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You might have read elsewhere that Debian has squeezed out Chromium. As of today, Debian has also squeezed Chromium back in. Does that mean that Debian Developers change their mind too often? Surely not. Rather, it means that the noise around the “squeeze out” has been a bit exaggerated and it would be similarly exaggerated to make noise about the “squeeze in” now.
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Some days ago I have started testing Linux Mint Debian Edition and Archbang.
They have some things in common but a lot more different, why did I pick those to test?, because Arch and Debian are my favorites Linux flavors.
ArchBang is an Arch Linux based distribution, I think it is inspired in CrunchBang which until now is based on Ubuntu, and switching to Debian.
ArchBang features OpenBox on its newly released 2010.09 “Apeiro” release. With the change from LXDE to OpenBox it looks a lot more like Cruchbang Linux.
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Debian GNU/Linux is a great, classic distro. It has a huge repository and features for everyone. It still has room for improvement and it may soon come to pass that the “testing” flavour will be joined by a “continually usable testing” flavour which would be more sure to boot and run usably.
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Raphaël Hertzog wrote a detailed article on the recent activity surrounding the Constantly Usable Testing (CUT) proposal. CUT would be a Debian distribution based on testing, but with significant differences that make it more usable, i.e. more polished and stable. In the article he talks about the potential value of a “rolling” release and how it might work.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The Release Candidate for Ubuntu Maverick was released on September 30. We’re counting down the last remaining days before the final release of Maverick. Overall, I feel all the people involved in the development process have done a excellent job on this release. A pat on the back and a “Nice job!” to everyone who helped to make this release possible.
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Ubuntu 10.10 comes with OpenCL support. OpenCL is a language that allows to access the GPU and other parallel processors. That means that the graphics card’s shaders can be used from within any application. Multimedia or image processing applications like GIMP or GIMP plugins are perfect candidates for this optimisation that is often just called “hardware acceleration”.
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By default Ubuntu uses the Sans font sized 10. This is a much larger default font and font size than most are used to. There are ways of changing this.
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Some, like the since-recanted attack by ex-Fedora community developer Greg DeKoenigsberg, seem openly partisan. The same is true of complaints from Debian developers, who often seem miffed that Ubuntu’s success is built upon their work (as if anything was wrong with that by free software standards).
In other cases, such as the denouncements of Ubuntu because it ships with Mono, the distribution seems unfairly singled out for doing exactly what plenty of other distros are doing. But, of course, other distros are not as popular, so they tend to be overlooked.
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If you don`t like the actual theme of Ubuntu Maverick Meerkat, maybe the First thing you can do is to change this one to another you like. There is a nice collection of themes from Bisigi Project that you can try and sure you will like them( See the complete collection).
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I came across this old image today. The current relevance immediately jumped at me.
All the best, Maverick and the Ubuntu team for the big 10.10!
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Flavours and Variants
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I bring this up because Trisquel feels, to me, to be more about promoting free and open source technology and showing people what can be done with FOSS than it is about ripping out the proprietary blobs. The project is more like a display of positive accomplishment, not a stand against something, and I like that. The Trisquel team has put together a solid distribution which manages to provide a good working platform without removing much functionality.
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I write full reviews of Linux distros over on my other blog, Desktop Linux Reviews. Sometimes, however, there are distro updates that are interesting but not quite worth doing a full review. So I’ll be covering those over here on Eye On Linux; I call them “Quick Looks.”
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Quite a lot of the improvements in this release of Peppermint Ice are “under the hood” so it won’t rock anybody’s world in terms of new desktop features, but based on my experience with it, I’d say it’s definitely worth an upgrade if you are already running Peppermint Ice. If you aren’t, it’s also worth checking it out.
Peppermint Ice is a Live CD distro, so you can just pop the CD in and boot into the Live CD desktop. You don’t need to do an actual install unless you like it enough to want to run it from your hard disk.
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While details are slim about the device so far, its rumored to be running on a Linux OS. The screen, while probably small, supposedly has an amazing resolution. We can safely assume The Jungle will have some sort of built-in WiFi, maybe even 3G capabilities, as well as some amazing battery life and a killer processor.
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Phones
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Android
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SpiderOak is a grand service. Should one need to access documents from a remote server, sync data between a Mac, Windows or Linux device, share documents with others, or simply backup you data safely, securely and automatically, SpiderOak is for you.
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OMG! Reader Nicholas Ipsen dropped by our inbox earlier today to show us some sweet Ubuntu font action in Android.
As you might expect, the new font that Canonical contracted type foundry Dalton Maag to design looks brilliant on Google’s mobile operating system.
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Beem is an XMPP client which, as yet, offers a fairly basic range of options but is under active development. There are a few quirks that mean it’s probably not quite ready for prime time yet, most notably the fact that it doesn’t always handle disconnections very well.
One of the biggest limitations currently is that you can only configure a single XMPP account. Ideally I’d like to be able to have several, which I could enable and disable individually.
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Sub-notebooks/OLPC
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In an Xconomy interview, Walter Bender has announced he’s rejoining the main OLPC movement. He’s working with Chuck Kane and the OLPC Association in building the usage of the Sugar Learning Platform in deployments.
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Next, Negroponte says the actual XO-3, which will follow the CES 2011 computer, will not be ready until 2012. The XO-3 will use Linux, be targeted at the developing world, and use a plastic form factor with a dual-mode display.
So that makes me wonder what, exactly, that Marvell is funding? If XO-3 development, wouldn’t that last till the product launch in 2012? If the interim Marvell device, why is it so different from the XO-3? And last but not least, why $5.6 million? That seems like such an odd number.
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The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organization has received a $5.6 million grant from hardware component maker Marvell to fund the development of an Android-powered mobile tablet based on a Marvell reference design. The product, which is expected to be ready for a public demonstration at CES next year, is intended for the developed world.
In a statement to Xconomy, OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte explained that the Android tablet will likely not have OLPC branding and is a transitional step as the organization works to develop the XO-3, a tablet device for the developing world that will have more ambitious hardware and will run the Linux-based Sugar learning environment. The XO-3 will ship in 2012 and the Android tablet will supposedly be ready in 2011.
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The One Laptop Per Child program has made another step towards the tablet they plan to release… well, sometime in the future. They’ve received a $5.6 million grant towards development of the platform, which will likely include much hardware from Marvell.
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Tablets
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Thanks to the Android open source OS, “AlessiTab” can be continually updated and enriched with new functions.
The icons on the main screen of the Alessi applications enable users to connect with a carefully chosen selection of interactive services with just a single touch: real time news updates from news agency ANSA and weather services from Epson, recipes from the Cucchiaio d’Argento recipe book published by Editoriale Domus, 13,000 radio stations from all over the world via the Radiotime application, nutritional information from the INRAN Institute, presentations of the DOKI system for a new concept of domotics. Thanks to its Wi-Fi connection,
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Subsonic is a free, opensource, web-based media streamer, providing ubiquitous access to your music. Listen to your favorite music where ever you are and you can even share your songs with friends and family usnig Subsonic online media streaming service.
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The community around OpenESB is actually fairly active, and they (or, as it includes ForgeRock where I now work, perhaps I should say “we”) want OpenESB to stay around. But what do you do if the project is hosted somewhere under the control of a disinterested party? There’s no huge crime or disagreement to “justify” a fork, but on the other hand any new plans really will need the source and the community presence hosted in a way that allows the interested parties can change and improve things without having to wait for weeks to get replies to requests and risk having them declined if they are deemed inconvenient.
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“The creative lot at agencies have a different lifestyle and attitude. They used to come into the office at 5 pm and start their work. I could not digest that but I learned quite a bit from that experience.” That was the time IBM was looking for talent from outside the IT framework. The Big Blue was scouting for personnel from varied backdrops. “I felt like giving it a shot and I did. I got selected and was made to undergo training for three months. I distinctly remember me wanting to drop out that training. Something inside me told me that this was not my scene. A lot of jargon was thrown at me and I felt I was not able to comprehend them. The I remembered my advertising days. Advertising has a few jargons and I could master them with time. So I decided to stay back and complete the training.”
The training did wonders to him as a professional and he realised the importance of working in an organised, process oriented environment. “The 10 years at IBM were great. It taught me everything. I found the work place challenging my abilities everyday. It is at IBM that he developed the reputation of a business leader with demonstrated ability to tackle tough business and management challenges. People around Sandeep say that he has an innate ability to inspire people, and lead through vision and logic.
At IBM, he transformed an ailing Unix business, while aiding the development of the Linux market across Asean markets, and led significant business transformation for IBM…
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But apart from OpenOffice.org, what else is there? I dug into my own program folders and searched the far corners of the Web to come up with a cache of free and open source productivity applications for a range of desktop productivity tasks: word processing, page layout, graphics editing, illustration, task management, and more. Some of these tools are worthy substitutes for expensive commercial counterparts.
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After 10 years at Sun, half of them as the company’s chief voice on open source, he was one of the first out the door when Oracle’s tentacles closed in. This has liberated him to say what he feels, rather than just what he is allowed to say. It has given him the fire of a good Baptist preacher.
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You don’t have to be a software developer to contribute to an open source project – there are all sorts of ways you can get involved, whether you are experienced or a newcomer, technically minded or otherwise inclined.
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When it comes to open source text editors, it’s hard to find a programmer who hasn’t heard of jEdit. Under development for more than 10 years, it’s a perennial favorite of developers, writers, bloggers, and casual users alike. As Project Leader Björn “Vampire” Kautler succinctly puts it, “It is simply is the best text editor out there, that can be easily customized and extended to eternity and is cross-platform. It supports syntax highlighting of over 200 languages.”
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Events
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So what did we do? I kicked off the day with explaining the galaxy that is Open Source and Free Software. the multitude of projects, the different governance models, how to find out about maturity and sustainability. I showed gource in action -. I love the visualization of open source projects over time that it generates.
We then went to our first round of checkount – build – modify – commit using git, which was fun and rewarding. People could actually learn how stuff works with immediate results.
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Web Browsers
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Internet Explorer falls below 50 percent global marketshare, Chrome usage triples
Oh, IE, it pains us to do this to you. You who once so mightily won in the battle against Netscape Navigator now seem to be losing your war against a battalion of upstarts, relatively fresh faces like Firefox and Chrome. According to StatCounter, IE’s global usage stats have fallen to 49.87 percent, a fraction of a tick beneath half. Firefox makes up the lion share of the rest, at 31.5 percent, while Chrome usage tripled since last year, up to 11.54 percent. Two years ago IE had two thirds of the global market locked down, and even if Internet Explorer 9 is the best thing since ActiveX, well, we just don’t see the tide of this battle turning without MS calling in some serious reinforcements.
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In Europe, IE market share has fallen to 40.26% in September this year from 46.44% in September last year. While in North America IE is still above 50% at 52.3% followed by Firefox at 27.21% and Chrome at 9.87%. The rise of Google Chrome in North America has also been impressive and in June it overtook Safari for the first time.
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SaaS
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ABC News Radio and StatusNet, the open-source microblogging service that serves as the foundation for identi.ca, have “unofficially” partnered to unveil a newswire for the radio service.
While the partnership may not be “official”, it is yet another vote of confidence in the Twitter-alternative and the open Web.
According to Dan Patterson, the digital platform manager for ABC News Radio, the partnership is not yet official because the two companies haven’t done the “lawyerly dance”, among other things. In his explanation of why ABC chose to work with StatusNet, Patterson writes a mini-treatise for an open, distributed Internet.
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Oracle/OOo/Java
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So excuse the headline on this blog, but OpenOffice is not dead per se. It will continue to live out its existence breathing in the air on planet Oracle. The suite itself is mature, stable and works cross-platform, so there should be no major reason to worry about its future growth and well-being.
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It’s not that Oracle wishes ill of The Document Foundation and its take on OpenOffice, LibreOffice. Oracle just isn’t going to be having anything to do with it.
When The Document Foundation released the beta of LibreOffice, the group wanted to speed up the rate of changes to the notoriously slow OpenOffice office suite software project and make significant improvements to OpenOffice, such as adding Microsoft OpenXML format compatibility to the program. This suggestion received support from all the major open-source and Linux powers: Red Hat, Novell, and Ubuntu. Even Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, announced that they’d place LibreOffice in next spring’s update of Ubuntu.
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JavaOne seemed to be near extinction last year, but Oracle’s acquisition of Sun revived it. We talked with some notable attendees to see how the conference went.
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If it sounds familiar, it may be becuase it is based on the OpenDS project Sun used to work on. My old colleague Ludovic Poitou has joined ForgeRock to look after it for us, and I am keen to see a co-developer community grow around it in addition to the substantial deployer community that is now free to migrate from OpenDS to OpenDJ. There’s plenty more about it in the press release and FAQ.
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Seven years after developers started working on ZFS, crypto functions have been added to the file system. The functions will probably be part of the forthcoming Solaris Express 2010. While no implementation details are available so far, a blog post talks about “support for encrypted ZFS datasets,” which points towards an encryption of the entire file system. The ZFS crypto project’s web site lists targets such as a per-dataset policy for enabling algorithms and key lengths as well as an encrypted swap area.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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As can be seen in today’s announcement, today is my first day as full-time Executive Director at the Software Freedom Conservancy. For four years, I have worked part-time on nights, weekends, and lunch times to keep Conservancy running and to implement and administer the services that Conservancy provides to its member projects. It’s actual quite a relief to now have full-time attention available to carry out this important work.
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Good morning my relations. Today is not such a great day. In the United States the Obama administration is actively seeking a new law to legally mandate the forced introduction of insecure back doors and support for mass surveillance into all communication systems. Specifically targeted are Internet VoIP and messaging systems.
Speaking on behalf of the GNU Telephony project, we do intend to openly defy such a law should it actually come to pass, so I want to be very clear on this statement. It is not simply that we will choose to publicly defy the imposition of such an illegitimate law, but that we will explicitly continue to publicly develop and distribute free software (that is software that offers the freedom to use, inspect, and modify) enabling secure peer-to-peer communication privacy through encryption that is made available directly to anyone worldwide. Clearly such software is especially needed in those places, such as in the United States, where basic human freedoms and dignity seem most threatened.
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Openness/Sharing
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Watching television at his Boston home in January this year, Patrick Meier, a director of the crowdsourcing internet platform Ushahidi saw early reports that a devastating earthquake had caused massive damage to Haiti. Within 40 minutes, he was working with a colleague to set up a dedicated Haiti-focused website, and in less than an hour the site was gathering intelligence from people on the ground.
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Open Access/Content
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With both private and public schools facing budget issues in tough economic times, it’s no surprise perhaps to hear a university employee say that the school is re-evaluating distance learning opportunities. But when an MIT employee made a statement to that effect at the OECD’s Institutional Management in Higher Education earlier last month, some media outlets erroneously reported it as an indication that MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) was considering implementing a paywall.
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Programming
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Countless developers use jQuery software tools today to provide advanced Web sites and to ease the difficulties of spanning multiple browsers.
Starting in about two weeks, though, they will start being able to extend their reach to the fast-growing world of the mobile Web as well. That’s when Mozilla plans to release the alpha version of jQuery Mobile, jQuery founder John Resig told attendees of the Future of Web Apps conference here Tuesday.
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I wanted a reasonably sized photographic image with a 24-bit alpha channel. So I used a JPEG for what JPEGs are good for and a PNG for what PNGs are good for…
I combined them using an HTML5 canvas element and then inserted into the DOM. The results look the same as using a normal 24-bit PNG but are one-half to one-sixth the size. In one case we got a 573KB 24-bit PNG down to a 49KB JPEG with a 4KB PNG alpha-mask!
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Last week, my fellow Guardian columnist Helienne Lindvall published a piece headlined The cost of free, in which she called it “ironic” that “advocates of free online content” (including me) “charge hefty fees to speak at events”.
Lindvall says she spoke to someone who approached an agency I once worked with to hire me for a lecture and was quoted $10,000-$20,000 (£6,300-£12,700) to speak at a college and $25,000 to speak at a conference. Lindvall goes on to talk about the fees commanded by other speakers, including Wired editor Chris Anderson, author of a book called “Free” (which I reviewed here in July 2009), Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde and marketing expert Seth Godin. In Lindvall’s view, all of us are part of a united ideology that exhorts artists to give their work away for free, but we don’t practice what we preach because we charge so much for our time.
It’s unfortunate that Lindvall didn’t bother to check her facts. I haven’t been represented by the agency she referenced for several years, and in any event, no one has ever paid me $25,000 to appear at any event. Indeed, the vast majority of lectures I give are free (see here for the past six months’ talks and their associated fees – out of approximately 95 talks I’ve given in the past six months, only 11 were paid, and the highest paid of those was £300). Furthermore, I don’t use an agency for the majority of my bookings (mostly I book myself – I’ve only had one agency booking in the past two years). I’m not sure who the unfortunate conference organiser Lindvall spoke to was – Lindvall has not identified her source – but I’m astonished that this person managed to dig up the old agency, since it’s not in the first 400 Google results for “Cory Doctorow”.
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Looks like NYC subway stations are getting cell phone service earlier than expected: Six stations—Along 14th St., and at 23rd St. and 8th Ave.—should be wired by the end of 2011. It will be both convenient and annoying.
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Google sees the adoption of Google Apps at schools and colleges as vital to the growth of the productivity suite; an outlook that Microsoft also seems to emulate as well. The strategy makes sense; not only do educational institutions represent a huge market for Google Apps and other productivity suites, but schools and colleges are where many people get trained, start relying on, and form brand allegiances to productivity apps. Today, New York is the fifth U.S. state to adopt “Google Apps,” joining Oregon, Colorado, Iowa, and Maryland.
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Science
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The 2010 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine goes to British researcher Robert Edwards for pioneering in vitro fertilization, or IVF, a process that has led to roughly 4 million births since it was first successfully done in 1978.
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A pair of new studies — one in the United States, another in Germany — reports strong evidence that diabetes rates climb with increasing air pollution in the form of of tiny airborne particles.
“Although previous studies had hinted at this possibility, the data were mostly from small studies or from animals exposed to high levels of particulate matter,” notes Aruni Bhatnagar, a cardiovascular researcher at the University of Louisville in Kentucky who did not take part in either study. He says the new data provide important and more rigorous evidence that real-world pollution may be tampering with blood sugar control in a large and growing number of people.
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In 2001, Pat Gelsinger, then the chief technology officer of Intel, made a striking prediction about the future of microchips. If current design trends continue, he said, microchips will be running at 30 gigahertz by the end of the decade. However, he added, at this speed they will be generating more heat per cubic centimetre than a nuclear reactor.
Sure enough, by 2003, Intel and other chip-makers had found that their plans for faster processors were running into trouble. For a chip to speed up, its transistors need to be shrunk, but smaller transistors must consume less power or they overheat. With chip-makers unable to keep to the reduced heat budget, the race for faster chips hit a wall (see diagram).
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Robots are a major part of the cultural fabric of Japan; they’re performing weddings, buying groceries and keeping people company. A team of researchers at the University of Tokyo is taking this robotic cultural immersion a step further — they’re making animal-robot hybrids. Sort of.
RatCar is a brain-machine interface that uses a rat’s brain signals to control a motorized robot. The rat hangs in the air, and the robot does what the rat’s limbs would do. It’s far from the only brain-robot locomotion contraption, but it’s arguably one of the strangest.
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Two Russian-born scientists working in Britain won the prize for investigating the strange properties of graphene, a form of carbon one atom thick.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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A Hull man has been given a suspended sentence for looking at hundreds of women’s medical records.
Dale Trever, 22, was working for Hull Primary Care Trust as a “care data quality facilitator” when he accessed medical records of 413 female patients. The court was told he accessed records 597 times.
He started his snooping when a female work colleague turned him down for a date, the East Riding Mail reports.
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A French official told AFP that police had seized weapons “including a Kalashnikov (rifle) and a pump-action shotgun, as well as ammunition” in Tuesday’s raids.
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About a century ago, Gandhiji started the world famous ‘Satyagraha’ in order to oppose the identification scheme of the government in South Africa. Hundred years later, India is repeating a similar programme under the pretext of unique ID numbers
As the old saying goes, ‘Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it’. It seems that both the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) and ultimately the Indian government have overlooked history and even the Mahatma’s views while going ahead with the ambitious and expensive unique identification number (UIDN) programme.
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An elaborate charade has begun with the rolling out of the first Aadhaar unique identity (UID) numbers by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress chairperson Sonia Gandhi in a tribal district of Maharashtra. The 12-digit number for each citizen is supposed to achieve pilferage-free delivery of services to the underprivileged.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The Tea-Party crowd, the hardcore anti-science extremists, can’t stomach the scientific reality that mutiple independent studies back Mann’s core finding Hockey Stick: Recent global warming is unprecedented in magnitude and speed and cause. And so Cuccinelli goes after Mann and the University of Virginia once again. His new case is infinitely weaker but his fervor has reached OCD levels.
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It’s called the “10/10/10 Global Work Party.” The goal of the day is to send a message to our political leaders: If we can get to work, you can get to work too — on the legislation and the treaties that will protect this planet for our children and grandchildren.
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One in five of the world’s plant species – the basis of all life on earth – are at risk of extinction, according to a landmark study published today.
At first glance, the 20% figure looks far better than the previous official estimate of almost three-quarters, but the announcement is being greeted with deep concern.
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One of the most extraordinary people I have met in 10 days of travelling around Peru and Ecuador has been Alberto Acosta. He’s head of Ecuador’s leading research group now, but until 2007 was the second most powerful man in the country after the president, Rafael Correa. He was not only charged with masterminding the new constitution but was head of the assembly, or parliament, a founder of the ruling political party and minister of energy of the country that depends on oil.
But Acosta will go down in my memory as the world’s only serving oil minister to have ever proposed leaving some of a country’s black stuff in the ground. That’s like Dracula renouncing blood, or a sports minister saying it’s better to play hide and seek than football. It just does not happen.
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Greenpeace has been banned from intercepting a deep sea oil-drilling ship after the protest group sent “wave after wave” of swimmers into the north Atlantic to stop the vessel from reaching its drilling site.
The US oil giant Chevron was granted a wide-ranging interdict, or injunction, by judges in Edinburgh today, ordering Greenpeace to stop any further direct action preventing the Stena Carron from reaching its destination or impeding its “lawful business”.
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When environmental campaigners began tracking a hi-tech South Korean trawler off the coast of West Africa, they were looking for proof of illegal fishing of dwindling African stocks. What they uncovered was an altogether different kind of travesty: human degradation so extreme it echoed the slavery they thought had been abolished more than a century ago.
“It was horrendous,” said Duncan Copeland, a senior campaigner at the Environmental Justice Foundation, who boarded the South Korean-flagged trawler at the end of 2008 with naval forces from Sierra Leone.
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California’s governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has come out fighting for his green legacy, going on the attack against the oil companies and rightwing groups bankrolling a campaign to suspend AB32, a landmark environmental law.
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Finance
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I mean that literally. As Politico recently pointed out, every major contender for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination who isn’t currently holding office and isn’t named Mitt Romney is now a paid contributor to Fox News. Now, media moguls have often promoted the careers and campaigns of politicians they believe will serve their interests. But directly cutting checks to political favorites takes it to a whole new level of blatancy.
Arguably, this shouldn’t be surprising. Modern American conservatism is, in large part, a movement shaped by billionaires and their bank accounts, and assured paychecks for the ideologically loyal are an important part of the system. Scientists willing to deny the existence of man-made climate change, economists willing to declare that tax cuts for the rich are essential to growth, strategic thinkers willing to provide rationales for wars of choice, lawyers willing to provide defenses of torture, all can count on support from a network of organizations that may seem independent on the surface but are largely financed by a handful of ultrawealthy families.
And these organizations have long provided havens for conservative political figures not currently in office. Thus when Senator Rick Santorum was defeated in 2006, he got a new job as head of the America’s Enemies program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a think tank that has received funding from the usual sources: the Koch brothers, the Coors family, and so on.
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This is a story about how an economist and his buddies tricked the people of Brazil into saving the country from rampant inflation. They had a crazy, unlikely plan, and it worked.
Twenty years ago, Brazil’s inflation rate hit 80 percent per month. At that rate, if eggs cost $1 one day, they’ll cost $2 a month later. If it keeps up for a year, they’ll cost $1,000.
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California, if you didn’t know, has one of the highest tax rates in the nation. On top of federal rates that can reach 39% of each additional dollar, California takes up to 11% of each additional dollar. This means that top earners pay half of their marginal income (the part above a certain amount) in income taxes. At 50% of each additional dollar going to taxes, it is no wonder that people devote such tremendous effort to tax avoidance schemes. To do anything else wouldn’t be sensible.
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The full cost of the 2008 banking crisis in Ireland will be laid bare tomorrow when the republic’s government is expected to admit that bailing out Anglo Irish Bank will cost at least €30bn (£25.9bn) – equivalent to a fifth of the country’s national output.
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Virtually everyone has had the experience of being forced to pay a late fee or a bank penalty because of some fine-print provision that we overlooked. Sometimes, begging by good customers can win forbearance, but usually we are held to the written terms of the contract, no matter how buried or convoluted the clause in question may be.
That is the way it works for the rest of us, but apparently this is not the way the banks do business, at least when those at the other end of the contract are ordinary homeowners. As a number of news reports have shown in recent weeks, banks have been carrying through foreclosures at a breakneck pace and freely ignoring the legal niceties required under the law, such as demonstrating clear ownership to the property being foreclosed.
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The proposal is a long-delayed response to the 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, which specified reforms to better organize the intelligence community and to avoid a repeat of the 20S01 attacks. The law required that the Treasury secretary issue regulations requiring financial institutions to report cross-border transfers if deemed necessary to combat terrorist financing.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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The courts are wrestling with whether new technology requires them to think differently about what is a reasonable expectation of privacy.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Many of these strategies are already being employed and Doctorow enumerates several: 40,000 people in the US sued by the record industry; mandatory DRM requirements for several digital distribution channels negotiated by Sony, Apple, Audible, and others; three strikes rule in effect in France that disconnects anyone (and their family) from the internet for “unsubstantiated accusations of infringement”; efforts by Viacom to prevent Google and other companies from allowing anyone to “upload content to the internet without reviewing its copyright status in advance.” This last one seems particularly intrusive and Big Brotherly to me because what Viacom wants is for a court “to order Google to make all user-uploaded content public so that Viacom can check it doesn’t infringe copyright – it thinks that its need to look at my videos is greater than my need to, say, flag a video of my two-year-old in the bath as private and visible only to me and her grandparents.” The incredible arrogance of Viacom is that it wants to court to validate the presumption that everything posted on YouTube and similar sites violates copyrights. So, for example, if this came to pass, would a video of someone watching an NFL game on a network be a copyright violation if it included in the video the actual broadcast in the background? What if you post a video of someone dancing to music? Would the presumption be that the music was pirated? Such a ruling, Doctorow says, “would shutter every message board, Twitter, social networking service, blog, and mailing list in a second.” If he’s correct, the impact on culture, society, daily life would be immeasurable.
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UK Internet providers have now banded together to challenge anti-P2P law firms who try to turn thousands of IP addresses into customer names—and a London court will hear their objections to the entire process.
The ISPs were burned last month when a massive e-mail leak from the top anti-P2P firm in the UK, ACS Law, exposed their own spreadsheets of customer names matched to the pornographic films they allegedly downloaded. The revelation of this embarrassing (and unproven) behavior was compounded by the fact that several of the ISPs were taking no security precautions, instead e-mailing their Excel spreadsheets unencrypted and without passwords.
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BSkyB, one of the UK’s largest broadband providers, has said it will no longer cooperate with the requests of controversial solicitors’ firm ACS:Law and that it will challenge them in court, after around 8,000 of its customers had their personal information leaked online.
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Contractually, the ISP would be reasonably justified in cutting off a user from the internet, as bot infection would be contrary to the terms of the ISP’s acceptable-use policy.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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BT is seeking a moratorium on legal applications to obtain details of its customers who are alleged to have illegally shared files online.
The firm outlined its stance following a high-profile data breach at London law firm ACS:Law last week.
The leak saw thousands of customers’ details from various ISPs – including BT-owned PlusNet – published online.
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On the back of the ACS:Law debacle, there has been a lot of interest in the way in which firms like ACS:Law and Davenport Lyons obtained customer information from internet service providers linking IP addresses to broadband account holders. The information was obtained in English courts through what is known as a Norwich Pharmacal order (NPO, named after the case in which it was first established). This order allows a potential claimant to ask for a third party to disclose the identity of an unidentified defendant.
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In the High Court today, UK ISPs BT and Plusnet refused to hand over subscriber data to lawyers acting for independent record label, Ministry of Sound. Their objections followed the catastrophic subscriber data leak from ACS:Law two weeks ago. The hearing was adjourned until January 2011.
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Copyrights
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Finding CC licensed images and using them properly is something many people seem to struggle with: finding them can be straight-forward, but many sites don’t provide copy and paste reuse code that complies with the license. Xpert, a project of University of Nottingham, has launched an image search tool that helps with this. Xpert Attribution tool searches Wikimedia Commons and Flickr and provides an easy way to get the image with the attribution information overlaid, or (even better, in my opinion) with RDFa suitable for embedding. I’ve combined the two below (downloading the image with attribution, and adding the structured-data enriched embed code below it).
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The creators of the BitTorrent-only movie The Tunnel are celebrating today. After being refused an IMDb listing on several occasions, the makers wrote an open letter to the Amazon-owned company which was featured in dozens of news articles. Today, the horror movie, which was funded by people buying individual frames of the production, has been accepted into the IMDb databases.
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When we rolled out Hudson for CC code last month, I already knew that I wanted to have test coverage reporting. There’s simply no reason not to: it provides a way to understand how complete your tests are, and when combined with branch testing, gives you an easy way to figure out what tests need to be written (or where to target your test writing efforts).
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A legion of Creative Commons (CC) Superheroes is already at work, using our amazing tools to save people from failed sharing all over the planet. GlaxoSmithKline, a major pharmaceutical company, recently released its entire malarial data set using CC tools, speeding the urgent search for new medicines to tackle the devastating disease. Online communities at Flickr, SoundCloud, and Vimeo are making creative works available for anyone in the world to use freely and legally through license adoption. Publisher Pratham Books has begun to CC license more and more of the textbooks it provides to 14 million children in India, lifting them from a future of poverty and miseducation. When the earthquake struck Haiti in January 2010, Google and Wired used CC tools to keep information widely available to relief workers, journalists, and governments worldwide.
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Now Jay sends in some news that continues to build on the legend of Minecraft, pointing to a story claiming that Persson is making $350,000 per day. With alpha software, and without going after “pirates” who are supposedly destroying the industry. Yeah. Apparently, he’s selling a copy every 3 seconds. And he’s done all this with no distribution. No retail deals. Just creating a really good game, getting people interested in it, not treating them like criminals, and giving them a reason to buy.
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The Internet Policy Task Force of the United States Commerce Department today issued a Notice of Inquiry (NOI) seeking comment from any interested stakeholders – including rights holders, internet service providers, and consumers – on the “protection of copyrighted works online and the relationship between copyright law and innovation in the internet economy.”
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Textbooks are like dinosaurs: clunky, archaic, and not readily available. That’s why Neeru Khosla founded CK12 Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to lowering the cost of educational materials and making them more freely accessible around the world. Khosla recruited teachers from all over America to help write CK12 textbooks and published all the material under Creative Commons licenses.
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For years, one of the points we’ve raised in answering the movie industry’s $200 million challenge to us (i.e., “how do you keep making $200 million movies?”) is that, in part, it’s asking the wrong question. No one asks “how do we keep making $10,000 computers?” Instead, they look for ways to make them cheaper (and better, at the same time). But in the world of Hollywood accounting, there’s little incentive to make cheaper movies (sometimes the incentive goes the other way). And, we keep showing how the world is reaching a place where it’s cheaper and cheaper to make good movies. We’ve pointed out nice examples of people making high quality movies for next to nothing. The idea is not that movies should be made for nothing, but that the technology is making it so that movies can be made for less. In fact, with two of the examples of cheap movie making we’ve highlighted, the makers later went on to score deals to do higher end movies for more reasonable budgets.
[...]
The technology keeps getting better and the cost to do such high quality work keeps decreasing. This movie did cost $550,000 to make — involving a 14-person team. But, that’s a hell of a lot less than it would have cost not so long ago for anything of this level of quality.
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ACTA
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The United States and European Union have reached a compromise over the use of prestigious geographical food names like Champagne and Parma, clearing one of the last obstacles to an international pact to battle the growing trade in counterfeit goods.
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Reports that negotiations on the controversial agreement have ended alarmed MEPs, who have called on the Commission to explain the matter as soon as possible.
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The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement has always been the exception to the general rule for international negotiations – closed participation rather than open, secretive rather than transparent – so it should come as no surprise that the negotiations have come to an end in an unusual manner. The only thing that is absolutely clear is that there will be no further rounds of negotiation as the latest round in Japan is being described as the final round of talks. Other than that, the conclusion seems open to considerable speculation and spin.
From the U.S. perspective, the negotiations are done and ACTA is nearly a reality. USTR Ambassador Ron Kirk has been quoted as saying that there are solutions to even the toughest issues and that nearly all parties have agreed to them. Another U.S. official admitted that there were still as many as six issues without agreement, including two on border measures and another from the Internet chapter. The EU has been even less supportive, with an official quoted as saying “we’ve come a long way but we must still close the remaining gaps without which there will be no agreement.” Moreover, several European Parliament Members are already calling for a halt to the deal. Meanwhile, Japanese officials have acknowledged that there are issues that require further discussion back home and that “in that sense we haven’t gotten agreement.”
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Four members of the European Parliament on Tuesday called for the international anti-counterfeiting trade agreement (ACTA) to be halted.
The news comes after reports that the controversial accord had been “concluded” in Japan on Friday. The MEPs, Greek Socialist Stavros Lambrinidis, French Socialist Francoise Castex, Czech center-right Zuzana Roithova and German Socialist Alexander Alvaro, have long argued for the negotiations to be more transparent and were outraged that the U.S. prevented the E.U. from publishing the proposed agreement earlier this year.
Andy Wingo – “GNU in the Cloud”
Credit: TinyOgg
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10.04.10
Posted in News Roundup at 7:53 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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The canton, in fact, “should fire those and hire more flexible people,” Pogson suggested. “Seriously, why would an employer tolerate insubordination? There are thousands of people ready, willing and able to work with GNU/Linux.
“If GNU/Linux gives the canton the efficiency and performance it needs, why should employees be allowed to say, ‘No’?” he added. “That would not be tolerated in any place where I have worked.”
At Pogson’s current employer, “we brought in GNU/Linux with little fanfare, just swapping it for dead/dying XP machines, and there has been no fuss at all,” he noted. “Why are the canton’s employees different — or is that just hype by the media to sell papers?”
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1) Total cost of ownership – Despite what the marketing material from select proprietary software companies might like you to believe, the software provided by proprietary vendors comes at a cost. There’s something to be said for having the ability to control the cost of your data and the software that runs it.
By using Linux, one can be assured that the future of any projects enabled by this open source solution will be in firm control of those who are running the controls. No faceless company is going to come along and suddenly change the rules as to how you run your projects or how their software can be used. With Linux based options in your arsenal, you’re in control of your data. From beginning to end, you have control over how much or how little your company spends on Linux solutions.
2) Updates are automatic – For many desktop Linux users, it’s something that we often take for granted. When we go to update our desktop operating system, we also have the option to update the software installed on our system as well…automatically. 1
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Prize drawing for a free 10-year subscription — Linux Magazine celebrates its 10-year anniversary with the November 2010 issue, which includes a free archive DVD with a complete library of all previous issues.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Ric Wheeler is the File System Group Manager at Red Hat, and Jeremy Allison caught up with him at LinuxCon in Sao Paulo, Brazil earlier this month. Ric tells Jeremy how he got into file system development as a grad student, then how he progressed into building storage arrays, eventually becoming a Linux advocate. From there, Jeremy and Ric talk about the direction that Linux is headed and the future of desktop computing. At the very end of the video, you can even hear about Ric’s brush with Hollywood!
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Applications
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CloudSN (Cloud Services Notifications) is an application similar to Specto (which is not maintained anymore): it can display notifications when you have new emails (POP3 and IMAP), new Identi.ca messages, Google Reader unread items or it can watch any RSS feed for changes. It used to also work with Twitter but since Twitter introduced OAuth for all apps, CloudSN stopped working with Twitter (hopefully it will be fixed soon).
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One of the best features of Linux is its flexibility, and nowhere is that more obvious than the desktop. Your Linux desktop can have the look and feel of any desktop environment you want. One reason for this flexibility is the ability to add and remove small applications to better the desktop experience, like desktop docks Cairo-Dock and Avant Window Navigator.
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DockBarX is a taskbar with grouping and group manipulation which works as an applet for both the GNOME Panel and Avant Window Navigator. DockBarX 0.39.8 (codename 0.40 release candidate) has just been released, bringing 2 changes:
* The tooltip for pinned programs with no open windows shows name and description now, just as normal Gnome launchers do.
* The width of the window list frame is slightly smaller.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Making your application a full-fledged participant in the federated social web
is not easy, but gradual and incremental improvements can make your users’
activities visible to others.
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Games
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Arcade shooter game Steel Storm Episode 1 version 1.0 is released which was only available as beta until now. The game is quite addictive with fast paced action that wants you to annihilate hordes of enemies . Episode 1 is available as free download for Linux, Mac and Windows users.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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GNOME Desktop
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This is a bit atypical for OMG! Ubuntu! but this morning Bryen Yuko Yunashko, also known as suseROCKS, reported that he was robbed for many valuable gadgets during his travels in Europe. As a user Bryan has dedicated much of his life to raising awareness of accessibility in technology, and this theft has robbed him not only of valuable data but of the tools he uses to increase his quality of life given his disability.
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Our kid Graham has had a rough time of it on the internet recently. His article for our sister site TechRadar, “The trouble with Linux: there’s too much choice”, sparked off a few flamewars. Most notably, Caitlyn Martin over on the O’Reilly blog delivered a no-minced-words response: “Are you intimidated by breakfast cereal?”.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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Smith’s vision for Fedora is about ensuring that the Fedora community is an inclusive place where multiple views and contributions are welcome. Smith doesn’t necessarily have any new or unique tools for building community, but he does bring a different background to the position than past Fedora Project Leaders.
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Debian Family
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The rolling distribution is certainly a good idea but the rules governing it must be designed to avoid any conflict with the process of releasing a stable distribution. Lastly, the mere existence of rolling would finally fix the marketing problem plaguing testing: the name “rolling” does not suggest that the software is not yet ready for prime time.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubucompilator is a tool to easily create Ubuntu / Debian .deb packages. It’s basically a GUI for all the commands required to make a .deb – to understand exactly what it does, take a look at this video…
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As Windows XP fades into the sunset, Ubuntu community members are trying to reach out to millions of Windows XP users to get them to switch to Linux. The Ubuntu pitch is pretty simple: Stick with your existing Windows XP hardware and switch to Ubuntu, rather than spending hundreds (or thousands) of dollars on a new PC running Windows 7. The big question: Will Windows XP users embrace the Ubuntu message?
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Ubuntu is brought to users in their own language by a large community of volunteer translators, who tirelessly work on localizing every part of the operating system on every release.
In this series of interviews we’ll get to know who they are, about their language and how they work.
This week we’re introducing you to Gábor Kelemen, the Hungarian translation team coordinator.
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Flavours and Variants
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In this Screencast I show you the twitter client hotot.
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Phones
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This one is still very much a rumor, but PreCentral is reporting that it’s heard from a “very reliable tipster” who says that Palm is prepping a new phone codenamed “Mansion,” which may or may not be the same device that recently turned up in a certification database under the name P102.
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Android
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The current Android Market — actually Markets, since several carriers have customized it to their own ends — have a long way to go to match the customer and seller experience of iOs. Amazon knows ecommerce better than just about anybody, and the kind of collective intelligence filtering they brought to books would be a big leap forward for app discovery. But I’d caution developers eager to get their apps in front of more buyers via an Amazon store to carefully review the terms and conditions to make sure they’re entering a relationship with a retailing behemoth like Amazon with both eyes open.
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Well, it seems that Google Wave isn’t quite dead yet after all. Turns out, they’re open sourcing a bit more of the project and asking for collaboration. (Ok, someone to take over.)
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We would like to thank our Google Summer of Code students for their hard work this summer. Thanks also to Google for generously supporting our students while they hacked on MINIX. We are also grateful to the MINIX community for all your contributions and feedback. We hope you enjoy the new release.
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Events
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So here we are, all in a room, running POSSE. Capetown, it’s warm, it’s sunny, it’s a very nice place to be. Following the schedule as planned.
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Web Browsers
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The Google Chrome development team has released Chrome 7.0.517.24, the first beta of version 7 of the company’s WebKit-based web browser. Formerly only available in the Chrome developer channel (a.k.a. the Dev channel), the first Chrome 7 beta resolves a number of bugs that lead to crashes in the Dev channel release and introduces several changes and new features.
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Databases
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The primary goal for Firebird 2.5 was to establish the basics for a new threading architecture that is almost entirely common to the Superserver, Classic and Embedded models, taking in lower level synchronization and thread safety generally.
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Business
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I spoke with Augustin ten years ago when I was writing Rebel Code, but until today, I had never met him. So it was good to do so, and to catch up with the many interesting things he has been doing in the world of open source business recently.
Things soon went downhill at VA Linux after those amazing times a decade ago. The dotcom meltdown meant that people stopped buying VA Linux’s boxes almost overnight: revenue went from $60 million a quarter to $15 million in six months. So Augustin set about restructuring the company, turning it from one based around hardware, to one based around the Web. For when it was flush with money, VA Linux had acquired a number of leading sites, including Slashdot, Sourceforge and Freshmeat. These formed the core of a business with $40 million annual revenue – rather a come-down from the $240 million the hardware business had been bringing in just a little while before.
One side effect of this slimming down was that Augustin had effectively made himself redundant. He joined some friends who had set up the venture capital firm Azure Capital Partners. The idea was that Augustin would help them invest in exciting new open source companies. During this time he formulated his view – novel then, but hardly earth-shattering in retrospect – that the next wave of open source companies would be at the application level.
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Alfresco has issued version 3.4 of its open source enterprise content management system (CMS). The latest release is aimed at making it easier for users to collaborate and and share their content as quickly and easily as possible. Discussing the release, Alfresco Software CTO John Newton said that, “The demand for collaboration and social sharing around enterprise content is rising – and content that was once meant just for the intranet is now being re-purposed for the public web, external portals or even to destination sites across the web”.
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BSD
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Today, the Software Freedom Conservancy, Inc., a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, which provides Free, Libre, and Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects with fiscal sponsorship, asset stewardship, license enforcement and license compliance services, announced the appointment of Bradley M. Kuhn as its full-time Executive Director.
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The original license was written by Stallman. Stallman had subsequently written a large number of GNU tools, but the license was his most important contribution.
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Openness/Sharing
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As more and more of the world’s population has gained access to the Internet so a growing number of free and open movements have appeared — including the free and open source software movements, free culture, creative commons, open access and open data.
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Open Data
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During the panel I noted that, if we are interested in improving response times for Freedom of Information (FOI) requests (or, in Canada, Access to Information (ATIP) requests) why doesn’t the Office of the Information Commissioner use a bugzilla type software to track requests?
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The government is to change the law so that all data released under the Freedom of Information Act will be fully accessible to computers.
Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude told the Conservative party conference in Birmingham that the Freedom of Information Act will be amended so that all data released through FoI must be in a reusable and machine readable format.
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Data science is clearly a blend of the hackers’ arts (primarily in steps “O” and “S” above); statistics and machine learning (primarily steps “E” and “M” above); and the expertise in mathematics and the domain of the data for the analysis to be interpretable (that is, one needs to understand the domain in which the data were generated, but also the mathematical operations performed during the “learning” and “optimization”). It requires creative decisions and open-mindedness in a scientific context.
Our next post addresses how one goes about learning these skills, that is: “what does a data science curriculum look like?”
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Open Access/Content
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Electronic content and digital interactivity are everywhere – except in most public school classrooms. How can schools and teachers take advantage of technology to help students excel? What do teachers really need?
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Programming
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Standards/Consortia
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It’s open standard. The good news with HTML5’s standards is they are open and free of patents. For example, WebKit, which keeps a library of open-source software, provides a free layout engine that can be used to create browsers or applications. “You won’t have IBM (IBM) knocking at your door, saying, ‘You’re using our patents,’” says Le Hégaret. This also means you’re not dependent on one vendor’s tools, as with Adobe Flash or Microsoft (MSFT) Silverlight.
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Federal officials on Friday suspended one of the nation’s largest government contractors from receiving new work, alleging that the Northern Virginia company inappropriately went through other firms to gain access to contracts set aside for small companies.
The U.S. Small Business Administration’s action imperils hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for GTSI Corp., a top-50 contractor that has relied on the Pentagon and the rest of the federal government for more than 90 percent of its sales in recent years.
At issue is work GTSI did as a subcontractor for small businesses serving as the prime contractors on government contracts.
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Say the word “inventor” and most people think of a solitary genius toiling in a basement. But two ambitious new books on the history of innovation—by Steven Johnson and Kevin Kelly, both longtime wired contributors—argue that great discoveries typically spring not from individual minds but from the hive mind. In Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, Johnson draws on seven centuries of scientific and technological progress, from Gutenberg to GPS, to show what sorts of environments nurture ingenuity. He finds that great creative milieus, whether MIT or Los Alamos, New York City or the World Wide Web, are like coral reefs—teeming, diverse colonies of creators who interact with and influence one another.
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Divining a possible new market in municipal water management systems, IBM has set up a pilot project in Dubuque, Iowa, to investigate whether cities could both save money and conserve water by monitoring citizens’ usage more closely.
In this project, over 300 home dwellers have been issued smart water meters that wirelessly transit their water usage back to IBM data center, on a periodic basis. The citizens can check into a secure Web site, run by IBM, to see how much water they use, and when the it is being used during the day. The idea is that by studying water usage habits, citizens may be able to tell if they have hidden leaks.
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In an interview with TechCrunch’s Sarah Lacy, Thiel, 42, argued that the high-tech gold rush that has skyrocketed valuations for Internet companies represents a sharp disconnect from the economic malaise that has blanketed much of the world, stagnating median wages and living conditions for most people just 30 miles outside of Silicon Valley.
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Science
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A team of planet hunters led by astronomers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the Carnegie Institution of Washington has announced the discovery of an Earth-sized planet (three times the mass of Earth) orbiting a nearby star at a distance that places it squarely in the middle of the star’s “habitable zone,” where liquid water could exist on the planet’s surface. If confirmed, this would be the most Earth-like exoplanet yet discovered and the first strong case for a potentially habitable one.
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With the introduction of Shader Model 5.0 hardware and the API support provided by OpenGL 4.0 made GPU based geometry tessellation a first class citizen in the latest graphics applications. While the official support from all the commodity graphics card vendors and the relevant APIs are quite recent news, little to no people know that hardware tessellation has a long history in the world of consumer graphics cards. In this article I would like to present a brief introduction to tessellation and discuss about its evolution that resulted in what we can see in the latest technology demos and game titles.
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From My Personal Blog
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I found it gratifying back in the days around 2006 when people in my scientific field knew me in conferences because of my blogs and wanted to hang out with me because of these. The readership grew steadily as long as I kept writing. PZ Myers sees the same type of trend and Techrights, where I wrote over 11,000 posts, is the same. Perhaps I will resume posting in blog form about science later this month or next month. As always, I will separate my professional life, my personal life, and my hobbies (the 4 blogs I run will provide this separation).
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The programme is broken down into several episodes, each delivered in parts due to time limits in YouTube. Here is the first part of the four episodes.
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Security
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On Wednesday, Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn III discussed the military’s cybersecurity strategy after meetings at NATO and the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe. “Like air, sea, land and space, we’re going to have to treat cyberspace as an arena where we need to defend our networks and to be able to operate freely,” he said.
The rhetoric sounds uncannily familiar to what retired CIA and National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden told infosec professionals at the annual security conference Black Hat in July. “Cyber is a domain like land, sea, air, and space,” he said.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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A Reddit user who posted meanspirited remarks about a Flickr user’s photo was called a jerk by the photographer. To get back, the critic posted a tiny thumbnail of the Flickr image (which is licensed Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike) to Reddit along with a complaint about his treatment.
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The co-founder of online encyclopedia Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, on Tuesday slammed whistleblower WikiLeaks over its release of Afghan war documents which he said could “get people killed”.
Wales also expressed irritation over the website’s use of the term “Wiki” in its name, which refers to a site that allows different users to collaborate and make contributions.
“I would distance myself from WikiLeaks, I wish they wouldn’t use the name, they are not a Wiki. A big way they got famous in the first place was by using the word Wiki, which was unfortunate in my view,” he said at a business conference in Kuala Lumpur.
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Technology is such an enabler. Even when it comes, allegedly, to robbing a bank.
For police in Arlington, Texas, believe they have rumbled an inside job of a bank robbery by stumbling on the cell phone of one of the bank’s tellers.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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As part of our work to witness and expose water pollution problems around China, Greenpeace campaigners and photographer Lu Guang visited several areas along the Yangtze River that have been severely affected by industrial water pollution.
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The discoveries are providing new insights into the behavior of our ancestors – but they come at a price. So rapid is the rise in global temperatures, and so great is the rate of disintegration of the world’s glaciers, that archaeologists risk losing precious relics freed from the icy tombs. Wood rots in a few years once freed from ice while rarer feathers used on arrows, wool or leather, crumble to dust in days unless stored in a freezer. As a result, archaeologists are racing against time to find and save these newly exposed wonders.
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Here aboard the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise, we are continuing our three-month science mission in the Gulf of Mexico. We are floating about five miles north of the Deepwater Horizon well site, in water that would have been covered with oil a few months ago, where thousands of gallons of oil were skimmed and burned on the surface while an armada of boats and planes delivered daily bombardment with chemical dispersants that sunk the oil back underwater into the path of any unlucky sea creatures nearby.
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While the water samples taken from way down deep during the trip are off to the lab to get analyzed, the immediate, measurable data obtained by Rainer tells us this; that there’s a clear indication of an oxygen deficiency in the Gulf’s waters, in an area stretching from around the Deepwater Horizon disaster site to 300 miles (500km) to the west. The infamous plume still exists – perhaps not visibly, but the essence of it is still there.
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A criminal with alleged links to gangs across the country and even Afghanistan was nabbed in Purulia with nearly 1 kg of uranium on Sunday. The market value of the radioactive element is said to be about $7 million.
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Our oceans are an absolute marvel – but they are also in a deep, deep crisis. If we don’t act fast, our oceans will continue to deteriorate and vital food sources and essential functions provided to our planet and its people by the oceans could be lost forever. Since healthy oceans underpin our very survival, Greenpeace is today releasing an “Emergency Oceans Rescue Plan” aimed at world leaders, which sets out the best way to save our oceans- something that can and should be done at the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) which takes place later this month in Japan.
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Finance
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Bank of America is delaying foreclosures in 23 states as it examines whether it rushed the foreclosure process for thousands of homeowners without reading the documents.
The move adds the nation’s largest bank to a growing list of mortgage companies whose employees signed documents in foreclosure cases without verifying the information in them.
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FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said Wednesday that his agency hopes to release a report by the end of the year that would detail proposals for helping journalism survive but said one idea that is unlikely to be included is a call for taxing electronic devices to subsidize newspapers and other media platforms.
[...]
He added that “government shouldn’t be picking winners and losers and [any proposal] should be platform neutral.”
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The IMF report – “Will It Hurt? Macroeconomic Effects of Fiscal Consolidation” – implicitly argues that austerity will do more damage than so far admitted.
Normally, tightening of 1pc of GDP in one country leads to a 0.5pc loss of growth after two years. It is another story when half the globe is in trouble and tightening in lockstep. Lost growth would be double if interest rates are already zero, and if everybody cuts spending at once.
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You read that correctly. Some of Germany’s wealthy are demanding that they pay a “Rich man’s tax” They feel that simply contributing to charity is not enough, they feel that they should pay more to support society, because they can. They say they have more money than they need.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation is joining the fight against Righthaven, a company that has been widely criticized for suing a string of news sites that use content belonging to its clients, including, notably, the Las Vegas Review-Journal. The EFF is now defending Democratic Underground, a political site which Righthaven sued last month for using a five-sentence excerpt of a Review-Journal article without permission. The Las Vegas Sun, which has closely been following Righthaven’s moves, says it’s the first time that Righthaven has been hit with a counterclaim.
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In the Steven Spielberg movie Minority Report, police belonging to a special Pre-crime unit arrest people for crimes they would do in the future. It’s science fiction, and it will probably never happen in our lifetimes.
However, the pre-crime concept is coming very soon to the world of Human Resources (HR) and employee management.
A Santa Barbara, Calif., startup called Social Intelligence data-mines the social networks to help companies decide if they really want to hire you.
While background checks, which mainly look for a criminal record, and even credit checks have become more common, Social Intelligence is the first company that I’m aware of that systematically trolls social networks for evidence of bad character.
Using automation software that slogs through Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn, blogs, and “thousands of other sources,” the company develops a report on the “real you” — not the carefully crafted you in your resume. The service is called Social Intelligence Hiring. The company promises a 48-hour turn-around.
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DOCTORS have been disclosing sensitive medical information – and even mocking patients – on Facebook.
The NSW Medical Board has cautioned one doctor for making “flippant and derogatory” comments, and warned others to “think twice” before disclosing patient details on social networking sites.
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And so, the mayor of Mokena gets a history lesson on the First Amendment from the press that the First Amendment enables. There’s something nice about that, though, you would have hoped the history lesson would have come sooner.
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Internet blocking is advocated as an allegedly effective measure against the proliferation of child abuse images. Countries such as the United Kingdom, Sweden and Denmark have been using this technology for years. But a practical test by the German Working Group against Access Blocking and Censorship (AK Zensur) in cooperation with European civil rights advocacy groups has shown: Internet blocking does not fight abuse, in practice it only serves to conceal the failures of politics and police. Websites can remain on blocking lists for years even though they have either been deleted or could be deleted easily and quickly.
How is this possible, and what could be done against illegal sites? Answers are given by a new analysis of current blocking lists from Sweden and Denmark by the Working Group against Access Blocking and Censorship. The group developed software to select, categorise and geo-locate 167 blocked Internet domains as a representative sample of websites blocked in Denmark at the time of the investigation. “The result is a smack in the face of law enforcement authorities”, says Alvar Freude of the Working Group. “Of the 167 listed sites, only three contained material that could be regarded as child pornography.” Two of these three sites had been blocked in Denmark since 2008, and these are, or least were, blocked in Sweden, Norway and Finland as well. These sites were therefore known for at least two years in several countries, and apparently law enforcement authorities did nothing to try and get this illegal content removed.
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With the Senate trying to rush through COICA, the online censorship bill that ignores history and appears to violate both the principles of the First Amendment and due process, a bunch of concerned citizens have been speaking out against the bill, and asking the Senate not to rush it through without at least holding hearings about the massive problems with the bill.
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While there’s been increasing attention paid to the “Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act” (COICA), the proposed law that would allow the government to require ISPs and registrars to block access to websites deemed to be “dedicated to infringing activities,” it looks like the White House (which we had thought was against censoring the internet) appears to be working on a backup plan in case COICA doesn’t pass.
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Quebec City’s Winter Carnival has hired lawyers to defend its beloved Bonhomme Carnaval, whose iconic image is gracing newsstands across the country this week after Maclean’s magazine used it to illustrate an explosive cover story about corruption in la belle province.
“For the past 57 years, the Carnival has invested considerable energy and resources into protecting Bonhomme Carnaval’s outstanding reputation,” said the event’s CEO Jean Pelletier in a statement released Monday afternoon. “We are therefore examining the options available to us to enforce our intellectual property rights.”
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The BlackBerry security jinx is unlikely to be resolved soon. The telecom department has rejected the interception solution offered by Canada’s Research In Motion (RIM) for its secure corporate email service. What’s more is that it has spurned RIM’s technical solution for decoding all chat communication on the popular BlackBerry Messenger service, which contradicts the home ministry’s recent clean chit to the Canadian smartphone maker’s interception solution for its messaging service.
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Taking a cue from the authoritarian regimes of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, American law-enforcement and intelligence agencies are seeking to re-engineer the Internet and other digital communications networks to make them easier to spy on.
In the week since the plan became public, it has been roundly condemned by civil liberties groups and security experts — and rightly so. While the proposal described in Monday’s New York Times probably won’t do much to hinder sophisticated criminals or terrorists, it does threaten to undermine the security of global communications and stifle technological innovation.
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A number of major advertising associations have banded together to announce a self-regulatory program that would allow users to opt out of ad tracking. The program revolves around the awkwardly named “Advertising Option Icon”—an icon that websites could place on their site that would allow users to get more information on why they’re being targeted for ads and let them control their data collection.
The program is based on an industry report from July 2009 titled Self-Regulatory Principles for Online Behavioral Advertising, which focuses on education, transparency, and consumer control when it comes to targeted ads. The participating organizations include the Association of National Advertisers, Direct Marketing Association, the Better Business Bureau, Interactive Advertising Bureau, and Network Advertising Initiative. And, lest you assume this is a small effort, these trade groups represent some 5,000 other companies when it comes to advertising on the Web, so they have some pull.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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“Young people are pretty smart. They’re not going to pay for something they don’t need to,” he said.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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One of the key objectives of the Indian Copyright (Amendment) Bill, 2010, is to protect the authors of underlying works in films (such as scriptwriters, lyricists and music composers) from exploitation by effecting extensive structural changes in the Copyright Act, 1957, and, consequently, in India’s film and music industry. The amendments proposed in the 2010 Bill cover a range of subjects including exhaustion, the regulation of copyright contracts and the role of copyright societies.
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Ars Technica’s Nate Anderson continues his excellent reporting on British law firm ACS:Law, a much-derided firm that sends threatening copyright letters on behalf of pornographers. ACS suffered an Anonymous denial of service attack in September, and inadvertently dumped its entire email repository, which is now available for download all over the net. Today, Anderson digs into ACS’s finances — how much it makes, what it expects to make, and how much paper it goes through printing threatening letters to mail to poorly researched accused infringers.
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Tweet
The O’Reilly Open Source Convention will be returning to Portland, Oregon, July 25-29, 2011.
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The owner of the Las Vegas Review-Journal has for the first time been hit with a counterclaim over its online copyright infringement lawsuit campaign, with attorneys for the Electronic Frontier Foundation accusing the newspaper of entering a “sham” relationship with the Review-Journal’s copyright enforcement partner Righthaven LLC — and accusing Righthaven of copyright fraud.
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The explanation that it’s because of the BitTorrent release is pure speculation. Another article, from TorrentFreak provides some more details, with notes of rejection from IMDB. They claim that the movie needs to be associated with a production company that has a history of releasing movies, in order to get listed at this early stage. However, Tedeschi notes that this is a real production house that has released movies in the past, all of which have been listed in IMDB. The only thing that he sees that’s different is the planned BitTorrent release.
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The article also highlights a filmmaker, Ellen Seidler, who complains about spending hours a day sending emails to file sharing sites, demanding they take down her film. Just think how much better she could be doing if she spent that same time connecting with fans and giving them a reason to buy.
What a waste of space by the LA Times, who shouldn’t be misleading people like this with bogus articles. It’s articles that portray these people as victims, due to their own lack of business initiative, that does real harm to filmmakers. If, instead, the LA Times focused on smart filmmakers who are in the same situation as Carter and Seidler, but instead embraced it and are making real money because of it, they’d be helping. Instead, they’re just making more of a mess.
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In the meantime one has to wonder, if BTplc had expressed concerns in the past, why is it only now they get an adjournment? Could it be that in not only damaging ACS:Law, the recent email leaks have also damaged the system which some wished to seek revenue from? and now Gallant Macmillan has been put on hold, what of Ministry of Sound? their site is still appears to be down. How much damage to their reputation with its potential customers has been done? From some forums, I’m seeing quite alot.
[...]
Torrent Freak is currently reporting a comedy spoof of a certain historical figure finding out about he leak at ACS:Law. You can find that here: http://torrentfreak.com/acslaws-anti-piracy-downfall-sends-hitler-crazy-101004/
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ACTA
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ACTA negotiators claim a deal has been done, but is it really a counterfeit? How is it that a deal is successfully concluded when there are matters still outstanding? It would seem that the European Commission statement of a “successful” conclusion of ACTA is somewhat pre-emptive.
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The Dutch foundation Vrijschrift requested publication of ACTA documents. The request was denied. Vrijschrift filed an objection, below a translation:
1. Many provisions in ACTA are mandatory: “Each Party shall”. Substantially, often they regard legislation, eg “Each Party shall provide for criminal procedures and penalties to be applied at (…)”. There is a binding relationship between ACTA and legislation.
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Participating in ACTA
mouse ears on the world: text says ACTA ATTACKS INTERNET
* Australia
* Canada,
* the European Union
* Japan
* South Korea
* Mexico
* New Zealand
* Switzerland
* United States
American Flag hangs down
ACTA came with heavy duty Non-Disclosure penalties. Which is why most if not all of the elected representatives of the participating governments were kept in the dark about what was even on the table. This includes elected representatives of the American Government. If they were made privvy to the negotiations, they were legally restrained from talking about it. Not very democratic, eh?
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The fact that ACTA did NOT go as planned probably means they will fight harder to achieve their goals in different ways. Canada is likely to get more “special treatment” since we’ve provided a hot bed of opposition. The fact that ACTA has not passed probably means that there will be an even stronger push to get the dreadful Bill C-32 passed.
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The round of negotiations in Tokyo last week on the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) will be the last in the several-year long process to come to a final agreement, negotiators have said. The latest text – along with highlighted issue areas on which certain countries still have reservations – will be released before the end of the week, negotiators told Intellectual Property Watch.
The most critical outstanding issue is scope, especially on border measures, a Japanese negotiator told Intellectual Property Watch today. There was a “certain convergence” but “further examination was needed in some capitals,” the negotiator said. “In that sense we haven’t gotten agreement” yet.
Juan Pedro Bolivar – “GNU Psycosynth”
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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Desktop
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I powered up SLED 11 SP1, plugged in her USB thumbdrive and opened up her Chinese poetry presentation in OpenOffice v3.2.1. Next, I showed her how to use SCIM for Chinese character input (toggle via Ctrl-Space & HanYu PinYin input). Left her to it for an hour and she successfully completed her assignment, saved it in PPT format and went home. I did warn her that her presentation may not be 100% WYSIWYG when opened on a Windows PC at her club meeting. *fingers crossed*
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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While AMD soon will be introducing the Radeon HD 6000 graphics cards, there is still plenty of life left to the Radeon HD 5000 series especially for those interested in open-source support with the Evergreen GPUs finally being supported by the open-source driver stack complete with OpenGL acceleration via a Mesa driver and this support will continue to mature before there is the same level of support for the next-generation Southern Island GPUs in the open-source world. In this article we are reviewing the ATI Radeon HD 5450 “Cedar” graphics card, which is AMD’s lowest-end Evergreen GPU but will set you back less than $50 USD.
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AppArmor, entry points for on-access virus scanners, a rewritten Out-of-Memory (OOM) killer, as well as basic support of Xen-Dom0 code, are among the most important advancements of version 2.6.36 of the Linux kernel. Due to various restructuring measures, this version will be slightly smaller than the previous version despite several hundred thousand new lines of code.
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Applications
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A task manager is software which enables users to compile a list of tasks to be completed. This list is also known as a to-do list or things-to-do. For the purposes of this article, the term ‘task manager’ should not be confused with monitoring software which provides information about programs and processes running on a computer.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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We hope to have our first Bordeaux for OpenIndiana release within the next month. Your support is welcome and needed to make this happen…
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Almost five years ago, at the traditional KDE PIM meeting at Osnabrück, I drew the first version of the Akonadi architecture on a whiteboard. It felt appropriate to put the server into the center and arrange the different layers of the system around it in circles. The result was a beautiful diagram.
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Trunk already features the new KDE Power Management System, but there are some feature regressions as not everything has been implemented yet, but I can say 80-90% of what’s needed is in. Today we’re going to make the applet play nice with the daemon, and if you want to test all of this goodness, I’d really advise you to wait until tomorrow.
Those are the main things, but many many more small ones have been done/fixed, to improve your desktop usage and not getting in your way. Hopefully I got you interested, so look forward to a vastly improved power management experience in 4.6!
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GNOME Desktop
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So.. I’m actually in Europe to work! Not play. And I’ll give dedicated posts to the two events I’ll be at this month, but quickly, I’m attending the GNOME-A11y hackfest/AEGIS Conference in Sevilla, Spain. This is a solid week of work. And later in October, I’ll be headed up to Germany for the openSUSE conference.
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New Releases
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Just released version 0.6.101 of stresslinux which is based on openSUSE 11.3. Some extra package are updated as well, these include bandwidth, busybox, memtester, stressapptest and x86info.
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This release of GParted fixes a regression introduced with the previous version. The problem introduced was that when partitions were created using MiB alignment, the resulting partition was 1 MiB larger in size than requested.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Concluding: I’m not saying here – give up on Mandriva and join openSUSE. What I do want to offer is some help – we’re all Free Software communities, we care. Let’s work together a bit more!
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Debian Family
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I attended the Debian Policy BoF. It inspired me to start reviewing Debian Policy and led to my submission of a bug report to improve the description of the archive areas in Debian.
[...]
I helped with the herculean task of getting Sage, a FOSS mathematics system, back into Debian. After discussing the issue during the Debian Science track at DebConf10, I met Lucas Nussbaum in the hacklab and he (with help from Luca Falavigna) managed to get the old buggy version of Sage removed from unstable (apparently, this version was causing support issues for the upstream Sage community, so this was a positive step forward).
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Debian’s “testing” distribution is where Debian developers prepare the next stable distribution. While this is still its main purpose, many users have adopted this version of Debian because it offers them a good trade-off between stability and freshness. But there are downsides to using the testing distribution, so the “Constantly Usable Testing” (CUT) project aims to reduce or eliminate those downsides.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Phones
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Android
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This is a big thing because now 32 countries out of 44 where Android has footprint can buy paid apps. This should take away one of the biggest drawbacks that Android marketplace was facing.
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Even as Android users, most of us have become familiar with the harsh requirements of the Apple App Store. Rejected App Store applications routinely find a place in the Android Market, and Tawkon Radiation Detector is no exception.
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Google has expanded Android Market paid application support for developers to 29 countries, and boosted to 32 the number of countries where consumers can buy apps for their phones. The search giant has also replaced its Nexus One web store with Google Phone Gallery, a site where users may compare three Android handsets at a time.
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Google has released the latest figures for devices accessing the Android Market and we’re getting closer to a Froyo majority.
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Tablets
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Dell’s recently tipped seven-inch Android tablet will ship in a few weeks, going head to head with the new RIM PlayBook and a rumored seven-inch version of the Apple iPad, says an industry report. Meanwhile, Dell is also readying a 10-inch Android tablet for release next year, says the story.
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* Yellow: Production Orientation
* Pink: Marketing Orientation
* Green: FOSS Community Orientation
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OpenOffice meets the needs of easily 95% of home users (and a good deal of those that use office software at work) and most of those people using an, often times illegal, version of Photoshop would be able to accomplish the exact same tasks using the legally free GIMP. Beyond this beginning Linux distros such as Linux Mint or Pinguy OS easily fulfill all the desktop computing needs of your average user.
With all of this in mind, why don’t you see Linux, OpenOffice, or GIMP on the shelf at your local computer store? Simple:
There is no money in it for the retailer.
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Today is international translation day! As part of the African Network for Localisation (ANLoc), I have been writing a book on the localisation of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS).
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Events
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In only a few years, Free Software has evolved from being a niche phenomenon into an increasingly mature mainstream movement. Despite the commonplace understanding as Free Software as one of the driving forces of tomorrow’s information technologies, the surrounding political and economic environment has often not yet kept up. As the founder and first president of the Free Software Foundation Europe, as well as CEO of a Free Software enterprise, the speaker has unique insight into political and economic aspects that keep favouring proprietary technologies until the current day despite the assurances to the contrary by some. From his personal experience, Georg Greve will give some real life examples of how Free Software companies work and interact with partners and customers, and how a truly level playing field would be constructed.
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Web Browsers
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That’s a sizable chunk, when you realise that total global average daily users of Firefox at the same time was about 114 million. In short, roughly 1.5 percent of total Firefox users globally are Australian. And the number is growing. As at August 2009, there were 1.6 million average Australian daily users of Firefox. That figure was much smaller — 1.2 million — in August 2008. In other words, although IE is still the dominant force, Firefox is a strong challenger, with Chrome and then Safari coming up behind.
IBM CIO Godbee compares his company’s adoption of Firefox to the way that the similarly open source Linux operating system gained traction on servers around the world over the past several decades since it was first released.
“Over a period of time it has been organic,” he says. “And suddenly there is it is, on a wide scale.”
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Databases
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MariaDB 5.2 is almost here. The gamma release (think “RC”) was released on 28 Sep and the stable release will follow just as soon as the developers are happy with it.
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Project Releases
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FireBreath is licensed under a dual license structure; this means you can choose which of two licenses to use it under. FireBreath can be used under the New BSD license or the GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1.
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Programming
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Standards/Consortia
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Green IT is concerned with approaches to information technology that reduce the environmental impact from the manufacture, use and disposal of computers and peripherals. Occasionally I am asked whether Open Document Format (ODF) has any relationship to “Green IT”. This is an interesting question, and the fact that the question is asked at all suggests that Green IT goals are increasing playing a central role in decision making.
When an organization migrates from Microsoft Office and their binary file formats (DOC/XSL/PPT) and moves to ODF, they will immediately notice that ODF documents are much smaller than the corresponding Microsoft format documents. This is a benefit of the ZIP compression applied to the contents of ODF documents. It also reflects that fact that Microsoft-format documents, especially ones that have been edited and saved many times, tend to accumulate unused blocks in the file, blocks which are not used, but still bloat the file’s storage.
[...]
So in summary, yes, a move to ODF will cause your documents to be far smaller than they were before, and that has advantages in terms of storage and bandwidth consumption. But let’s be honest, when it comes to disk storage and bandwidth documents are not your biggest problem. Graphics and video are far larger.
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Compounding the problem is decreasing quality and quantity of original material and increasing torrents of swill from content farms, recycling the same shallow junk over and over merely to provide a framework to hang yet more ads on, and then SEO-gaming for all they’re worth. Thanks, I so love it when the first page of a Google search is link farms and content farm crapola.
Consider supporting sites you enjoy, if they accept reader subscriptions or donations. For example, Groklaw and LWN.net serve up some of the best, most in-depth articles anywhere. Groklaw runs no ads, and LWN.net relies on subscriptions to help them keeps the ads to a minimum. As always, it comes down to the Golden Rule– the one with the gold makes the rules. Me, I don’t even want to live in a world controlled by marketers. Though I fear we are already mostly there.
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Science
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They want to establish “at least one Fab Lab per every 700,000 individuals in the United States in the first ten years of its operation”. Um, our simplistic arithmetic shows this would be 438 Fab Labs, based on 307,006,550 residents (from July 2009) divided by 700,000. Many cities would have several Fab Labs, if this scheme works. Oh, and the population is likely to grow a tad by ten year’s time.
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For certain kinds of bacteria, we have reached the end of the line. No new antibiotics have been developed for decades, and some superbugs are now resistant to all those we have. There is no one solution to the problem of antibiotic resistance, but we desperately need new antibiotics.
Far from helping, though, drug regulatory agencies are discouraging the development of new antibiotics, say those who met in London last week to discuss solutions to the problem of antibiotic resistance, at a conference organised by the British Society for Antimicrobial Chemotherapy. New Scientist finds out what is going on.
Why are regulators coming under fire?
They are making it ever harder and more costly to get new antibiotics approved. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) came in for the most criticism.
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Health/Nutrition
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Could Del Monte, Heinz, Unilever and Walmart become the deciders on stainability? In “What’s New for Dinner,” Frederick Kaufman writes about the Stewardship Index for Specialty Crops, an attempt by large companies to measure the environmental impact of the seed-to-shelf life cycle of any produce-based product.
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Basically, the entire chicken is smashed and pressed through a sieve–bones, eyes, guts, and all. it comes out looking like this.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Ed Miliband, giving his first speech to the Labour party conference on 28 September 2010, said of civil liberties, “too often we seemed casual about them”.
“I won’t let the Tories or the Liberals take ownership of the British tradition of liberty,” he said. “I want our party to reclaim that tradition.”
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As a report published yesterday by the Civitas think tank makes clear, this is a dangerous approach. The idea behind the Vetting and Barring Scheme is flawed and remodelling it will make no difference. The scheme was introduced to make children safer after the murders of Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells in Soham in 2002 exposed the flaws in vetting their killer Ian Huntley. Yet it is more likely to put our children in greater jeopardy, while at the same time poisoning their relationship with adults.
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Police will soon have the means to grab someone’s genetic sample and run it through the national DNA database while waiting in the street, if early trials by military industrial giant Lockheed Martin are successful.
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A Norwich two-year-old was asked to take down the hood of his anorak when entering a city convenience store – for security reasons.
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Yesterday Norfolk County Council confirmed that the camera has never been used and as a result no tickets have been issued.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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10:10’s climate change murder video has caused much offence, but one thing nobody is questioning is their inability to control the material, or the debate.
The instant negative reaction from most of the climate change campaign community after its release yesterday morning, prompted the video to be quickly pulled from 10:10’s own website, but it was even more quickly reposted by people wishing to continue to comment.
Wisely, in their apology statement yesterday evening 10:10 said they are not going to try to control how people use the video now it is in the wild, for instance via copyright take-downs.
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Finance
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Beijing offered to buy Greek debt on Saturday (2 October) and pledged to support a stable euro and not reduce its holdings of European government bonds in an effort to deflect criticism of its foreign exchange policy ahead of an EU-China summit this week.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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This 15 minute film has been realized in the studio of the Amsterdam Blender Institute, by an international team of artists and developers. Also, several crucial technical and creative targets have been realized online, by developers and artists and teams all over the world.
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Today, lawyers Gallant Macmillan will attend the High Court in London in an attempt to persuade a senior judge to order the handover of hundreds more identities of people accused of file-sharing. To mark this occasion, Operation Payback decided to hit the London law firm but after they tried to nullify the planned DDoS attack, Anonymous hit their client instead. Many hours later, Ministry of Sound is still out of business online.
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The Library of Congress has released a sobering new report on the state of digital audio preservation in the United States. The Library’s National Recording Preservation Board concludes that most of the nation’s audio libraries are ill-equipped to handle the complex array of streams and digital formats by which music and other recorded sounds are released today.
“It is relatively easy to recognize the importance of recorded sound from decades ago,” the survey notes. “What is not so evident is that older recordings actually have better prospects to survive another 150 years than recordings made last week using digital technologies.”
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ACTA
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The spokesperson for the Trade European Commissioner has announced Saturday October 2nd, that all parties have reached an agreement on ACTA. This is one more example of how the secrecy of this negotiation permits all manoeuvres to deceive citizens and Members of Parliaments. La Quadrature du Net calls all European citizens to alert their MEPs and National MPs about the need to monitor closely the rest of this negotiation and prepare to reject its by-product.
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Digital Economy (UK)
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We have highlighted the problems with the Ofcom filesharing code, most importantly that the code does not comply with the Digital Economy Act.
Neal Walfield – “GNU Hurd”
Credit: TinyOgg
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10.03.10
Posted in News Roundup at 10:09 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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Desktop
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One picture is worth a thousand words…
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For these beginner Linux users, Linux represents an all-mighty fortress that stands impenetrable. Consequently, they engage in all sorts of risky on line behavior. While it is a fact that Linux is more secure than Windows is, the hubris of these tragic heroes gradually leads them to their destruction…or to the bitter realization that a great many of the attacks a computer can suffer are fostered by a careless user.
Fanboys always wage wars based on prejudice. Regardless of the OS you like, an open mind will help you fly over the clouds of ignorance and, eventually, you can make a conscious choice about whether or not your OS satisfies your needs or if a migration is the solution to your computer woes or the beginning of them.
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Without further delay, here are some impressive Linux desktop customization screenshots…
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Applications
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Starting a new application series will show you many alternative applications for Microsoft windows in Linux platform. For example today I will try to find many possible applications to be alternative for Adobe Photoshop, and Illustrator work In Linux Platform.
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I have a few applications that I have tinkered with, but didn’t make a big enough impression to warrant a full post. Just in the interest of safekeeping the notes I made about them, I’m going to leave a list here, for the future.
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There are more than thousands of Linux Operating Systems and checking out all of em is simply impossible .
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Better late than never, so I am entering into this fever called Twitter. And as a Linux Guru wannabe I like to use the command line for a lot of task, including tweeting.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Ubuntu Gamer reader Boni Boy Blue recommended an open-source MMORPG. Planeshift is a fully immersive 3D world which is based on the Crystal Space 3D engine with no limitations on class, weapons and armour so there is no need for micro purchases that seem to plague a lot of free MMORPGs. The game is also multi-platform so you can play with your friends who run Windows or Mac.
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Turned out the entire system was running Linux.
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Frictional Games may be a small Swedish indie studio, but the outfit has a flair for atmosphere and production values which make its horror titles stand out as much as any heavyweight developer. We were impressed with the earlier Penumbra series of games, and found them genuinely chilling, although Amnesia: The Dark Descent takes everything up a notch again. Or down a notch, perhaps, given the descending theme. Amnesia is a first-person horror survival game with adventure style and physics puzzles, alongside stealth elements.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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This week, on KDE and the Masters of the Universe, Kopete ex-maintainer and all around Basket case, Matt Rogers.
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I guess Sabayon 5.4 hasn’t really changed much from version 5.3, which had many of the same bugs that I experienced today. I simultaneously love it for its vast collection of applications included out-of-the-box and hate it for its stability issues, which still haven’t been resolved despite using the extremely stable KDE 4.5. I guess this is going to get a solid “meh” from me. (That said, don’t be surprised to see me testing the next version of Sabayon when it comes out.)
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From time to time we hear the question, what actually is KDE e.V., what’s its role in the KDE community? Let me try to answer this question here.
In short, KDE e.V. is the organization, which represents, supports, and provides governance to the KDE community. It gives the community a legal body so it can participate in activities which require a legal representation, somebody handling money, or a way to legitimize individuals to speak and act for the community.
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GNOME Desktop
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For some strange reasons, I am not able to enable clutterview in my Ubuntu Maverick. When I press F4, it just shows a black screen. Hence the ammonkey’s screenshot above. Another important feature worth mentioning is the integration for zeitgeist search engine. Take a look at the awesome video by ammonkey himself demonstrating zeitgeist search engine.
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Just days after the release of GNOME 2.32, focusing on GNOME 3.0 development for next March has now regained center stage. It was in August that GTK+ began using more of Cairo for its tool-kit drawing and then dropped DirectFB support, but with today’s release of GTK+ 2.91.0 (the latest GTK+ 3.0 snapshot) the rendering clean-up of GNOME’s tool-kit is complete.
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And then of course there is Debian. I think about half the servers we have deployed are Debian based and indeed I like it very much. Desktop however is another story, many of our test runs have miserably failed due to unsupported graphic cards, malfunctioning wireless support and so on.
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Red Hat Family
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Shares of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) are trading very close to calculated resistance at $41.75 with the current price action closing at just $41.00 placing the stock near levels that make it difficult to buy.
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Fedora
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The Board agreed to move forward with the last statement, and will be voting on whether or not to finalize the statement at this coming Monday’s Board meeting.
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Debian Family
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Megatotoro was kind enough to remove Gloria and install Mepis for me, after which, as in the Sioux hanblecchia, I was left alone on the hilltop…or, more accurately, inside the Mepis pyramids. This is the beginning of my challenge: For the next week, I will only use Mepis on my netbook to feel the differences. Remember, since I am not a computer guru, all I have is my limited empiric access to this fascinating world.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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* Ubuntu One was greatly improved with lots of bug fixes with focus on stability and better nautilus integration. Users can now create account with out a need to visit a browser. The web interface was improved and feels more intuitive.
* An Android application was released for Ubuntu One and a new feature introduced where Ubuntu One will stream music to phones.
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Toshiba’s AC100 is certainly an interesting notebook on the face of it: Tegra 2 processor, full QWERTY and plenty of battery life, but the Android OS does mean it’s definitely a companion device and not your sole ultraportable. That could all change, however, now a hack for loading Ubuntu onto the AC100 has been developed; Carrypad pulled together the instructions and files from tosh-ac100.wetpaint.org, ac100.gudinna.com and the official Toshiba forums and managed to get his AC100 up and running with Ubuntu 10.10.
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Ubuntu 10.10, the Maverick Meerkat, will be released in just a couple of weeks. That got me reflecting on the fact that I have been a happy user of Ubuntu for what must be over 5 years now. That’s a long time!
The GNU/Linux variants are the only OSes I’ve used where I really have the flexibility to define my own workflow (example). So they are a pleasure to use (ok, most of the time). I use a computer for many, many hours a day nearly every day. And the time spent customizing software and learning it is a drop in the bucket when it’s amortized over the months and years I’m going to spend using it. Sure, Windows and Mac OS are a bit more learnable and easier to get started with— but they are much less usable. And for me, and most other people who sit at a computer for a living, that is precisely the wrong optimization to make.
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Flavours and Variants
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The only review of a lightweight Ubuntu-based distribution I’ve done before this is of #! 9.04.01. I was looking around to see if there are any others, and I came across wattOS.
wattOS R2 is based on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS “Lucid Lynx” and uses LXDE. From other reviews of this distribution that I have read, the thing that sets it apart is its comprehensive set of power management tools (hence the name).
The other reason I wanted to test this is because I wanted to try to make a “light” version of my Fresh OS respin. Yeah, I know this is based on Ubuntu while the regular version is based on Debian, but I’ve heard murmurs in the wattOS forums of the next wattOS version being based on Debian anyway. Anyway, this means that I will also be testing the installation procedure as well as a few other things post-installation.
[...]
Overall, I think wattOS is a great distribution that is highly customizable and is a great way to revive an old computer with modern software. I do still feel slightly cheated by the absence of the power management tools. I highly recommend anyone to try it out. (See? I did include the download link this time!)
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Overall it works great – just as well as Crunchbang, but with update to date software. The only thing I didn’t like was that there was no update gui – I needed to run apt-get to find out stuff is ready for update – this also annoyed me with CrunchBang. Come on guys, every major distro (including Ubuntu, upon which it’s based) has some way of letting the user know there are updates to be installed. The user shouldn’t have to go manually checking every few days.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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In a head-on comparison, Firefox 4 wins over its Microsoft arch-enemy. But that does not mean Internet Explorer 9 is bad. Far from it. Furthermore, the fact the browser scene has another new player, a good one with big teeth and a decent punch, should make you really excited. As the end user, you will benefit from even more attention and better and cheaper products. This is what fierce competition is all about. You.
Firefox 4 and Internet Explorer 9 are going to be great browsers once released. If you’re a Firefox user, no need to abandon your favorite product. It’s still the good ole stuff that made the difference and broke the monopoly. If you’re an Internet Explorer user, now you truly have a good browser, which you can use and be proud of.
And that would be all.
I hope you enjoyed the article. If not, feel free to point out where I might be wrong.
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Firefox is my default web browser, which can be mainly attributed to its amazing add-on support and customizability. But other browsers have emerged (Chrome) or improved to a point, that Firefox feels old fashioned in certain categories. Especially speed and performance wise. If you ever experienced how fast Chrome or Opera are opening the most complex websites, and then compared that to Firefox, you know that something is amiss there.
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CMS
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The Economist is now using Drupal 6 to serve the vast majority of content pages to its flagship web site, economist.com. The homepage is Drupal powered, along with all articles, channels, comments, and more. The Economist evaluated several open source CMS and proprietary solutions aimed at media publishers. In the end, The Economist chose Drupal for its vibrant community, and the ecosystem of modules that it produces. The Economist will be adding lots of social tools to its site over time, and doing so on its existing platform was too slow/inefficient.
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Business
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Recent surveys have found that small and medium-size businesses are increasingly willing to consider open source tools. Not surprisingly, small businesses and large enterprises are predisposed to different categories of open source software. Survey data suggest that ERP is one category where small businesses are more likely to adopt open source than their large enterprise peers.
Several open source ERP vendors are vying for a share of the action. Small-business owners and/or their IT department heads should consider whether an open source ERP package could meet their business needs as their companies grow.
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Project Releases
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I have spent the last few weeks working on setting up nightly tarball builds of GIMP, GEGL and babl. Today I am glad to announce that this is up and running.
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Introduction
BIND 9.7.2-P2 is a maintenance release for BIND 9.7.
This document summarizes changes from BIND 9.7.1 to BIND 9.7.2-P2. Please see the CHANGES file in the source code release for a complete list of all changes.
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Government
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The National Archives is today launching a new Open Government Licence, which makes it faster and easier than ever before to re-use public sector information.
The UK Open Government Licence is a key element of the Government’s commitment to greater transparency. It provides a single set of terms and conditions for anyone wishing to use or license government information and removes some of the existing barriers to re-use.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Hardware
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At the moment, due to limitations in the GCC compiler only 128k of flash are immediately useable but we’re very close to unlocking the whole memory space.
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Programming
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I’ve finished writing and editing Modern Perl: The Book, and it’s gone into production, which means that Onyx Neon is preparing a print-ready PDF to give to the printers. The book should be available in print by the end of October, if not sooner.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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To recap, what I am offering is to think of CC as an enterprise operating on three separate spheres, each with its distinct, although definitely not independent, value contribution. The first is the contribution to transactions between actors in the creative fields, the second is the institutional contribution and the third is the contribution in the normative field.
The idea is that this can serve as the baseline for analysis, a fundamental categorization which lends itself to further sub-categorization, by field, by activity, by actor and by CC tool, but that doesn’t lose track of the way all of these tie into the one primary goal.
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Technically the video is impressive, it shows the software advancements and the grown experience of the team, it had good music and voices and it slightly longer. Still… I think it will be a smaller success compared with its predecessor, Big Buck Bunny.
Simon Josefsson – “Autobuild”
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:09 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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I was trying to figure out a topic to write about. I usually focus on Tutorials and tips, as not being a native English speaker, my grammar is not good enough to write opinion posts.
This time I decided to write about the future of Linux, and I was focusing of topics like:
* Need of marketing
* Teaching children how to use computers with Linux instead of others.
* Focus on new devices, like smart phones, tablets, etc.
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Desktop
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My wife is a special case of another kind. Once the initial learning for Linux was over, she would have been happy as a pig in mud. I spent a day with her getting Gnome configured to look and act as much like Windows XP as possible. And everything was pretty much working OK. But Danielle is an Excel guru. She stopped using Google Docs’ spreadsheet function because it was too basic for her needs. So, for her, using OpenOffice.org’s Calc is like trying to fly a stealth bomber in which all the buttons were moved to random locations in the cockpit. As far as I can tell, everything she wants to do is possible, but it’s somewhere else or done in a really weird way. I don’t regularly do 1/4 of what she does with spreadsheets, so I have no idea where these things are. Unlike problems with Nautilus or Rhythmbox where I use the programs daily and, therefore, know what to do, I have no idea how to do the things she wants to do. And the inline help has left her….unsatisfied.
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So, TFA and some of the comments are pure ignorance. The presumption is that OpenOffice.org has failed as desktop software because M$’s Office still remains active. What nonsense! That is “winner-takes-all” and not relevant to the question of success or failure. Being driven from the market is only one way to fail and monopolizing the market is only one way to succeed.
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Server
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Intel was caught napping on 64bitness. They may be napping on the ideal cloudy server. If Intel lets ARM march in, ARM and GNU/Linux could take a big chunk out of Wintel in the server/workstation space. What’s wrong with a ton of passively cooled CPUs on a motherboard? Is Intel worried for the CPU cooler makers? Is Intel worried that ARM may be better at this role than Atom?
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Dell and Canonical have jointly certified a range of PowerEdge servers for Ubuntu Server Edition. The majority of systems have been certified for the current version 10.04 LTS, which Canonical plans to maintain until April 2015. Some older models, have been certified with older versions down to Ubuntu 8.04.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Under the release management of Apple’s Jeremy Huddleston, the first release candidate for the first point release in the X.Org Server 1.9 series is now available. X.Org Server 1.9.1 will be the first update to X.Org Server 1.9, which was released in August, and should make it out around the same time as the X.Org 7.6 katamari release later in October.
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Applications
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Linux only (maybe): The free, open-source image editor, GIMP, uses multiple windows for its tools and dialogs, but they’re getting combined into a single window in a future release. Impatient types can combine everything right now, though, with a Python script.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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If you’re not familiar with the ‘Tetris’ then welcome to earth – I will take you to our leader. Everyone else has likely succumbed at least once to the addictive puzzler and as such it needs no formal introduction.
Hexglass is a Tetris-styled puzzle game with a slight difference. Instead of using square blocks to create a ‘Tetris’ you are instead given hexagonal shapes of varying forms. You must arrange, rotate and align these into horizontal rows of hexagonal bricks, completing a row makes it disappear and scores you some points – just like traditional Tetris.
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Desktop Environments
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At long last, the EFL (Enlightenment Foundation Libraries) have reached a beta status for their version 1.0 release. Among the libraries hitting this beta status are Eina, Eet, Evas, Ecore, Embryo, Edje, E_Dbus, Efreet, and Eeze. New snapshots are also available for Enlightenment and Elementary.
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GNOME Desktop
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Richard Hughes updated his pack of freely distributable generic ICC profiles that are used by GNOME Color Manager.
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September has beaten our previous record month
. In total approximately $635 has been received from in affiliate fees from Amazon compared to the previous record of $500 a nice 27% increase
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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What I’m looking for is a distro that supports the latest version of KDE, uses pulseaudio, networkmanager and usually sports the latest kernel. Bonus if they refuse to package Mono. Fedora used to be the ideal distro for me but after F14 this will change because of the new policy. Fedora will eventually turn into Fedbuntu.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Two new T Shirts for the Maverick Meerkat release of Ubuntu that comes out in just over a week have appeared in the Canonical Store.
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It is my great honor to be able to announce a new Ubuntu Classroom event that will be taking place: LoCo Days! To quote the wiki, “Most Classroom sessions done in the Ubuntu community are done in English. However, we have a large LoCo community as well.
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Under the hood Maverick Meerkat uses the 2.6.35-22.33 Linux kernel, which is Ubuntu’s take on the 2.6.35.4 stable kernel. What’s noteworthy about this kernel is that it’s a bit more stable than previous ones and it includes support for Intel’s Sandy Bridge processors. Sandy Bridge is Intel’s next generation of PC and server chips. That doesn’t matter now except for developers, but if you want to get the most from your next high-end PC purchase in 2011, you’ll want this support.
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Flavours and Variants
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The plasma-widget-message-indicator is not new to Kubuntu, but it got some nice improvements in this cycle. It got a visual overhaul to fit the new visual theme of KDE 4.5 (and in my opinion looks generally more pleasing to the eye), but the new killer feature is one you can’t see at all.
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Phones
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Android
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Consumers don’t pay attention to patent infringement cases. Unless the court opts to halt sales of Motorola’s Android smartphones, which is also unlikely, the market for Android devices will keep skyrocketing.
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The bottom line is that Android is an open ecosystem–much more open than the one surrounding Apple’s iPhone. As long as Android is open, everything from porn to GPS tracking will be more likely to show up on the platform than it is on Apple’s. Increasingly, though, it’s precisely the openness of Android that is making it an attractive platform, and one predicted by many researchers to become much more dominant in coming years.
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If you think back to what you were doing digitally 10 years ago, and then think about what you’re doing today, odds are that you work with video, graphics and audio much more than you ever did before. Within the world of open source, there are not only outstanding free applications that can improve your experience in these areas, but there are many free guides and tutorials to get you going with them. In this post, you’ll find a huge number of resources for pumping up your multimedia muscles. Spend some time with these, and you’ll collect some rich dividends.
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It is possible that we’ll see standardization of componentry around specific projects like Hadoop – although even that seems unlikely with the rampant proliferation of query, import and other ecosystem projects – but I do not expect to see a standard stack of software used to tackle generic Big Data problems, because there really aren’t many generic Big Data problems. Inconvenient as that might be from a vocabulary perspective.
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# Guadalinux on hundreds of thousands of computers in schools and offices in Andalusia, Spain. A million downloads so far.
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Apache Shindig 2.0 is available to download and is licensed under the Apache 2.0 licence. An overview of the project explains Shindig’s history and how it implements the OpenSocial specification.
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Events
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In a recent post (Hackers Play “Social Engineering Capture The Flag” At Defcon), I pointed to a game in which contestants used the telephone to convince company employees to voluntarily cough up information they probably shouldn’t have.
Of 135 “targets” of the social engineering “game,” 130 blurted out too much information. All five holdouts were women who gave up zero data to the social engineers.
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Web Browsers
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Mountain View updated Chrome to 7.0.517.24 for Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome Frame. But the latest release is light on new features, which has left some Chrome fans a bit nonplussed.
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Databases
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The PostgreSQL Global Development Group recently released PostgreSQL 9.0, with major new features and more than 200 addons and improvements for the popular database.
If you look at the release notes you’ll find a ton of new features and enhancements to existing features. For example, this release brings better error messages for unique constraints, improvements in PL languages for stored procedures, and a lot more. Wading through the PostgreSQL 9.0 release notes is a DBA’s delight, but what are the top features in this release? I pinged PostgreSQL core team member Josh Berkus and got some input on the most important features for PostgreSQL 9.
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Oracle
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Gosling sums the whole dispute up as “all about money,” and provides many more details in the transcript.
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Business
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Semi-Open Source
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Open source cloud players are pursuing promising hybrid strategies, and as that continues, their flexibility may make them the big winners.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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While GCC 4.5 has been around since this past April, if you are still living with GCC 4.4 for whatever reason (like being hit with a massive performance regression), you may be pleased to know that on this Sunday afternoon there is the GCC 4.4.5 release that’s now available. GCC 4.4.5 was delayed a bit, but it’s here and offers up bug-fixes but no major new features.
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Project Releases
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ForgeRock has announced OpenDJ, a Java based open source directory server as part of its I3 platform. OpenDJ, a standard compliant LDAP directory server built for scalability and stability, is a based on OpenDS, a project initially developed by Sun Microsystems, and ForgeRock has announced that a key OpenDS developer, Ludovic Poitou, has joined its ranks. ForgeRock CEO Lasse Andresen said “It’s a real delight to work with him again”. Enterprise subscriptions to OpenDJ are available now from ForgeRock.
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Government
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This state of play report on recent PSI initiatives in Greece discusses the national transposition of the INSPIRE Directive by the Greek Parliament: the National Infrastructure for Geospatial Information (3882/2010). This is a vitally important piece of legislation both in the context of open data and the regulation of Public Sector Information. It adopts a life cycle approach and increases the threshold of protection of the re-use of public sector information. This was the result of lengthy process and a concentrated effort to create a functional and sustainable system for the sharing of Geospatial Information in the context of the Greek legal system. The success of Law 3882/2010 is something yet to be tested in its implementation. However, the author concludes that it is significant as a model for increasing administrative capacity in dealing with open data. This report demonstrates the value of the EU focus on INSPIRE and PSI legislation.
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Openness/Sharing
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Jean-Claude Bradley is the master when it comes to organising collaborations around diverse sets of online tools. The UsefulChem and Open Notebook Science Challenge projects both revolved around the use of wikis, blogs, GoogleDocs, video, ChemSpider and whatever tools are appropriate for the job at hand. This is something that has grown up over time but is at least partially formally organised. At some level the tools that get used are the ones Jean-Claude decides will be used and it is in part his uncompromising attitude to how the project works (if you want to be involved you interact on the project’s terms) that makes this work effectively.
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Open Access/Content
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This naming of a threat seemed interesting when read in connection with Steven Bell’s recent ACRLog post, “Underground Resource Sharing,” in which he related the outrage over Netflixgate to a blog post by a scholar who was horrified to discover that once he finished his degree, the library cut him off from JSTOR. (Apparently he thought an alumni association deal would keep the connection open to everything; anyone who has had to negotiate a license agreement to spend over ten thousand dollars to share two seats across the total population of three institutions, each kicking in over 10K for the privilege is now rolling around on the floor laughing so hard it hurts. Or … well, it hurts, anyway.) How was he supposed to get any work done? He reported feeling a “fresh surge of hatred” for his alma mater. (Excuse me, but does this mean everything you publish in future will be open access? Whose fault is it that research findings have to be paid for and fenced off? You’ll find a hint if you look in the mirror.) Comments on his post pointed out that, duh, you just get a friend to send articles to you, or you join a Facebook or FriendFeed group dedicated to swapping articles or just get somebody’s login. Too bad we spent so much on EEBO – apparently everyone has a bootleg login.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Who gets to decide what you do on the internet: you or your internet service provider? Until recently, the answer was simple: you decide which services and websites you want visit. This is changing rapidly, however. Most internet providers want to restrict your internet traffic. Unless the European Commission prohibits them from doing so. Bits of Freedom together with EDRi on 30 September 2010 urged the European Commission to prohibit this. If you have 5 minutes, you can do the same.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Supported by a conglomerate of file-sharing sites and applications, the VODO project offers a novel distribution platform for indie filmmakers. The model has already proven itself as all major releases have been downloaded by hundreds of thousands of users. However, to really tap into the core of peer-to-peer distribution, the focus will now shift to peer-to-peer promotion.
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Berkeley, CA-September 28, 2010…A group of leading experts on copyright law and policy released a report today that explores ideas for meaningful reforms to the U.S. copyright system. Crafted over three years by a group of legal academics, private practitioners, and corporate attorneys, the report examines several ways to improve and update the law in an era of rapid technological change.
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Law firm Gallant & Macmillan, which was threatened with a DDos attack by 4chan yesterday, appears to have disappeared from the internet. It is unclear whether the host disconnected the domain in advance of the attack or whether Gallant & Macmillan is now the latest company to be forced offline through traffic overload.
Anonymous group 4chan began waging war on copyright bodies and solicitors involved in accusing internet users of copyright infringement as part of what it described as a ‘operation payback’.
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It’s being reported by some tech writers that Gallant Macmillan might have been taken down with a new ddos by users from 4chan (It also suggests the possibility that the site was taken down intentionally by its owners.)
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After disgruntled letter recipients mailed off a barrage of complaints to the Solicitors Regulatory Authority against ACS:Law owner Andrew Crossley, he told his advisor that not only did he “feel defeated” but that in his long-term interests it might be better if he “shut up shop”. Doing so, he explained, would bankrupt him.
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In just under 15 minutes, the film narrates a traditional fantasy story with all the pathos expected from the genre – a young female warrior called Sintel finds an injured baby dragon and nurses it back to health. When the baby dragon, barely able to fly, is kidnapped by a powerful older dragon, Sintel takes up the pursuit.
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ACTA
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According to the latest leaks, on 25 August 2010, the wording of the section on the Internet entitled “Special Measures Related to Technological Enforcement of Intellectual Property in the Digital Environment” has been softened but it still gives governments a lot of scope to introduce repressive provisions including filtering and a “graduated response” leading to the disconnection of illegal downloaders.
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QuestionCopyright.org: Street Interviews About Copyright, Chicago, June 2006 (2006)
Credit: TinyOgg
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10.02.10
Posted in News Roundup at 4:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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The detectives, no doubt eager to solve their case, save money & get it all done a little bit faster, are running a GNOME-based operating system on Windows branded HP computers.
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Server
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As I recently discovered WordPress.com has a pretty neat sharing service support. It essentially adds a bunch of social network links to the bottom of your pages. Which makes a lot of sense, because every content provider (e.g. a blogger) would like their content to be spread to the world and what better way to archive this than by giving the user the means to easily share something they like or find interesting.
One problem though. Since I am a free software advocate and suppose that you, my readers, are too, I prefer Identi.ca (which is using a free software microblogging software) over Twitter. Yet WordPress.com does not have a share button for Identi.ca…
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Audiocasts/Shows
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This week on the show: AMD vice president embarrasses herself, native ZFS on Linux, the Seabird concept phone, the new Ubuntu application review process, the usual Microsoft fun and Dan roots his Desire and reviews CyanogenMod 6.
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Plone 4 is the latest version of the state-of-the-art open source CMS.
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Kernel Space
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I really dig the Kindle 3. The small improvements add up to a significant improvement in usability. As my friend Chris put it, “as soon as I turned it on I realized I did the right thing.”
For the curious, I got ahold of the Kindle 3′s source code and generated a patch against 2.6.26 (I did the same for the Kindle 1′s kernel).
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Two weeks ago, I was in Toulouse, France, at a multitouch workshop organised by Stèphane Chatty. After the workshop, in the same week was XDS. The workshop had a nice mix of people, Benjamin Tissoires whom I credit with kicking off much of the multitouch work with his evdev hacks, Pengfei, a PhD student of Stèphane, and Chase Douglas from Canonical, involved with their multitouch efforts. Ping Cheng from Wacom, Gowri Ries and Pascal Auriel from Stantum represented the hardware side. And Zeno Albisser and Denis Dzyubenko from Nokia for the toolkit side (Qt). We talked multitouch for two days and I think we got a lot done – not in code but in concepts and general design questions. The current state is essentially that both hardware and software guys are waiting on us, the X server, to integrate multitouch.
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Applications
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In the course of my day job I tend to get drawn into interesting niche projects because of my Linux expertise. Recall that the Mothership (that corporate entity located somewhere on the East coat which pays me fairly well to work for them) is *shudder* a Windows shop, primarily.
However, Open Source Software is making not-too-subtle encroachments into even this bastion of All Windows All The Time. I got a call one day a couple of weeks ago from a semi-stressed project leader who at the suggestion of the client was being encouraged to use an application built entirely out of open source components. We have it running on a virtual Linux server. It’s called REDCap, and was developed by Vanderbilt University. Basically, it is a web-based interface to an underlying mysql engine. It is a highly specialized database tool developed specifically to support data collection for clinical studies.
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Most people including myself are hooked on using wget to do whatever quickies that we need to do on our servers. I use it in my scripts, crontab entries and even site mirroring and web crawling.
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Proprietary
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AutoCad which is frequently touted as a killer app unavailable on GNU/Linux has some new developments:
* some cloud services which may with GNU/Linux to view drawings via a browser
[...]
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Instructionals/Technical
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Everyone loves the convenience of Skype and other voice-over-IP (VoIP) applications, but the official tools still tend to focus on making simple one-to-one phone calls. One of the most common limitations mentioned is how difficult it is to record the digital audio stream on your computer. Podcasters, teams holding conference calls, and reporters doing interviews (among others) all need to record calls for later use. There are a few stand-alone tools built to work with specific applications, but with just a little additional time you can set up a system capable of recording audio from any application — Skype, various Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) clients, group chat tools, and many more.
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Wine
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New to Wine 1.3.4 is support for right-to-left mirrored windows, Winelib now supporting the ARM architecture, a new taskkill.exe built-in application, the Inetcpl control panel being fleshed out, AcceptEx has been implemented, and there’s improved security checks for SSL connections. There’s also the usual translation updates and bug-fixes. The Wine library now supporting the ARM architecture is good for those interested in wanting to run Windows applications on your ARM-based netbooks or other mobile-focused devices.
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Games
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If you like MahJongg and solitaire card style games then you would be happy to learn that two games were recently released, one is free as a beer, other cost $10.
Those games are made by the indie company named Lost Luggage Studios.
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Would you buy an open source gaming console? How about some purpose made open source gaming software that you could install on your computer? Do you think there is a market for this?
[...]
The latter two are already familiar concepts, with games already available for download on many platforms (Steam, App Store, Android Market, Ubuntu Software Center etc) and as you should all know, games have been available for purchase from a store since… well… since ever.
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Welcome to the tenth mega compilation of Linux games. The magic number! … one more … This time, I truly do not have any grand opening. The only thing I’d like to mention is that the games included in the Humble Indie Bundle, as mentioned in my Linux news article, will be reviewed separately, in the eleventh compilation.
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Desktop Environments
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Just days after the release of GNOME 2.32, focusing on GNOME 3.0 development for next March has now regained center stage. It was in August that GTK+ began using more of Cairo for its tool-kit drawing and then dropped DirectFB support, but with today’s release of GTK+ 2.91.0 (the latest GTK+ 3.0 snapshot) the rendering clean-up of GNOME’s tool-kit is complete.
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Red Hat Family
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Those of us who write for the insular world of the open-source-software enthusiast don’t often think about how the rest of the planet looks at Linux and other free software.
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Red Hat says the award recognised OSS as the most successful Advanced Business Partner in the region this year and acknowledges its work migrating datacentres at major corporates locally to Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux platform.
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Fedora
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What am I talking about? HTML5 and javascript. Javascript has gotten significantly faster in just the last two years. In some cases over 100 times faster then just 2 years ago. Who drove that? Google and Chrome. Why did they do it? They realize HTML5 is disruptive technology. What we think of advanced “web technologies” today, are still based on html 4.01. Not changed in over 10 years. Ajax was a nice addition 7 or so years back but the foundations, the primitives are 10 years old.
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Yes, finally there’s an updated updates policy for Fedora.
I think it’s worth reading because, as the announcement says, it can be improved, clarified and adjusted; but it’s a very good starting point.
I was writing a more or less deep review of the document, but my internet connection failed, Chromium crashed (!), and here I am writing this post again, so instead of explaining something that you can read yourself in the policy page, I’m going to focus in the most interesting part: the releases.
The updates on the branched release are divided into pre beta, beta to pre release, pre release and release. Although the updates policy helps to have a more solid release, the updates after the release are a very important part of the user experience (for example, it’s an excellent way to polish the rough edges of the release).
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Debian Family
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There are a number of different operating systems today based on the latest Linux kernel, and because Linux itself happens to be open source, anyone can monopolize on the concept and create their own Linux distribution, Ubuntu being one of the distros that rose from the dust of the once great Debian. Debian was an excellent distribution in it’s day, but it fell out of favor for a number of reasons…
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MEPIS is a Linux distribution (a.k.a “distro”) that is designed to give new users a no frills experiece when trying it for the first time. It is based on Debian and gives users the option of either running it as a LiveCD or installing it permanently on your hard drive. When run in the LiveCD mode, the OS gives users the ability to test drive the OS from either their USB stick or a DVD and explore all the available features without making any permanent changes to the filesystem of the host machine. This would mean that you could try this distro on your MAC or Windows PC and then install it later if you so choose.
[...]
Eventually, it comes down to you, the user. With MEPIS 11 in the pipeline and Linux distributions available dime a dozen for you to test, MEPIS or any other popular distro would be ideal for you if you want to break free (literally `0) from the shackles you are wearing while using proprietary operating systems like Microsoft’s Windows. The community fourms are always there to help if you do have any questions and the least you could do is try the LiveCD for yourself and see if it suits your needs.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Amongst the many improvements the Ubuntu ARM team have made happen this cycle are support for the community-driven, high-performance, embedded Dual-core ARM Cortex A9 mobile development OMAP4 Panda board and the forthcoming Beagle board XM which boasts 512mb of low-power RAM and a nippy 1Ghz Cortex A8 processor.
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Spreadubuntu is a repository for marketing material by and for the community, with the goal of increasing the market share of Ubuntu.
It will see a theme update soon, to match the new visual identity of Ubuntu. I have been kindly asked to help with the logo.
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At the Ubuntu Developer Summit later this month in Orlando for the Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty Narwhal” release, it looks like performance testing may finally be discussed at length by Canonical and the Ubuntu developers.
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Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat release candidate is here and it’s packed with a slew of new features. The amount of changes happening with Ubuntu lately is quite overwhelming. Here’s a quick look through the improvements in the new Ubuntu 10.10 release candidate.
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Phones
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Android
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Google’s flagship device, the Nexus One, is always the first phone to receive the latest software updates. It was the first to obtain the initial over-the-air update to Android 2.2 (Froyo) and this update provided the basis for much development and discussion across the site.
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I’m a big fan of instant messaging apps. They’re fun and easy—plus, like Google Voice, they’re sometimes a money-saving alternative to texting via your mobile number. Living on the west coast, they’re one way I keep in touch with my east coast family, especially my busy brother and my mom, who loves her iPad’s expandable, easy-on-the-eyes fonts. Plus, I sometimes ping Ars’ staff on their IM accounts to work out stories (hey Nate, Eric!).
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Tablets
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StarNet Communications of Sunnyvale, California, a leading developer of X11 connectivity solutions, announced iLIVEx, a fast, secure and fault-tolerant X11 client that turns the Apple iPad into an X terminal for powerful Linux and Unix mainframe and supercomputers.
iLIVEx is available from the App Store for $14.99. It allows iPad users to connect to Unix and Linux desktops and applications hosted on remote Unix and Linux servers. iLIVEx features an ultra-thin data transfer protocol allowing for LAN-like performance, even over 3G connections. iLIVEx connections also run over securely encrypted SSH tunnels. Built-in session persistency allows users to reconnect to their remote desktops should the iPad get disconnected, turned off or the user temporarily switches to another iPad app.
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We have previously reported on Lightspark working on a new graphics engine for this open-source project to implement the Adobe Flash/SWF specification. This new graphics engine leverages OpenGL and Cairo, but now the lead developer is considering a different approach.
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I really like the recent trend of communities forking free software projects when they become unhappy with the direction that the parent company or organization is taking. The first example of this in my memory was when the creator of MySQL, Michael Widenius, created a fork called MariaDB due to his unhappiness with the purchase of Sun Microsytems by Oracle. Widenius feared that Oracle would damage or destroy MySQL, the free software database that his blood, sweat, and tears created and that Sun faithfully supported. Recent events have shown that his fears were valid. More recently, former members of the OpenOffice.org Foundation created a fork of OpenOffice called LibreOffice due to similar fears. Today, it was announced that some members of the Madriva community have created a Mandriva fork called Mageia because they no longer trust the direction in which Mandriva is being taken.
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MySQL alone has had at least four forks (Percona, Our Delta, MariaDB, and Drizzle).
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Core developers of large projects are almost always paid developers. This is true for Eclipse, JBoss, Red Hat, most Google projects and, notably, OpenSolaris, among many others. These developers are either employees of companies that have a commercial interest in the finished product, or that derive revenue from ongoing support of the product. These developers, then, don’t have any reason to join a fork. In fact, they have strong reasons not to.
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Events
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One thing I have learned at the Open World Forum is that Europe’s approach to open source is highly political, but not in the way you think.
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Sometimes late, but always on time, Future of Web Apps added me as a speaker this week to the Carsonified-powered Future of Web Apps London event. After some swapping my schedule around since I’ve been speaking about the Federated Social Web at Joi Ito and Digital Garage’s New Context Conference in Tokyo, I’l be speaking mid-day in London about connecting the social web.
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The last decade has seen many open source activities run for the benefit of a single company, but the roots of software freedom can be found in the synchronisation of part of the interests of many equal participants. The next phase of open source should embrace “open-by-rule” and have the liberties of every participant respected equally. We have already seen OpenStack and The Document Foundation arise; I believe there will be more.
The benefits that businesses derive from open source – especially flexibility, vendor independence and the cost savings that result from both through accelerated and simplified procurement – arise from Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. Jeffrey Hammond presented research showing lower barriers to adoption of open source software in enterprises as their understanding of and comfort with open source improve.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla is paying special attention to Indonesia these days because Firefox has become the leading browser in the country with up to 70 percent market share. Exactly why, we’re unfortunately as baffled as Mozilla is.
On Sept 27, the Mozilla Foundation’s chairperson, Mitchell Baker, and its director of Asia business development, Gen Kanai, and id-mozilla, the Indonesian Mozilla community, held a public talk at Blitz Megaplex at Pacific Place in Jakarta about Mozilla’s market-leading position in Indonesia.
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I’m not sure if my hat is going off to Firefox for being a good watchdog, or to the Swiss Consumer Protection office, ironically, for slipping up on this one. I wanted to see their new web page on how to find out where your wooden furniture (and other objects) comes from.
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This new version includes all changes made upstream in Firefox 3.6.10.
Now the privacy extension gives an alert everytime a bookmark containing javascript code is stored.
Now, by default, HTML5 local storage is disabled. If you desire it, then it must be manually enabled.
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Mitchell was interviewed by Bernard Leong and Daniel Cerventus, two of the hosts of This Week in Asia podcast.
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When you are designing and creating a browser that’s used by 400,000,000 users of the Web, it goes without saying that a lot of responsibility lies in your hands. A crippling bug or fundamentally flawed user interface not only turns people away from your browser, but from the entire Internet. When a geriatric user with Window Me and IE6 announces that they can’t make a website work, it’s not their fault. It’s not the Web’s fault either: it’s the browser! Fortunately, a rather gifted designer is at the helm of Firefox.
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Databases
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With the release of Build 1802, Drizzle, the community driven fork of MySQL, is now officially “beta” software. The new version includes an enhanced version of drizzledump which can now be used to migrate databases from MySQL to Drizzle without any intermediate files. When connected to a Drizzle server it will perform a normal dump, but it it detects a MySQL server it converts all structures and data into a Drizzle compatible format which can be sent directly to a Drizzle server.
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MariaDB 5.2 is finally released as gamma (RC). I had hoped to release this in July at Oscon but our new QA person, Philip Stoev, find at the last moment some problems with Aria recovery and virtual columns that we wanted to fix before doing the release.
The new features in 5.2 are quite isolated and as most have been in use by members in the MySQL community for a long time, we don’t expect any big problems with 5.2 and we should be able to declare it stable within a few months.
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Oracle
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BY VIRTUE of its purchase of Sun Microsystems last January, Oracle has acquired not just a venerable computer hardware maker but some of the open source community’s best-known applications and building blocks, ranging from database MySQL to the Java platform to operating system Solaris.
Even the free and popular Microsoft Office challenger Open Office now belongs to Oracle.
Oracle isn’t a newcomer to open source – software that is community-produced by developers, often made available at zero or nominal cost, with the software code freely available to anyone to examine or modify. It has long supported many open-source applications and has been a champion of open-source operating system Linux for years.
[...]
To kick things off, James Gosling, the eminent Sun engineer who created Java – a computing platform that was designed to enable developers to write a program once then run it in any computing environment – quit Oracle soon after he became an employee by virtue of its purchase of Sun.
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CMS
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Since many of you have your own open-source projects to promote and support, but may not be as well-versed in web development, I will create an open-source project site for the Billix distribution to demonstrate site building. When you’d like to expand beyond your SourceForge page, you can turn to Drupal.
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Croogo is a free, open source, content management system for PHP. It is built on top of the popular MVC framework CakePHP and is targeted towards developers, designers and administrators. It was first released on October 2009 by Fahad Ibnay Heylaal, and continued to see 6 more releases in less than a year. The project is currently at version 1.3.2 beta, and is being actively developed.
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Education
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I had an interesting class with my grade 9 students today. Usually it is very hard to keep their attention long. Today, I played a video of Richard M Stallman speaking in a college lecture theatre about Free Software. They gave him rapt attention. They got it. I followed up with a bit of history of GNU, Linux and the SCOG v World saga.
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Government
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Yesterday, the United Kingdom made an announcement that radically reformed how it will manage what will become the government’s most important asset in the 21st century: knowledge & information.
On the National Archives website, the UK Government made public its new license for managing software, documents and data created by the government. The document is both far reaching and forward looking. Indeed, I believe this policy may be the boldest and most progressive step taken by a government since the United States decided that documents created by the US government would directly enter the public domain and not be copyrighted.
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Openness/Sharing
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As Wikimedia and the community embark on campaigns and programs to increase video contribution and usage on the site, we are starting to see video usage on Wikimedia sites grow and we hope for it to grow a great deal more. One potential problem with increased video usage on the Wikimedia sites is that video is many times more costly to distribute than text and images that make up Wikipedia articles today. Eventually bandwidth costs could saturate the foundation budget or leave less resources for other projects and programs. For this reason it is important to start exploring and experimenting with future content distribution platforms and partnerships.
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Data
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Thanks for your reply – it inspired me to go back and do a little more poking around, in the hopes of giving you more resources to get started. How to do everything is ultimately up to you – consider these notes as options you can choose whether or not to take, possible pointers for places to look if you’re unsure where to begin.
On the technical side, I’d suggest looking at the OpenGeo stack, in particular the OpenLayers javascript library, for implementation. It’s an open source mapping library and they have very supportive core developers and a growing community. Some documentation:
http://workshops.opengeo.org/openlayers-intro/
http://docs.openlayers.org/
http://openlayers.org/dev/examples/
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Open Hardware
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Our paper tries to measure the breadth of LilyPad’s appeal and the degree to which it accomplished her goals. We used sales data from SparkFun (the largest retail source for both Arduino and LilyPad in the US) and a crowd-sourced dataset of high-visibility microcontroller projects. Our goal was to get a better sense of who it is that is using the two platforms and how these groups and their projects differ.
We found evidence to support the suggestion that LilyPad is disproportionally appealing to women, as compared to Arduino (we estimated that about 9% of Arduino purchasers were female while 35% of LilyPad purchasers were). We found evidence that suggests that a very large proportion of people making high-visibility projects using LilyPad are female as compared to Arduino (65% for LilyPad, versus 2% for Arduino).
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Standards/Consortia
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In its continuing attempts to make the Web faster, Google is trimming down the size of image files, which make up about 65 percent of the bytes on the Web.
Google announced late Thursday afternoon that it’s releasing a developer preview of a new image format, which it’s dubbed WebP. An alternative to the JPEG format, which is typically used today for Web pictures and images, WebP should “significantly” reduce the byte size of images, Google promises.
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To clarify, the Street View imagery for Antarctica includes panoramas of an area called Half Moon Island – such as this view of penguins and this one of the landscape. The blue dots you see throughout the continent when dragging the pegman are user-contributed photos.
We introduced Street View back in May 2007, enabling people to explore street-level imagery in five U.S. cities. We were excited to share a virtual reflection of the real world to enable armchair exploration. Since then, we’ve expanded our 360-degree panoramic views to many more places, allowing you to check out a restaurant before dining there, to explore a neighborhood before moving there and to find landmarks along the route of your driving directions.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The fossil of a giant penguin that lived 36 million years ago has been discovered in Peru.
Scientists say the find shows that key features of the plumage were present quite early on in penguin evolution.
The team told Science magazine that the animal’s feathers were brown and grey, distinct from the black “tuxedo” look of modern penguins.
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Finance
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Top 10 Ideas for Goldman Sachs New Ad Campaign
10. Under Buffett’s protection since 2008
9. Putting the zero in zero-sum game.
8. Government Bailout: $29 billion
SEC Settlement: $550 million
Doing God’s work? Priceless.
7. Helping you forget about Bernie Madoff one CDO at a time
6. Goldman Sachs: America’s Counterparty
5. Let us do for you what we did for Greece.
4. Like we give a fuck what you think about us . . .
3. Goldman Sachs: There are some things money can’t buy. For everything else, there’s JPMorgan.
2. The Rothschilds were Pussies
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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The raids carried out by the FBI against antiwar activists last week are an ominous warning to the entire working class. The police-state tactics show the extent to which basic democratic rights—including the right to free speech and political association—have been undermined in the US.
The Obama administration ordered the invasion of the homes of several individuals—primarily members of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO)—and the seizure of documents, computers, cell phones, cameras and other personal and political material. Those targeted have been summoned to appear before a grand jury on October 12 and may face criminal prosecution for “material support” for terrorism.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Tim Berners-Lee, the man credited with inventing the world wide web, warned Tuesday of the “blight” of new laws being introduced across the globe allowing people to be cut off from the Internet.
“There’s been a rash of laws trying to give governments and Internet service providers (ISPs) the right and the duty to disconnect people,” he told a conference on web science at the Royal Society in London.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Inspired by the Wikimedia Foundation, I wanted to give a brief update on the past month’s technology work at Creative Commons.
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Four years ago, the MPAA worked with the local Los Angeles chapter of the Boy Scouts of America to create a special “activity patch” for Boy Scouts to repeat propaganda about how evil file sharing is. For some reason, that story got renewed attention earlier this year, when a few sources came across the 2006 story without checking the date on it. While there’s really nothing new on that story, it does appear that the Boy Scouts are making some absolutely ridiculous suggestions to parents about how to talk to your kids about copyright issues.
That link is to an article in the latest issue of Scouting Magazine, supposedly about the “ethics” of file sharing, and how parents should talk to their children about it. And, yet, it’s entirely one-sided, quoting the RIAA’s claims about “losses,” but oddly leaving out the stacks upon stacks upon stacks upon stacks of research showing that musicians are making more money these days, via alternative business models. You would think that would be a relevant part of the discussion… but it’s totally absent. Someone, apparently, failed their “research the facts” merit badge.
But where the article goes totally off the rails is in telling parents that their children are too stupid to understand the nuances of copyright law, and because of that, they should take an extreme position: one so extreme that they shouldn’t even listen to legally burned CDs…
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Undeterred by the online destruction of ACS:Law, UK lawyers Gallant Macmillan will head off to the High Court on Monday to demand the identities of hundreds more people they claim have been detected sharing files online. While the ISP that holds the identities says it will resist the demand and ask for the hearing to be adjourned, the judge and jury of Operation Payback will pass down their verdict tomorrow, sentencing Gallant Macmillan to a DDoS attack.
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ACTA
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As the 11th round of negotiations for an Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) gets under way in Tokyo, Reporters Without Borders reiterates its opposition to the way these talks are being held behind closed doors without democratic consultation and to the potentially repressive positions being taken by the countries involved. The negotiators aim to conclude the accord or at least finalize its main points, but the latest draft is unacceptable and must be changed if not abandoned altogether.
According to the latest leaks, on 25 August 2010, the wording of the section on the Internet entitled “Special Measures Related to Technological Enforcement of Intellectual Property in the Digital Environment” has been softened but it still gives governments a lot of scope to introduce repressive provisions including filtering and a “graduated response” leading to the disconnection of illegal downloaders.
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The Tokyo round of ACTA negotiations concluded earlier today with countries saying that they “resolved nearly all substantive issues and produced a consolidated and largely finalized text.” Earlier reports from Reuters indicated that the latest round of ACTA negotiations in Tokyo, Japan has failed to produce an agreement. That report indicated that there is still disagreement over scope, including geographical indications and patents. A later report indicated that there was a basic agreement.
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The 11th and final round of the negotiations for the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) was concluded successfully in Tokyo, Japan on October 2. The Government of Japan hosted the negotiations.
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Negotiators for an international anti-counterfeit accord failed to reach agreement after more than a week of talks on Saturday, but European Union officials said a final deal was just weeks away.
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ABC reports that Agreement Reached in Tokyo Anti-Counterfeiting Talks
I tried to comment on the article, but even after jumping through hoops, it wouldn’t let me. If it has to pass a moderator my comment is certainly dead in the water. Which is a good reason to have a blog, so I can comment on articles full of misinformation like this one.
Why shouldn’t Kraft be prevented from calling their product “Parmesan” or have to pay royalties to Parma, Cognac, Roquefort or Champagne for infringing on these legally trademarked names? Isn’t that the point? REAL Parmesan cheese comes from Parma. Kraft’s Parmesan Cheese is COUNTERFEIT. That’s what ACTA is all about… stopping piracy, right?
Isn’t that why they want these laws? So THEY get paid every time. But paying someone else is a problem. They don’t want to have to pay others, I guess they like the RIAA/CRIA music business model where everything possible is done to avoid actually paying the artists.
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Canada
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While the rest of the world is walking down the street to the beat of a breathtaking 21st century soundtrack—from free music streaming on their cellphone, thanks to online music services like Pandora—we Canadians are stuck shuffling along in 20th century AM/FM land.
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The International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers has written to the Canadian government to criticize Bill C-32. In addition to criticizing virtually every new exception – including many that are far more restrictive than those found in the U.S. – it argues for a system that could lead to permanent termination of Internet access.
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Konsole Demo
On YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtRBoi1At_0
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