The following Linux-based operating systems were announced last week: Android-x86 1.6, Linux Mint 8 RC1 KDE Community Edition, Ubuntu Electronics Remix 9.10 and Tiny Core Linux 2.8. In other news: the Ubuntu Manual team needs your help to make the upcoming manual, for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx) operating system, better and useful! The weekly ends with the video clip of the week, the latest Linux distributions released/updated and the development releases.
Virtual machines are the entire state of a computer, frozen into a memory file, and saved. You can run them in the corner of the memory of your PC. Like a picture in a picture or a baby in a womb, a virtual machine is an entire, self-contained image of a computer, running inside your own computer. You can have as many virtual machines running as you want and that your computer can bear. I’ve seen Mac laptops running Windows 7 in one virtual machine, Linux in another. And that Linux image is, itself, running a simulation of the veteran Commodore 64 microcomputer, just to be perverse.
I found this site reports 4.4% GNU/Linux visitors from their webloag. The site is a dial-up ISP and co-location service so they may have more visitors who are techie but at least we know that up front. It shows MacOS at 4.7%. Now to find reports far and wide, wherever Debian goes…
This week on Linux Outlaws: Sun/Oracle deal approved, Zonker leaves Novell, Linux-powered roboboats to invade Wales, 17 year old flaw in Windows uncovered and much, much more…
Cisco today announced the launch of a new Linux-powered router, “the Linksys by Cisco Wireless-N Broadband Router with storage Link (WRT160NL)”, for the Indian market.
Cisco Systems Inc. has launched a new Linux-powered router, the Linksys by Cisco Wireless-N Broadband Router with Storage Link (WRT160NL) in India. This new product complements the existing Linksys by Cisco consumer router line-up and is essentially the next generation of the popular WRT54GL router.
In February 2009, Georgian College went into production with a four-node Oracle Database cluster running industry-standard servers and Linux powering enterprise applications used by students, faculty and administration.
Zarafa is a Linux-based groupware product which offers its own WebAccess web client, IMAP/POP3 access, a CalDAV gateway and native MAPI integration with Outlook.
“I created CloudLinux OS based my previous work developing the H-Sphere Control Panel. I could see the need to give providers a way to control the CPU and IO demands of individual users to achieve high level of server stability,” states Igor Seletskiy, CEO of Cloud Linux Inc. “This work is based on a lot of research that has been done over the years. We went deep into Linux kernel to achieve high level of resource isolation. We also wanted to be able to offer the OS with a professionally staffed, 24/7 support operation and at a low cost for providers. So on behalf of my team and after these many months of hard work, I am proud to be introducing this new technology here at the Parallel’s Summit.”
The Linux server market is proving to be big business for San Francisco-based Polywell Computers, a manufacturer and distributor of servers and desktops to the corporate market. In fact, the 23-year-old maker of low-cost PCs and servers has experienced a steady and significant rise in demand for Linux boxes over traditional Windows PCs and servers.
“Ten years ago, 99% of our servers were Windows-based, and today 99% are Linux-based,” says Polywell CEO Sam Chu (www.polywell.com). “We see all sizes of companies, and government, moving from Windows to Linux.”
We had all but given up on the FOSS MIS in UK schools and had resigned ourselves to virtualising an MS server instance on what otherwise would have been a pure Linux server stack just to run SIMS.
However, it seems to me now to be a MIS-take! To elaborate on this it is necessary to look at the trends in the market.
There’s news that the London Stock Exchange plans to move to GNU/Linux within 12 months. There is also a story on Groklaw about GNU/Linux meeting the needs of Intel better than that other OS ten years ago. GNU/Linux is a great OS.
Hitting back at Microsoft’s recent denunciation of Mobile Linux, the Linux Foundation’s outspoken director Jim Zemlin has defended the open source platform against charges of fragmentation.
The Linux Foundation is offering global training programs, including a free webinar series, to help prospective job searchers meet the rise in demand for Linux-related jobs.
Research shows the demand for Linux talent is on the rise with some firms reporting a 50 percent increase in Linux-related jobs just in the last year. This is certainly good news if you already know how to work with Linux, and perhaps better news if you are looking for a new technical role.
A little less than a year ago, the Linux Foundation launched a program to provide a variety of training opportunities for Linux professionals. Just a few months later, the Foundation moved the program online, offering web-based sessions of select courses to reach a wider audience. On Tuesday, they took it one step further, announcing the free — as in beer — Linux Training Webinar Series.
The courses are VENDOR-NEUTRAL. I think this is an important detail because the huge variety of distro’s, applications and the like are all running on top of a common kernel.
In my dressing down of Wine, I noted that users are unlikely to find Wine mentioned in their ISV’s support matrices, but, as I learned, two of the most frequently-recommended MySQL query tools I encountered, PremiumSoft’s Navicat Lite and the open source HeidiSQL, owe their Linux support to none other than the Wine project.
When I stumble into the kitchen table at midnight, I’ve been known to cry, “It’s a virtual dark room in here!” But that has nothing to do with darktable, which is virtual darkroom software that lets you develop your digital negatives (comparable to UFRaw), and also bundles in the same application a virtual light table to organize your image collections (comparable to F-Spot).
strace is a mighty tool. It’s so simple to use, yet it offers rewards almost instantly. I do admit it’s not for everyone, definitely not the majority of home users, but with some patience, basic investigative instinct combined with a curious soul and desire to learn, you can put strace to smart use.
People often ask why there are so many Linux distributions. No one seems to ask why there are so many items in a buffet spread or so much variety in a botanical garden. The large number of distributions sure makes it difficult to pick the right one for a particular task; but having picked the right distribution, you have it better adapted for the task at hand.
A Linkedin profile from Valve Software’s Chris Green reveals that the company is apparently “REALLY looking for senior Linux + Mac engineers.” As of yet there has been no official announcement of any upcoming Mac related projects. Valve is known for its Half-Life series as well as its Steam digital download service.
It seems as if Half-Life and Left 4 Dead developer Valve is looking for a few good men to engineer things for Linux and Macintosh. Several sleuth sites, as well as more than a share of Mac-focused sites, have been reporting on a rogue sentence not-so-tucked-away in Valve’s Chris Green’s LinkedIn profile, indicating that the studio is indeed doing as much.
As many of you know, I’m still quite interested in virtual worlds and 3D immersive environments though I certainly don’t spend as much time in Second Life as I did several years ago. So from time to time I poke around and see what people are working on, and tonight I came across the Sirikata project from the Stanford Virtual Worlds Group in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University.
Akonadi is the central point of accessing PIM data for all KDE applications. It abstracts all the different implementation details of various sources so that the mail program or calendar application does not need to know the details of how to access the sources itself. However, Akonadi does need these details, which is where its resources come into play.
Last week, the KDE Community had their yearly Americas event, this year in sunny San Diego. Despite California not living up to its sunny reputation, the attendees certainly had a good time. The first three days featured talks about a variety of topics (day 1, day 2 and day 3), there were CMake and Qt development courses and of course several small meetings and work to be done. However there was more than sitting in the conference room at UCSD. We had a great time at Banana Bungalows on the beach, went out for a variety of food, had a few dragons and babies visit us and risked our lives getting to and from the university. Read on for some general impressions on the event, and for some motivation to attend Camp KDE 2011 next January, at a location still to be determined.
The booth will need to be staffed from 9am-6pm. The great news is that you will get into SCALE for free, and because you will not need to be at the booth the whole show, you can take time to check out the talks or visit other booths.
KDAB, the Qt Experts have issued a new release of the Qt Addon collection KD Tools. This release goes along with a significant extension of KDAB’s training course offering, now including in-depth trainings and more advanced topics. KDAB developer Stephen Kelly has been interview after he won the Qt Contribution Award. He, and all other KDAB developers are now Qt certified.
Tiny Core lead developer Robert Shingledecker has announced the availability of version 2.8 of Tiny Core Linux. Tiny Core is a minimal Linux distribution that is based on the 2.6 Linux kernel and is only about 10 MB in size. In addition to the usual bug fixes, the latest update includes a number of changes and updates.
The guys over at Linux Outlaws are always talking about Tiny Core Linux because it always seems to be releasing a new version. I was impressed back in the day that Damn Small Linux could have a working Linux distro in only 50 MB. I know that Tiny Core Linux is technically not a full Linux distro, but I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. It came in a recent LXF disc and I decided to check it out.
On January 25th, François Dupoux released version 1.3.5 of the SystemRescueCd Linux-based operating system. The new SystemRescueCd 1.3.5 is now powered by Linux kernel 2.6.31.12, with an updated Btrfs filesystem from Linux kernel 2.6.32. The popular GParted application for partitioning tasks was updated, as well as the FSArchiver and NTFS-3G.
We are proud to announce that we have just released the newest release of PC/OS. PC/OS OpenWorkstation and PC/OS WebStation are the two editions released. These replace PC/OS 2009 OpenWorkstation and WebStation. This release is based on the Ubuntu 9.04 series. Some of the higlights that target the new release are as follows.
Yesterday evening, January 26th, Roberto Dohnert proudly announced the immediate availability for download of the PC/OS 10 Ubuntu-based operating system.
The idea of open source need not be limited to software — it can also apply to subjects like education, business, law and life in general. That’s the philosophy behind Red Hat’s new Web site, anyway. Could opensource.com be Red Hat’s attempt at reviving excitement in the open source movement? Perhaps the site was put up in an attempt to clarify the difference between open source and collaboration.
I’m kicking off my third year at Red Hat this month and would like to take a step back as we move into 2010 to reflect on the past year. In keeping with the U.S. presidential tradition of delivering a “State of the Union” address each January, I’d like to maintain a similar tradition at Red Hat and highlight some of our milestones from 2009.
Last weekend I went through a somewhat lengthy process of upgrading one of my servers from Fedora 6 to Fedora 12. The server is vital for a company that uses it, there is more than 2 TBytes of data on that machine, and I only had a weekend to go through the upgrade.
Fedora is a very dynamic distribution, with new releases coming out roughly every 6 month. An upgrade backward compatibility is maintained only for the last 2 releases. So, I had to first upgrade from Fedora 6 to Fedora 8, then from Fedora 8 to Fedora 10, and then finally from Fedora 10 to Fedora 12.
Several of the concerns about Oracle’s acquisition of Sun have revolved around how Unix technologies led by Sun would continue under the new ownership. As it turns out, Solaris users might not have much to worry about, as Oracle executives on Wednesday affirmed their commitment to preserving the efforts.
If you want to know what Oracle’s roadmap is for Linux, just watch what Red Hat does. Oracle Enterprise Linux is just a clone of RHEL. Getting a sense of what Oracle really has planned for Solaris – aside from deploying it in SMP systems and clusters – is going to take some time. Oracle’s plans for virtualization and system management are more clear.
Linux was referenced a lot. Larry is a Linux fan, and so are his colleagues — there’s no doubt. ZFS was referenced a lot as one of the most powerful filesystems (it can do snapshots), I really hope that Linux fans will be able to truly enjoy ZFS on Linux kernel level because as of now it works so slowly via Fuse (Filesystem in Userspace).
Ubuntu 9.10, code-named Karmic Koala, debuted in late Oct 2009. And unlike the commercial operating systems, Ubuntu is totally free;it doesn’t cost you a dime. Eric Geier tells you all you need to know about this nifty Ubuntu upgrade.
“The guidance at Canonical is that we encourage our employees to sign copyright assignment agreements for the projects they participate in (as far as I know we’ve done so for MySQL, Zope, FSF, Novell, Red Hat, Intel and others) in order to facilitate the upstreaming of their work. There are variations on the language used. Canonical’s was highlighted in a recent LWN article, but I think the article created the very mistaken impression that Canonical’s agreement is materially different from any of the others I’ve mentioned.”
The Ubuntu developers have announced the availability of Ubuntu 8.04.4 LTS, the fourth maintenance update to the Long Term Support (LTS) version of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, first released at the end of April 2008. The maintenance release of “Hardy Heron” includes 77 updates, covering several bugs, security issues and errors in the installation system. These issues include, Nautilus not displaying Samba shares for certain networks, specific hardware fixes for Dell computers and GRUB installation failures on certain non-Ext3 file systems.
Interestingly enough, the amount of open bugs has stayed relatively steady since Ubuntu 8.10, with Intrepid (8.10) containing 290 bugs compared to 272 in Karmic (9.10). In contrast to this, the last Long Term Support edition of Ubuntu (Hardy – 8.04) contained the most open bugs with a whopping 466 bugs remaining open to this day.
I have recently converted all but one of my personal computers to Ubuntu. To be more specific I am now using Ubuntu 9.10 on two desktops and one Netbook. Windows XP is only surviving on my laptop for support reasons and handling accounting backups on a program that only works in Windows. That conversion is also in development and sometime soon I have a very good feeling Windows XP will die on my notebook and Ubuntu will rise. Wait, I am being too harsh in my descriptive passage. Windows XP meant a lot to me over the years and it was truly great! But it is time to move on. It has been a gamble but so far so good.
A prime example: Back in April 2009, Austin told us Rezitech was leveraging Ubuntu Linux at the heart of his data center. Most folks consider Ubuntu a desktop operating system. But Rezitech spotted the server and cloud opportunities early. Now, Austin is looking to do the same in the MSP middelware market.
Mailspect is pleased to announce a new email defense and archive solution that instantly transforms any Ubuntu server into a highly scalable email security and archive device. With the introduction of our new APT installation a single apt-get command will install Mailspect and all related components on Ubuntu and Debian servers thus providing a substantial improvement over the open source antispam tools provided in Ubuntu.
Each day, the drumbeat for Ubuntu Server Edition is getting slightly louder. In recent weeks, a growing list of ISVs (independent software vendors) has vowed to support Canonical’s Linux server operating system. The latest example involves Mailspect launching antispam and email archiving solutions for Ubuntu Server.
Ecocyn today announced new Linux Ubuntu offerings for the Epoch iGx mainframe to help clients run smarter and more efficient data centers that maximize the use of IT resources and reduce energy costs.
I have previously described Linux Mint as “Ubuntu plus all the stuff you would probably add to it yourself after installing”. Of course, you need to be aware that a lot of the things which are added are proprietary or otherwise non-FOSS, so if you are a GNU/Linux/FOSS purist, you should be aware of that at the beginning. I am not of that persuasion, and Mint is one of my two favorite distributions (SimplyMEPIS is the other). Now, with the quality of Mint and the care that the Mint Community contributors have taken in adding KDE 4.3, this is sure to be an excellent distribution. If you are a KDE devotee, and you have been disappointed by Kubuntu (I know that a lot have), I would strongly encourage you to take a look at this distribution.
The PlayStation 3 up until now was the only one of the modern consoles that hasn’t been hacked. Reason for this, people often reasoned, was that Sony had already catered to the “hackers” needs by granting the ability to install Linux on the platform.
I’ve gotten confirmation the exploit works on 3.10. Also I’ve heard about compile issues on Fedora. I did this in Ubuntu. I would really like someone to write up a nice tutorial
Enhance Technology announced an eight-disk, Linux-based network-attached storage (NAS) device, offering up to 16TB of SATA storage. The UltraShare NAS8000-P4 incorporates an Intel Xeon (Nehalem) CPU clocked at 2.0GHz, four gigabit Ethernet ports, and an optional gateway for expanding to up to 176TB.
MSI announced an ATX-format motherboard based on Intel’s P55 chipset that supports LGA1156-socketed Core i3, i5, and i7 processors. The “P55-GD85″ offers connections including USB 3.0, SATA II, SATA III ports, RAID , PCI Express, PCI, and FireWire, and offers a Linux-based fast-boot OS called “Winki.”
Kontron announced an “AM4020″ AMC module and a VPX format “VX6060″ computing blade, both equipped with Intel’s 32nm-fabricated Core i7 processor. The Linux-ready products are the first of many Core i7 systems Kontron plans to introduce this year in formats including AMC, CompactPCI, and COM Express, says the company.
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Kontron also announced a Linux-ready, VPX-format 6U computing blade for parallel data and signal processing applications. The Kontron VX6060 is equipped with dual Intel Core i7 processing nodes linked to an Ethernet and PCI Express infrastructure, says Kontron.
Xport Pro is available running Linux and IPv6, providing Linux developers with a compact compute platform, along with an industry standard development environment.
From a software point of view, the CM-T3530 is supported in the mainline Linux kernel from rev 2.6.33, and offers full Openembedded Angstrom Linux distribution and full support for Windows CE 6.0 R3.
The Motorola Moto ZN300 utilises a Linux/Java-based MOTOMAGX operating system, which makes it somewhat different from many handsets market. Reliability and stability are key elements and the use of this operating system provides that and more. The unit itself is aesthetically pleasing to the eye, as well as being a functional slider phone. Measuring 95 mm x 46 mm wide and only 15 mm thick it is somewhat compact. At only 103 g, this impressive social media handset is also lightweight.
To recap, the Mini 5 is a 1GHz Snapdragon-powered netpad (did I just coin a phrase?) running Android 1.6 with 5 megapixel camera, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and 3G mobile. It should be selling for $1,098 before carrier subsidy.
Cypress Semiconductor announced a touchscreen device driver for Android and Linux that supports Cypress’ TrueTouch touchscreen controllers, complete with “all-points” multi-touch signaling support. Meanwhile, “Cyanogen” has hacked a multi-touch interface for Google’s Nexus One phone, and Google is upgrading the Android-based phone’s spotty 3G support, says eWEEK.
A hacker called Brandon Roberts has worked out a way to dual-boot the native Maemo-Linux operating system on the Nokia N900 and also the Android operating system.
Nokia has announced its second Push N900 developer contest meant for developers to push themselves creatively by figuring out creative uses and hacks for the Maemo Linux based Nokia N900.
The Nokia N900 smartphone is the first open-source handset to use the pioneering Maemo 5 software, delivering a PC-like experience on a cellular handset.
This means you can adapt the phone’s software (built on Linux) to integrate many applications such as Facebook, Skype and open-source add-ons.
Do you want your computer to be adorable? If so, you might want to look into one of Haleron’s new machines. These tinier-than-netbook ‘Swordfish’ (via Netbooked) have a 7″ screen, VIA ARM 300 MHz processor, 128 MB of RAM (up to 256 MB) and 1 GB flash storage (up to 4).
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3G support is optional, and you can also choose to run Windows XP or Linux if you wish.
There is of course an Archos 7 Tablet on the Archos site running on Linux. This new scoop from ArchosLounge points to an Android-based Archos 7 tablet. The specs also indicates a flash-storage device instead of a hard drive one. It should be the same 7-inch 800 x 480 touchscreen tablet with WiFi. The Archos 7 Android comes with a 180 euro price or about 150 British pounds.
I ran my first Linux live CD in January 2007. I’ve been using free, open-source operating systems on my personal machines for much of my work for the past two years, more intensively in the last year.
New York University anthropologist Gabriella Coleman says the open-source software movement has emerged relatively unscathed from the economic downturn.
Ms Coleman was the opening keynote speaker at Linux.Conf.Au, a trans-Tasman conference held in Wellington last week that attracted more than 600 open-source software developers and enthusiasts.
Waiting for open source to give Microsoft a much-needed kick up the jacksie has seemed like waiting for Godot. We wait, we wait and we are still waiting.
The Editorial Committee of the International Free and Open Source Software Law Review (IFOSS L. Rev.) is proud to announce the immediate availability of the publication’s second issue. IFOSS L. Rev. is a peer-reviewed biannual legal review dedicated to analysis and debate about Free and Open Source Software legal issues. It is published by an independent Editorial Committee.
The International Free and Open Source Software Law Review (IFOSS L. Rev.) is a collaborative legal publication aiming to increase knowledge and understanding among lawyers about Free and Open Source Software issues. Topics covered include copyright, licence implementation, licence interpretation, software patents, open standards, case law and statutory changes.
Nuxeo, the Open Source Enterprise Content Management (ECM) company, announced today that it has enriched the value of its Nuxeo Connect support and maintenance offering with the introduction of Nuxeo Studio.
In the world of product development, time-to-market keeps shrinking and demand for better quality keeps growing. Open Source, which is often thought to be the definitive solution to meet both objectives – faster development cycle and better quality, is on the mind of many OEMs and product companies.
In reality, the companies find it difficult to overcome the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) to make a final decision and say, “Yes, we will use open source in our product.”
In the product development process, at the one end are the engineering people – developers, architects, engineering managers – who are aware of open source and its benefits, but lack the power to take decisions. At the other end, are the management and the legal people, who can take decisions, but may not have sufficient ground-up information. How do we bridge this gap? How can the engineering team convince the management to boldly embrace open source?
Red Hat’s President and CEO Jim Whitehurst does a “State of the Union” blog (which I think should be a mandatory action for all CEOs) during which he talks about the company’s double-digit growth rates for both revenue and headcount throughout the course of the recession. Open source appears to have thrived in during the downturn (whether we are out of it or not) and I think that might just be because open source likes the going to be crunchy.
If you had to ascribe the terms ‘wealth and sogginess’ and ‘crunchy and on the edge’ to a) proprietary software systems and b) open source software – which way round would you put them? See what I mean? Open source is all about survival of the fittest rather than survival of the fattest. Now of course that’s doing proprietary vendors a huge disservice, but I am trying to make a point.
Kitware, a company that builds open source platforms and develops advanced research solutions to overcome the challenges of our time, today announced it is opening up the main infrastructure of MIDAS under a nonrestrictive license allowing freedom to install the MIDAS server on location and build on top of the platform for free.
Jackrabbit 2.0 has been updated to now require at least Java 5 and common components have been spun out into separate projects for better re-usability. Support for database connection pooling is now available for all supported database back-ends and a local data store feature is enabled in the default configuration.
In 2010, Eucalyptus is going to focus more on refining what they have and finding new business opportunities, Wolski said. But the eventual goal is to become to the cloud what Linux is to desktop operating systems: the free, customizable alternative platform that has the potential to put gray hair on the bigger, better-funded competition’s heads.
If you’re a solution provider, vendor, developer or technologist with a vested interest in open-source PBX and VoIP, particularly Asterisk, your time is now.
That was the resounding theme of last week’s Digium Asterisk World conference in Miami Beach, where a number of open-source devotees said the opportunity to push Asterisk platforms further into networking and infrastructure is pronounced like never before.
A web interface to BIANA providing basic functionalities is also available. The software can be downloaded under GNU GPL license from http://sbi.imim.es/web/BIANA.php.
How important is an open-source solution for HIE, when interoperability is required for compliance with federal mandates?
The Nationwide Health Information Network, and the fact that it is using open-source technology, really led us to start our own in-house project. Given that, it was a natural for us to move over to Misys.
Proponents of open-source health IT systems have some concerns about the recently proposed “meaningful use” rules, including the time frame for electronic health record certification and adoption.
After Maemo, Firefox Mobile (aka Fennec) is about to conquer another Linux-based platform – Android. This is not to say something’s wrong with the built-in Webkit-based browser, quite the contrary, but as you know – more choices are always welcome.
With the final version of Firefox for Maemo just around the corner, and with more stable versions of Firefox for Windows Mobile down the pipe, the guys over at Mozilla are also gearing up for the first release of Firefox for Android, it seems. The company already announced back in 2009 that they were considering a move in the Android area, and it seems that we are nearing the first step to be taken in this direction, with a usable flavor of Firefox for Android expected to arrive in February.
You’ve probably seen the news – the Sun/Oracle transaction has closed. With the passing of that milestone, I can once again speak freely.
Having had nine months to accelerate down the runway, there’s not a doubt in my mind Oracle’s takeoff and ascent will be fast and dramatic. I wish the combined entity the best of luck, and have enormous confidence in the opportunity.
“Kenai today is a good idea but we don’t think it is quite working” said Ted Farrell, Oracle’s Chief Architect and Senior Vice President for tools and middleware.The plan is to close the public facing version of Project Kenai and bring the project “inhouse” where, Farrell says, there are a number of internal projects which are a good fit for Kenai.
Oracle promised during its five hour webcast Wednesday to continue Sun Microsystems open source commitment by throwing money and support behind MySQL, Open Office, and Solaris, promising to make each offering better. As expected, open source users are skeptical.
Oracle executives have said they intend to use Sun Microsystems’ storage product portfolio to compete in the disk and tape business – in support of and outside of Oracle’s software applications — now that the sofwtare company’s acquisition of Sun is finally complete.
If yesterday’s epic five hour webcast discussing Oracle’s plans for its finally acquired Sun assets was a long time coming for the analysts listening in, you can imagine how much of a wait it’s been for those on both sides of the transaction. It’s been roughly nine months, remember, since the database giant announced its intention to acquire the one time dot com darling.
Several of the concerns about Oracle’s acquisition of Sun have revolved around how Unix technologies led by Sun would continue under the new ownership. As it turns out, Solaris users might not have much to worry about, as Oracle executives on Wednesday affirmed their commitment to preserving the efforts.
Among the new Zenoss Enterprise customers in 2009 were Hosting.com, Agilent Technologies, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and Real Networks while leading organizations such as Carlson, Deutsche Bank, Rackspace Hosting, iStock International, and Motorola renewed their agreements with Zenoss.
Here’s some short but sweet (and lucrative) news involving money in the open source industry. Opengear, provider of an open source console server, scored its first $1 million deal in December 2009. Next up, Opengear has won a deal involving Linode, a cloud and VPS (virtual private server) hosting company. Hmmm…. are solutions providers waking up to these niche open source opportunities?
Translate.org.za are the proud parents of a new Zulu spell checker.
What makes us such proud parents? We’ve ported the spell checker from the Myspell platform to Hunspell. Which means what exactly? It means that we can now spell check Zulu text at much higher precision. It also puts the platform in place to ratchet up the checkers performance.
Mozilla has released Weave 1.0, the Firefox extension and service that provides Firefox user data synchronization among computing devices like laptops, desktops, and starting tomorrow, with Firefox for Maemo release, mobile devices. It is also great for users who dual-boot, and what don’t want to bother remembering where they did what.
In January, Acquia (news, site) announced its private beta launch of DrupalGardens.com, a hosted Drupal (news, site) solution. They also launched an Open Government program to help US government agencies meet the requirements of the Open Government Directive.
Popular Open Source Software offerings such as Linux and Open Office have seen substantial increases in market share as the recent global recession has prompted more and more organisations to look for additional value from their software. The UK Government is already heavily backing Open Source Software, accelerating its use in public services.
Technology services company East Summit, Inc (DBA ESI Web Services) has launched a campaign to reveal the true power of WordPress to the small and medium enterprises that can benefit most from its features.
I was greeted by the ominous discriminatory phrase “To join the Webinar, please use one of the following supported operating systems”. Oh, what a surprise. Linux isn’t one of the supported operating systems.
This is all the more incredible because the vast majority of Drupal installations are on Linux web servers.
Perhaps what Klause is currently best known for is being the man behind the move of Whitehouse.gov to open source Web CMS Drupal. He returned to the public sector during the run-up to the 2008 elections, and regardless who won, there would be a new administration.
Such an event requires that the outgoing administration’s final message be archived for posterity. You can see the results today in the US government archives.
The new U.S. Administration has demonstrated an immediate commitment to investing in green energy technologies and developing the new regulatory frameworks required to address the crisis of climate change. We have a unique historical opportunity to incorporate these open elements into the policy framework, but we must seize this opportunity now if we are to achieve the pace of innovation and adoption required to avert the climate change crisis. Government spending commitments and economic incentives of well over $100 billion for green technologies provide the necessary commercial leverage to drive an open innovation model, much as the U.S. Department of Defense’s spending on computer equipment in the 70s enabled it to drive the adoption of the Internet Protocol that led to the modern Internet. This leverage needs to be exercised now while contracts and governance for these large taxpayer investments are still being put in place and while policy frameworks for regulation and market mechanisms are being detailed.
Open Source for America’s Guidelines for Open Government Plans will help inform the different agencies about what policies and practices should be included in their mandated Open Government Plans. OSFA has opened this discussion on its website and plans to finalize its set of guidelines the second week of February, thus providing the agencies with sufficient time to take them into account before the April 7th deadline. Later in the year, the organization will issue a report card about the agencies, using these Guidelines as part of the process of the grading system.
Greens communications spokesman Scott Ludlam has called for the Commonwealth to better audit its software licensing and support costs and to encourage the adoption of open source software where a robust alternative exists.
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The Commonwealth is understood to spend more than $500 million annually on software licences and support.
Some 95 percent of Malaysia’s government agencies have adopted open source software (OSS), but the remaining 5 percent have not warmed to the concept–and is unlikely to anytime soon, according to a government official.
The UK Government has revised its 2009 Open Source strategy and will now require suppliers to show they have considered open source. Although the government says that the new strategy documentPDF “does not represent a wholesale change to Open Source Open Standards Reuse Strategy” they have taken account of feedback from writetoreply.org.
The UK government has rejigged its open source and open standards software procurement policy, following pressure from OSS vendors last autumn.
Early last year the Cabinet Office revised its rules on public sector open source software purchases, but many OSS players complained that the policy amendments didn’t go far enough.
Clearly, much of this is just words, words, words, as someone once said. Moreover, the time scales are depressingly long: 2015 is a generation away in technology terms. Still, the fact that open source is mentioned explicitly in the ways described above, and that there is a growing understanding of the problems it faces, gives me some slight hope that one day we might even start seeing free software being widely used by the UK government.
The UK government’s stance on open source is meaningless without any significant means of enforcement. That’s the view of the open source community which has bemoaned the lack of teeth in guidelines issued this week.
Although there was a broad welcome for the new Cabinet Office strategy document, particularly the passages affirming the support for open source, several commented that there was a need to go further.
The Cabinet Office seems to have got its PR strategy all wrong. The period leading up to the launch of the iPad would have been a perfect day to have buried bad news #169;Jo Moore but the new ICT strategy seems to be something to celebrate: a move that saves money, cuts carbon emissions, sets out a cloud computing policy and offers more to the open source community should be trumpeted loud and clear on a day free from any other distractions.
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So, if we accept that public procurement should be more loaded in favour of open source software, what can be done about it? Should we adopt a policy like Hungary’s where 20 percent of public procurement has to be open source? (although the open source community in Hungary is not entirely convinced it should be a poster-boy for European open source adoption) Should we adopt a policy like the Netherlands where open source has to be adopted, all other factors being equal? Or should it like France where there’s no set policy but open source has taken off to such an extent that 96 percent of public sector bodies are now using it.
The government’s revamped open source procurement policy will continue to lack teeth unless a single body is made accountable for enforcement, a member of the open source community have warned.
The measures, which have taken a total of five years to overhaul, are intended to promote open standards and encourage the reuse of software.
As part of its exploitation strategy, Telefónica I+D decided to release as Open Source a number of components developed during the research on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Clouds. These components will be integrated in the Claudia Platform that will offer a Service Management toolkit to deploy and control the scalability of service among a public or private IaaS Cloud. Telefónica I+D chooses MORFEO Project to release the software because it guarantees the access to the results of research beyond the end of the project.
I’m constantly amazed and heartened by the new domains in which free software is turning up. Here’s a nice one: setiQuest.
For centuries humans have looked at the stars and wondered “are we alone?” Now, setiQuest is an opportunity for you to help answer that question. In 1960, Frank Drake conducted the first scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). Since then, scientists from many countries have conducted more than 100 projects looking for communication signals from other civilizations. With the spread of the Internet in the 21st century, it is now possible for humans around the globe to participate in a new SETI program.
You can participate as a software developer, signal detection algorithm developer, or a citizen scientist.
We are entering an era in which the mark of an open society is the way in which it guarantees access to open knowledge through the internet. It is therefore vital that liberal democracies do not send mixed signals to closed societies that seek to restrict internet freedoms for their citizens. The anti-counterfeiting trade agreement that is being discussed in Mexico might inadvertently do that, so may we have a debate in the House so that hon. Members can test that notion and find out more about our negotiating position?
We can only promote the commons as a new narrative for the 21st century if they are identified as a common denominator by different social movements and schools of thought. In my point of view, enforcing the commons would be not only possible, but strategically intelligent. Here are 15 reasons why:
1. The commons are everywhere. They determine our quality of life in great many ways. They are present (even though often invisible) in the social, natural, cultural and digital sphere. Think about the things we use to learn (read and write), the things we use to move (land, air and sea), the things we use to communicate (language, music and code), the things we use to feed and heal (land, water, medicine) or the things our reproduction depends on (genes, social life). The commons is about how we share and use all these things.
‘We are putting into practice the philosophy of open-source software: that given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” So says Zakir Thomas, project director of Open Source Drug Discovery, or OSDD. Established in India, OSDD has established a novel open-source platform for both computational and experimental technologies to make drug discovery for infectious and neglected diseases cost effective and affordable to the people of the developing world.
Interaction design and strategy company ZURB focuses on helping businesses create Web sites that get noticed and keep visitors. The company recently launched a tool called Notable, an interactive method for teams to use internally while building a Web site.
As Ashlee points out, R is being used by academics, university students, and enterprises. If ignored, R could very well have become a threat to the SAS and IBM/SPSS franchises. IBM has a history of utilizing open source for competitive advantage. Instinctively, I thought SPSS decided to support R after being acquired by IBM. I’m encouraged to learn that SPSS made the decision to support R well before the IBM acquisition. It’s also great that SAS has followed suit.
Qt framework
Qt is a C++ framework for high performance cross-platform software development. Qt port (Qt 4.6) is available on Embedded Linux, Windows, WinCE, and Symbian. This means, any application that is developed on Qt for Linux will run on Qt for WinCE.
The GCC announcement comes a day after an separate announcement by Taylor on the golang-nuts mailing list that the Go licence would now include an explicit patent grant.
Today, just 11 years after the first release of XML, there are hundreds of XML languages, schema and supporting standards. Because of standards like XML (and HTML and the Unicode), the noosphere has morphed from a philosopher’s foil to a boundless resource to be mined by the great and the humble, the rich and the poor, wherever they may be.
XML will not be the last standard we will need to fully capture the promise of the noosphere. But it is one of the small set of foundational standards that have set us on our way into a future that could not have been imagined but a short time ago. Except by visionaries, like de Chardin, who were able to look past the horizon of time to imagine a world that it will be our privilege to experience first hand.
Witnesses could be charged with a misdemeanor for failing to report violent attacks in California under legislation approved by the state Assembly.
The bill by Democratic Assemblyman Pedro Nava of Santa Barbara follows the October gang rape of a 16-year-old girl outside Richmond High School’s homecoming dance. Investigators believe as many as 10 people participated while another 20 or so watched without calling police.
About 18 months ago, we published a graph showing that Unicode on the web had just exceeded all other encodings of text on the web. The growth since then has been even more dramatic.
Labour has introduced 14,300 new offences since taking office in 1997, with Gordon Brown’s administration inventing crimes at a rate of more than one a day.
The Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies released the results of a new national survey on public responses to climate change. This report finds that public concern about global warming has dropped sharply since the fall of 2008:
* The percentage of Americans who think global warming is happening has declined 14 points, to 57 percent.
* The percentage of Americans who think global warming is caused mostly by human activities has dropped 10 points, to 47 percent.
As speculative pressure intensified against Greece in European financial markets on Thursday, senior figures in the Greek government sought to bolster confidence that it will repay its debts on time.
Representative Stephen F. Lynch grilled Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on why regulators propped up AIG in the fall of 2008 when they let Bear Stearns fail earlier that year and why they allowed AIG to fully reimburse business partners, such as Goldman Sachs, with what was essentially taxpayer bailout money.
Yesterday’s release of detailed information regarding with whom AIG settled in full on credit default swaps (CDS) at the end of 2008 was helpful. We learned a great deal about the precise nature of transactions and the exact composition of counterparties involved.
When Goldman Sachs (GS) decided to pay out bonuses to the top 30 employees in stock, a big issue was where the strike price–so to speak–will be set. That is, how much stock would it take to get the bonus level. It depends of course on how the calculation is made.
The Obama administration may have made bankers’ pay a focus of criticism, but its recent initiatives may have actually helped boost the bonuses of firms like Goldman Sachs.
Today, Jim Cramer was getting hysterical on his defense of Goldman Sachs. Just like he did last Thursday when the stock was breaking the 160 level on CNBC. Now its close to breaking 150, so he’s upping it a noy=tch.
Senior executives from J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. also got involved. Rainmaker James B. Lee, who serves as a firm vice chairman, and Jes Staley, who runs the investment bank, each placed calls to senators over the weekend urging support for Mr. Bernanke, according to a person familiar with the situation.
In the testimony of Timothy Geithner and Henry Paulson about the decision to pay AIG counterparties full value on credit derivative contracts, Congressman Dennis Kucinich’s (D-OH) questioning disclosed that Goldman Sachs had not expected full payment on those contracts from AIG for over a year, and that Goldman Sachs was in fact exposed to up to $2.5 billion AIG losses once the Government stepped in to rescue the ailing company, contrary to Goldman’s public statements. The decision by the New York Fed to pay 100 cents on the dollar gave Goldman Sachs a better deal than it was legally entitled to receive.
Goldman Sachs Group, one of the biggest recipients of funds from the US bailout of American International Group, was seen by the public
as favoured by regulators, according to an internal Federal Reserve Bank of New York e-mail.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc., one of the biggest recipients of funds from the U.S. bailout of American International Group Inc., was seen by the public as favored by regulators, according to an internal Federal Reserve Bank of New York e-mail.
Mr. Geithner, who was president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York during the A.I.G. bailout, said during the hearing that he was faced with a “stark, tragic” choice when the decision was made to pay off A.I.G.’s counterparties at par instead of at market value, but that it was the right one considering the circumstances at the time.
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman lashes out at Goldman Sachs today, writing, “The behavior of some leading Wall Street banks, particularly Goldman Sachs, has been utterly selfish. U.S. taxpayers saved Goldman by saving one of its big counterparties, A.I.G. By any fair calculation, the U.S. Treasury should own a slice of Goldman today.” This is a flawed line of reasoning, for at least four reasons.
This is truly remarkable. Three amazing things happened in a period of 6 minutes.
1. A Democrat is not closing ranks with his fellow Democrat
2. A Democrat from MA recognizes that the money the Federal Government is spending belongs to the American Taxpayer. You know, the American Taxpayer the one who pays the bills a.k.a “those rich people”. He states this repeatedly as well.
3. The Democrat from MA recognizes that the folks at Bear Sterns got a crew cut, but the folks at Goldman Sachs got 100 cents on the dollar. This is typically called “picking winners and losers.” Behavior that any resident of a banana republic would recognize.
Friedman said New York Fed staff kept sensitive information away from him and other officials with private-sector ties to avoid conflicts. He testified today before a U.S. House committee on what some lawmakers are calling the New York Fed’s “backdoor bailout” of banks, including Goldman Sachs, that did business with American International Group Inc.
Goldman Sachs’ speculation and profiteering was a major cause of the recession and now their CEO is giving out $16.7 billion in bonuses. They got a bailout, what do all of us get?
Recall the Rolling Stone description of Goldman Sachs (GS) as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” So is that good thing or a bad thing? For some, this is a virtue, as long as the blood funnel is properly jammed. It’s clear to many that the bank does not randomly throw its funnel around. It’s culture makes it as circumspect as could be, if you ask its supporters.
Wall Street is cutting back on cash bonuses, which means paper-rich banksters are forced to choose between preschool tuition and new wine cellars until their restricted shares mature. Goldman Sachs is lending a hand by offering mortgages to its staff.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has already taken a beating in the press and more blows are on the way.
Some of the punishment follows the less than impressive testimony on Wednesday by U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner about his role in rescuing AIG Inc., the failing insurer. The rescue resulted in a multi-billion-dollar payout to Goldman, which held credit default swaps with AIG.
Unless it dramatically changes the way it does business, Goldman Sachs will lose access to the discount window of the Federal Reserve under the new financial regulations proposed by Barack Obama last week.
The Volcker plan has not been fully sketched out, and it would on the surface appear to hit Goldman Sachs less than other banks that are more commercial-investment bank hybrids. Goldman Sachs doesn’t have a lot of FDIC-insured accounts, and it could always give up its bank holding company charter.
The transfer of financial data from Europe to the US ‘to fight terrorism’ may be unjustified, according to EU Information Society Commissioner Viviane Reding.
In a speech marking Data Protection Day, she said that the amount of financial data being transferred to the US had ‘considerable privacy-invading potential’.
Let me contribute some open source intelligence on the SWIFT case. One of the leading SWIFT related software solutions providers is the German company Tonbeller AG. As we can see the company is specialised on business intelligence, risk analysis and financial profiling solutions. SWIFT itself seems to be their client or certification agency, here is the Partner profile from SWIFT.
Reding also urged greater privacy controls on behavioral advertising because “[u]sers are not always aware that they are being tracked whenever browsing the Internet.” In her view, data gathered without the users’ informed prior consent should not be used.
Think that turning off cookies and turning on private browsing makes you invisible on the web? Think again.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has launched a new web app dubbed Panopticlick that reveals just how scarily easy it is to identify you out of millions of web users.
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The purpose of Panopticlick is to show you how much you have in common with other browsers. The more your configuration mirrors everyone else’s, the harder it would be to identify you. The irony is, the nerdier you are — using a unique OS, a less common browser, customizing your browser with plug-ins and other power-user habits — the more identifiable you are.
The House Democrat heading up the push for legislation that would set new online privacy safeguards that could dramatically reshape Internet marketing said he plans to introduce the bill shortly, with several Republicans likely signed on as co-sponsors.
MBC, a major Korean broadcasting company, announced (link in Korean) it will make nearly all of its content available to anyone for sharing. This means any individual or company can freely grab MBC’s original content and put it up on their server without any restrictions.
BitTorrent is popular because it lets anyone distribute large files at low cost. Which kinds of files are available on BitTorrent? Sauhard Sahi, a Princeton senior, decided to find out. Sauhard’s independent work last semester, under my supervision, set out to measure what was available on BitTorrent. This post, summarizing his results, was co-written by Sauhard and me.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation can’t believe it: the FCC’s network neutrality draft rules, if adopted in their current form, might give Comcast permission to flat-out block BitTorrent—precisely the scenario that led to the rules being drafted.
What seems clear is that Virgin may have a lengthy legal dispute in its hands if it insists on using DPI. While they have not stated it, Virgin might be taking this decision in order to pre-empt any potential legal threats as content owners insist more and more on making ISPs liable for illegal content shared in their networks. It will be interesting to see if other ISPs follow Virgin’s lead.
Charles Dickens was angry at those American publishers in 1842 when he arrived in Montreal following a trip to the United States. Stephen Leacock notes in his book Charles Dickens, His Life and Work, that Dickens wrote home:
Is it not a horrible thing that scoundrel booksellers should grow rich here from publishing books, the authors of which do not reap one farthing from their issue by scores of thousands; and that every vile, blackguard and detestable newspaper, so filthy and bestial that no honest man would admit one into his house for a scullery doormat, should be able to publish these same writings…?
In 1880, the copyright issue was still around. In November, the Literary and Debating Society at the Mechanics’ Institute of Montreal had this item as a subject of debate: “Is the action of the American Publishers respecting copyright likely to advance literature?”
3. It seems like a gift economy would be a whole lot easier to operate than a barter economy. Would that advantage be the reason gift economies, rather than barter economies, were so widely adopted historically?
It would be absurd if the amazing possibilities of digitising museum and art collection holdings were squandered because of a short-sighted and misguided obsession with copyright. We need to nip this in the bud, and get some leading institutions to come out in favour of disseminating their holdings in this way. If we don’t we’ve decades of lock-down in front of us, just when things should be available to all.
I’ve noted several times an increasingly popular trope of the intellectual monopolists: since counterfeiting is often linked with organised crime, and because counterfeiting and copyright infringement are vaguely similar, it follows as surely as night follows day that copyright infringement is linked with organised crime.
Perhaps the folks at the IFPI don’t quite understand how the internet works (or perhaps that’s a given) but generally speaking, when you have internet access at your house, you don’t set up separate access accounts for every family member… And if others in the family have access, what’s to stop the “cut off” one from using the other’s access?
Apparently times are hard over at ECN Magazine. Rather than come up with compelling content to draw people in, its Technical Editor decided to pen the mother of all troll-baiting editorials. NSILMike points us to Jason Lomberg’s recent rant on The Internet Entitlement Mentality, which I think may set a record for repeating pretty much every long-debunked fallacy about online content and business models, as well as how it describes those folks who actually understand basic economics, and how free works as part of an economic ecosystem.
This week the condemnation of file-sharing “legal blackmail” lawyers ACS:Law has been widespread, with extremely harsh words coming from the country’s House of Lords. Despite this the law firm are unrepentant and say they will persist with their campaign. It is, however, possible to immunize your family from this growing threat.
Is it reasonable to question how data, as an unproven but potential revenue source for the New York Times, would compare to the direct monetization scheme currently proposed? Of course. But given that one negatively impacts users, and one does not, I know which one I would try first. Not that they need be mutually exclusive, of course, but I would exhaust all of my options before embarking upon a course of action that might materially and permanently impact my relationship with my customer.
I’ve marked some names in blue, and the reason I’ve marked them in blue is that Sound Exchange is supposed to be responsible to musicians, and the names in blue are remoras. For those who don’t know what a remora is, it’s a fish which attaches itself to larger marine animals, like sharks or whales to get a free ride. It offers nothing back to the animal is rides, nothing at all, and it couldn’t exist without it’s ride.
What are the criteria for being a “Linux guru?” Is the breadth of your skills, the depth of your knowledge, or the the size of your collection of early kernel 1.x CDs? It’s a question on the tongues of many Linux bloggers this week, and everyone seems to have their own list of attributes. One common theme: the ability to help out others. Also, it’s probably best not to call yourself a guru, even if you think you are one.
Free software has come this far by just being itself. We use it because we like it. Should we be focusing more on integrating with Windows in order to increase market share, or should we just let nature take its course and those who want to switch will? In the end, a majority will “see the light.”
[...]
Perhaps it’s time we took a page out of Microsoft’s book and started to “embrace, extend and extinguish” proprietary data formats and software. Integrate ourselves with them, and once we have the power, break them. Aside from the fact that this approach is horrible, nasty and completely unethical, the danger is whether in the end we would actually switch to totally free solutions, or continue to use those old familiar encumbered ones. We might have the market share, but then we’d have a whole new battle on our hands.
One thing is certain, however. Integration with existing systems has helped to rocket the popularity of Linux and make it much more attractive to business, education, government and even end users. If you’re a developer of free software, keep doing what you’re doing. Make great products and the users will come. Consider integrating with existing systems to make your software more attractive, but just don’t lose yourself along the way.
Kate Stewart is the manager of the PowerPC team at Freescale. As such, she has a basic customer service problem to solve: people who buy a board from Freescale would like to have some sort of operating system to run on it. That system, of course, will be Linux; satisfying this requirement means that Freescale must operate as a sort of Linux distributor. At her linux.conf.au talk, Kate talked about a new initiative aimed at helping distributors to ensure that they are compliant with the licenses of the software they are shipping.
We, the undersigned, are current or prospective subscribers of Netflix that would like the “Watch Now” feature available to Linux users. Linux users are part of a new trend in OS use around the world. Interoperability with Linux will be very much appreciated and beneficial to all. To remain partisan by making use of the “Watch Now” feature for Windows users and possibly Mac OS users only, is not a fair practice to your subscribers.
The schedule of weekend talks for SCALE 8X has been finalized and are posted on the SCALE web site at http://www.socallinuxexpo.org. The topics are interesting and wide-ranging – check them out! The schedule for the Friday specialty sessions (OSSIE, WIOS and the Try-It Lab) will be posted in the next week.
LinuxTag has been held regularly for 15 years, longer than any other Linux fair in Europe. More than 200 free software projects and companies participate, more than in any other European Linux event. LinuxTag attracts nearly 12,000 visitors — an unrivalled record. Since its beginnings in 1995, visitors and exhibitors have valued the credibility and expertise behind LinuxTag.
2. *nix Systems are More Secure – I love the confident security of *nix systems. They are collectively the most secure systems on the planet. Unlike the MacOS and Windows, that leak like security sieves, *nix systems arrive out of the box in a secure mode. A default install of any *nix system stands as the very picture of a bullet-proof system. The only reason why any *nix system ever gets hacked is because their system administrators are stupid. They’re the kind of people who login as root (See #5 above). When you need a system with 100% sterling security, choose *nix, you won’t be sorry.
FINNISH PHONE MAKER Nokia’s N900 is a Linux-based mobile device with a number of advanced features, including application multi-tasking, built-in VoIP support, stereo speakers, graphics acceleration, video output to a TV, and more.
Announced last August and available now from Vodafone, Carphone Warehouse and Nokia’s online shop, the Nokia N900 is part of the firm’s N Series of multimedia handsets. However, it is more like a tiny computer that can make voice calls rather than a smartphone. This is demonstrated by the fact that the main screen resembles a computer desktop, and the phone features are relegated to just one application among many others.
Two things are clear from this experience: (1) Nokia made a very poor choice with the GMA 500, and (2) Wubi is a fantastic way to get Linux on your freedom-hating machine.
In Part 2 of this continuing series I managed to free Nokia’s Booklet 3G from the clutches of Windows using Wubi. Today we’ll be looking at a Linux distribution made specifically for netbooks — Jolicloud.
James Cameron’s Avatar is now officially the top grossing movie of all time eclipsing Titanic (also by James Cameron). Probably the main reason of its huge success is the use of innovative filmmaking technology like its development of 3D viewing and stereoscopic filmmaking with cameras that were specially designed for the movie’s production. It’s amazing that Cameron wrote the scriptment for the film more than 15 years ago, but the technology available at that moment was very limited to portray his vision of the film, a major cause of the long delay of its release.
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Creating the virtual world of Pandora required over a petabyte of digital storage (Transformers “Revenge of the Fallen” needed about 140 terabytes). The final footage for Avatar occupied 17.28 gigabytes of storage per minute. To help finish preparing the special effects sequences on time, Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) was brought in, working alongside Weta Digital to create the battle sequences.
Think about it…technically you can break the operating system into many constituent pieces:
* Kernel
* HAL
* Desktop
* Subsytems
and more. You can also break the human body into pieces:
* Brain
* Eyes
* Skeleton
* Nerves
* Heart
and more. And like the operating system, each piece is worthless alone. What exactly can you do with the Linux kernel without the other pieces around it? Not much. There are plenty of desktop environments and window managers available, but none of them will run without X Windows, which will not run without the kernel.
Extended discard support means that Linux now supports ATA TRIM, which can increase SSD lifespan and throughput. New additions to the Linux kernel include HA solution DRBD and drivers for HP, LSI and VMware storage hardware. The new kernel version, expected in early March, also includes many minor improvements to the code for the Btrfs, Ext4 and ReiserFS file systems.
Last May we were briefed that DisplayLink would provide open-source driver support on Linux. DisplayLink is a company that makes graphics processors capable of powering high resolution displays that work over a USB connection. This technology is found within products from Hewlett-Packard, ASUS, Samsung, and others. Since last year DisplayLink and the Linux community has been working on a LGPLv2 software stack and in June first released a frame-buffer and X.Org driver and since has released other improvements.
Catalyst 10.1 for Linux continues to lack X Server 1.7 support, but the Linux 2.6.32 kernel may work with this release. Like past months, the Catalyst 10.1 driver is another unexciting driver update. AMD Eyefinity might also be working on Linux, or at least the ability to use three monitors from a single AMD Radeon HD 5000 series graphics card, but that hasn’t been officially shared. Catalyst 10.2 will be a bit more exciting as Ubuntu 10.04 nears, but not without some disappointments too.
Tools such as grep, find and awk have often come to the rescue of gleeful Bashmongers searching for files buried beneath gigabytes of other items. But when a typical Linux distro takes up a couple of gigs of disk space, it’s not hard to imagine that finding your files will only become trickier over time.
EtherApe is a graphical network monitor for Unix modeled after etherman. Featuring link layer, ip and TCP modes, it displays network activity graphically. Hosts and links change in size with traffic. Color coded protocols display.
KDE Community Ships Fifth Translation and Service Release of the 4.3 Free Desktop, Containing Numerous Bugfixes, Performance Improvements and Translation Updates
January 26th, 2010. Today, KDE has released a new version of the KDE Software Compilation (KDE SC). This month’s edition of KDE SC is a bugfix and translation update to KDE SC 4.3. KDE SC 4.3.5 is a recommended upgrade for everyone running KDE SC 4.3.4 or earlier versions. As the release only contains bugfixes and translation updates, it will be a safe and pleasant update for everyone. Users around the world will appreciate that KDE SC 4.3.5 is more completely translated. KDE 4 is already translated into more than 50 languages, with more to come.
The latest version of my favorite desktop, KDE SC 4.4, is due to be released in just a couple of weeks. Even though it’s still in beta, I just couldn’t keep my hands off of it, being the desktop geek that I am. Let’s take a quick look at how KDE 4.4 is shaping up during the last leg of its development phase.
Linux only: It’s still a work in progress, but GNOME Activity Journal already offers a nice at-a-glance look at your file work over the last few days, offering usage charts, image previews, and quick file access.
You don’t have to go with Dell though. Other major hardware vendors like HP and Lenovo also offer pre-installed Linux on desktop systems. I’m loath to recommend them though because, frankly, they make it very hard to find their Linux-powered systems. Your better choice is to go with a smaller company that stands behind its Linux PCs like Los Alamos Computers, system76, or ZaReason. For a more comprehensive list of companies that sell computers with Linux ready to go see LXer’s Pre-Installed Linux Database.
We’ve just got an email which points out that there is going work for a new operating system called RevLin OS. This is more of an announcement, because there are no downloads available for now, so I couldn’t test it. But I really liked the concept – I must say that it sounds much better than Chrome OS, so I decided to share this news with you. Why better than Chrome OS? Read on!
RevLin OS sounds promising. It may be the bit of “new” that the *nix world needs, and it may wake all the freetards up. Essentially, it’s a reworking of the Linux kernel that keeps the driver framework, and has the same system calls. This makes it binary compatible with Linux, while not suffering from the size and complexity issues of Linux (or so we hope since it hasn’t been released yet). Currently, it is unclear whether or not this monster will use X11 or some other display framework, but we know that the GUI can be scripted with JS, HTML, and CSS. This would no doubt start a flurry of distro building by the FOSS community, and within a year or so someone would have RevLin running his toaster.
First, thanks to Greg for an excellent, thoughtful post on Fedora’s goals. I remember well — and I’m sure Greg does too — the FUDCon in Raleigh in January 2008 where members of the Fedora community sat down to try to distill “what Fedora stands for” into a powerful message. The result was the freedom, friends*, features, first mantra — guiding values that we’ve enshrined on our Foundations page.
There are a number of popular choices for Linux enterprise level servers including CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian, Slackware and others including Red Hat Enterprise. This series of articles on a choice for a Linux Server will compare several of these Linux distributions to examine the advantages and disadvantages of each distribution. What is important to recognize in this evaluation is that how you view advantages and disadvantages are dependent upon the expertise of your Linux administrators and the level of support you need to maintain your servers.
It is not the most profitable of those in its class, neither is it the oldest nor the classiest. However, it is the most popular and that popularity is set to increase come this April with the release of the LTS edition of Ubuntu Linux.
All things being equal, the release of Ubuntu Lucid Lynx is likely to be a game changer in its own right and help increase the awareness among more people about the existence of alternatives to Windows. The following five factors will definitely play a crucial role in this regard.
Back in November we shared that Nouveau would finally be pulled into the Ubuntu 10.04 kernel as up to this point Canonical had employed the feature-limited and obfuscated open-source NVIDIA driver known as xf86-video-nv. The Nouveau driver became an option with Ubuntu 9.04, but it was using Nouveau’s DDX user-space mode-setting code paths that have since been dropped upstream.
Of course, I realize new product launches don’t guarantee customer or IT administrator success. WorksWithU plans to track a range of Ubuntu enterprise deployments more closely in 2010. Hopefully, our efforts will reveal best practices for remotely, proactively managing Ubuntu in the enterprise.
Back in March 2009, I started hanging out in the #ubuntu-meeting channel on Freenode to see first hand how IRC meetings in the Ubuntu Community are conducted. I noticed there were specific actions/commands that were being used in the meetings; I wanted why and what they were, so I asked :-).
With regulators set to approve Yahoo!’s search pact with Microsoft, this means that Redmond will power the future of Firefox on Ubuntu, a combination with decidedly anti-Redmond connotations. The ultimate irony is that Microsoft will essentially be paying people to build a Linux distro.
This morning I noticed a link to this article that caught me off guard: Ubuntu is changing it’s default search selection in Firefox for the next release to Yahoo because they are going to pay more (than Google does). Now, I don’t much care for Yahoo (especially now that they use Microsoft for search since I REALLY don’t like Microsoft but this is a wakeup call and this needs to be said:
Mozilla needs to make an official repository for Ubuntu.
I have also heard that Yahoo’s privacy policies are much better than that of Google. What I find actually interesting is that sometime last year, Yahoo! reached a deal with Microsoft to have Bing power Yahoo! searches. Now we are going to see Yahoo! being the default search provider for Ubuntu. This will really be interesting. Only time will tell how this turns out.
Some people will object to the deal automatically, because, last year, Microsoft emerged as one of Yahoo!’s major partners. As I write, I am sure that others are already reflexively ranting about how Ubuntu is inching closer to Microsoft, citing its use of Mono applications as further proof of this alleged trend.
But that seems a relatively remote concern. What makes me uneasy is that the change is apparently being done solely for business reasons.
Talk about a careful balancing act involving Ubuntu. Canonical appears to have financial relationships with both Google and Yahoo. Here’s how the relationships — involving Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) and Google Chrome OS — are shaping up. Plus, the potential financial implications for Canonical.
Zoho recently announced that they are making Zoho Discussions available for free to open source projects. Zoho Discussions is an online forum tool that provides a way for people to discuss various aspects of a project.
Spammers beware! A new version of Apache SpamAssassin has you in its sights.
After over two and half years of development, SpamAssassin 3.3.0 is now available, providing mail administrators with new features to better stem the flow of spam into their organizations.
“Zap” is a wireless performance tool, previously used for internal development and testing by Ruckus Wireless. Ruckus has released the Zap source code under a modified BSD license to provide the tool to the world, and hopefully spur development of this and other related analysis tools. Zap measures performance, statistically, to provide insight into the true nature of how a network can perform.
A movement is growing quietly, steadily, and with great speed. In basements, attics, garages, and living rooms, amateurs and professionals alike are moving steadily towards disparate though unified goals. They come home from work or school and transform into biologists: do-it-yourself biologists, to be exact.
The Polish Police force wants to increase its use of free and open source software in order to cut costs, announces Andrzej Trela, Deputy Chief of Police and responsible for logistics, in an interview in the Police force’s monthly newsletter, published on 15 January.
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The latter remark suggests to the Polish Foundation on Free and Open Source (Fwioo), that the police might use the savings on proprietary licences to pay for innovation. The Fwioo mentions the interview on the website of their project on Transparent and Correct Public IT Tenders (PPIT).
IPv4 addresses are running out. There is no second opinion about this – at the current rate of allocation, there will be no unallocated addresses by the end of 2011. Even if some of the large allocated, but unused ranges will be given up by their current owners, this could only delay the exhaustion by a very limited time. And after that, any newcomers to the Internet wishing to have IPv4 connectivity will either have to negotiate to purchase blocks of addresses from someone, or use whatever addresses their provider gives them, which increasinly will be fewer and fewer addresses, or none at all, if their ISP has implemented…
With Firefox 3.6 now out the door, what new features are coming next for Mozilla’s open source browser?
Starting with Firefox 3.6, Mozilla developers are now set to more rapidly iterate and integrate features as part of its ‘Lorentz’ branch. With Lorentz, Mozilla developers are aiming to include new features faster while maintaining backwards compatibility and overall browser security and stability.
OpenOffice.org: OpenOffice.org will be managed as an independent business unit, Screven said, with Sun’s development and support teams retained. Oracle will continue to support the free community edition of OpenOffice.org. However, Oracle also plans to deliver a cloud offering called Oracle Cloud Office, which Screven said had been under development for a while. Screven did not comment on the fate of StarOffice, the paid, supported version of OpenOffice.org that competes with IBM’s own OpenOffice.org-based Lotus Symphony.
OpenOffice will continue to receive investment and be managed within a separate business unit. There will be a focus on integrating OpenOffice with business intelligence and content management offerings.
Oracle’s chief executive on Wednesday claimed that – far from laying off beleaguered Sun employees – his company would be hiring 2,000 additional people during the next few months.
He reprimanded as “irresponsible” the UBS analyst who said last week that Oracle will cut up to half of Sun’s 30,000 workforce following the completion of the deal.
With Oracle’s anticipated purchase of Sun drawing near, company CEO Larry Ellison disclosed plans to hire 2,000 engineering and sales employees – more workers than it’s expected to cut from Sun’s workforce, according a The Wall Street Journal report posted Tuesday.
In any case, 3D applications were certainly usable, even if they didn’t perform flawlessly, in my virtual machines. This is a huge improvement over the past, when using Ubuntu meant saying goodbye to a range of Windows-only applications that require hardware acceleration.
Ideally, the day will come when I can run every application I want natively on Ubuntu. But until then, user-friendly and feature-rich virtualization platforms like VirtualBox will remain a vitally important component of the Linux world.
VirtualBox 3.2 isn’t yet around, but the Sun (well, Oracle) engineers are going to be releasing a 3.1.4 release shortly. To get some tests out there prior to the final release they have issued a beta of VirtualBox 3.1.4, which offers 40 fixes/additions. VirtualBox 3.1.4 is positioned to have SMP stability fixes, 3D support improvements, fixes for the Linux 2.6.32 kernel, video mode improvements for X.Org / XFree86, and various other changes.
Alfresco say that the brand is now established and they are ready to move to a more permissive licence. The big difference between the LGPL and GPL is that the LGPL allows proprietary and closed code to be linked to the software. Companies have used the inability of GPL code to be linked to proprietary code as a cornerstone of dual-licensing, where they make the code open source, but sell licences to users who wish to integrate it with proprietary components.
Colorado’s Dish Network Corp. and its sister companies have won a $51 million court judgment against a man they accused of being a satellite TV pirate who helped people steal the companies’ transmissions.
YouTube users will be able to submit questions to President Obama via Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Moderator, which will be answered by the president during a live interview next week. MSNBC.com has a bulked up player, which will let users search for for keywords in the president’s speech, among other features. And CBSNews.com promises to let users participate in real-time polls.
President Barack Obama is set to effectively scrap all US manned spaceflight plans beyond Earth orbit for the foreseeable future, according to a newspaper report.
A Texas bank is suing a customer hit by an $800,000 cybertheft incident in a case that could test the extent to which customers should be held responsible for protecting their online accounts from compromises.
The incident, which was first reported by blogger Brian Krebs this week, involves Lubbock-based PlainsCapital bank and its customer Hillary Machinery Inc. of Plano.
The Home Office has created a new unit to oversee a massive increase in surveillance of the internet, The Register has learned, quashing suggestions the plans are on hold until after the election.
The new Communications Capabilities Directorate (CCD) has been created as a structure to implement the £2bn Interception Modernisation Programme (IMP), sources said.
That’s hardly a “vital” tool now is it? Of course, we’ll be reminded that if it wasn’t for assuming guilt and taking DNA samples of anyone you arrest then some murder from 25 years might not have been solved, but still, little more than a half of one percent of crime relies on the DNA database?
Gareth Evans was sacked after allegedly threatening to criticise his local council on air over a minor parking ticket row involving his heavily pregnant wife.
Evans, 39, a popular DJ at BBC Radio Sheffield, detailed the dispute on Facebook, revealing how his wife Joanna was given a £25 ticket for parking badly in an ‘empty’ town centre car park during a shopping trip.
When parking her Land Rover, she slightly straddled another bay to ensure she had sufficient room to get out. She returned later to find a fixed penalty notice on her windscreen.
Mr Evans wrote on Facebook about his family’s ‘war’ with the council and their failed attempt to have the fine overturned.
But a senior official at Bassetlaw Council in Nottinghamshire was so concerned about comments that he wrote to BBC management.
GROWER OF SEMICONDUCTOR WAFERS Intel had to shut part of its Irish plant for a while because of the extreme cold and the fact the local council polluted the water supply with fertiliser.
The extra security measure, reported by the New York Post, comes as the United States’ biggest banks have never before attracted so much public outrage.
Obama, attacking a ‘binge of irresponsibility, wants to ban banks which take customer deposits from betting on shares with their own money – proprietary trading – and running hedge funds and private equity groups
Firms such as AIG, Goldman Sachs Group Inc and Morgan Stanley, which have taken part in U.S. taxpayer funded bailouts, have been under close scrutiny for being lenient with executive pay and perks.
As observant readers will recall, a week ago we pointed out a letter in which the New York Fed’s Steven Manzari instructed AIG to stand down on all discussions with counterparties on “tearing up/unwinding CDS trades on the CDO portfolio.” At the time we focused on the word “stand down” as an indication of the Fed’s lead role in the process. At this point there is no doubt that the FRBNY, together with its law firm, Davis Polk, were in the pilot’s seat during the entire AIG negotiation, and while Tim Geithner may not have been the responsible man for this, someone must have been – and for the record, our money is a double or nothing on recently promoted FRBNY Senior Vice President Sarah Dahlgren, who as of January 21st is in charge of the Fed’s Special Investments [AIG] Management Group.
As everybody knows, AIG got a huge government bailout in September 2008 to help make payments on derivatives contracts with banks, including Goldman. Yet in the previous month, Goldman approached AIG about “tearing up” its contracts, according to a November 2008 analysis by BlackRock, then an adviser to the New York Fed.
Now Goldman Sachs is talking about giving up their Federal Bank Charter as well as becoming a private company, giving up their public status. Is this an effort to wield their power without any public scrutiny at all? Just think about it. When Halliburton was taking a lot of hits from the media and the public, they simply gave up their American corporate citizenship and became a Dubai corporation – no longer open to domestic scrutiny or regulatory oversight. Is GS planning a similar move to shield their operations with much more limited regulatory oversight and no public scrutiny without having to give up their American citizenship? Only time will tell but during that time, we, the people can take back control and our system from all those who threaten our Democracy.
A proposed trading crackdown backed by former Federal Reserve chief Paul Volcker overshadowed Goldman Sachs’ biggest-ever profit Thursday.
New York-based Goldman (GS, Fortune 500) posted a gaudy fourth-quarter profit of nearly $5 billion. That number beat the Wall Street analyst consensus estimate by more than $3 a share, thanks to an unusual reduction in employee compensation that handed shareholders a $3 billion after-tax bonus.
Which demands another question: what happens to actual breathing/bleeding human beings who sell $40 billion of something they know to be toxic? What penalties would we extract from any person who then made bets about how long it would take for that toxic waste to kill other “citizens” of its kind?
Never mind the millions of actual, living, breathing human beings left unemployed, their children born in debt to pay for the latest round of CEO bonuses. It sure has been a good year for Goldman-Sachs! But I digress.
Goldman would be the biggest beneficiary of such a move because it makes huge profits from proprietary trading and runs many private equity and hedge funds, the article noted.
Bank of America’s K Street lobbyists include Obama administration alumnus Oscar Ramirez and Chuck Schumer’s former press secretary Izzy Klein, both at the Podesta Group, co-founded by John Podesta, who served as Obama’s transition director, and has visited the White House more than 15 times.
One of Congress’ premier watchdog panels is investigating Goldman Sachs’ role in the subprime mortgage meltdown, including how the firm sold securities backed by risky home loans while it simultaneously bet that those bonds would lose value, people familiar with the inquiry said Friday.
SEPTA has filed suit against Goldman Sachs investment bank, which mananged its pension funds. The suit claims the bonuses paid to Goldman Sachs executives harmed SEPTA’s returns.
Public anger over Goldman’s $16.2 billion in salaries and bonuses after the multibillion-dollar taxpayer rescue of the financial system has not subsided.
The company’s profitability, and suspicions that its deep links with governments around the world gave it unfair advantages, made it a symbol of Wall Street greed and excess. Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi described it as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity.”
As Goldman Sachs prepared to announce its fourth quarter earnings and employee compensation levels yesterday, the bank had bomb-sniffing dogs and police barricades on hand at its New York City headquarters, the New York Post reports.
Relations between the banks, the US Government and the public are now in new and dangerous territory with the New York Post reporting that Goldman Sachs used police barricades and called in bomb-sniffing dogs when it announced its record $4.95 billion earnings result. So while the rest of America is struggling, Goldman Sachs continues to rake it in.
The Nazareth District Court has upheld the right of the Walla Web portal to refuse to hand over the IP addresses of commenters accused of defaming a journalist.
No one is accusing Google of being Big Brother, but it certainly was eye-opening when Ben Edelman, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, shows that newer versions of Google Toolbar, versions 6.3 and above, was tracking Internet Explorer 8 users actions even when it was ‘off.’
Of course this begs the question, “Is there someone out there who ever turns the extremely useful Google Toolbar off?” I never have. Still, it is disturbing that this bug ever made it to the public in the first place. I mean, what part of ‘off’ did Google’s developers not get?
Micro-blogging site Twitter is developing technology that will prevent government censorship after Iran and China moved to censor its users.
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Williams said Twitter had an advantage in evading government censors over a singular website as its streams are distributed through a number of outlets, including syndicating sites and mobile applications.
InternetNZ (Internet New Zealand Inc) has released a position paper rejecting centralised internet filtering as an acceptable approach for New Zealand.
Like many, we were amazed at the decision by Cablevision to try charging $5 per week (yes, per week) for its paywall to Newsday content online. The newspaper itself is not particularly good and doesn’t really provide all that much in the way of excess value compared to what else is out there. And $5/week is extremely high. Yet, even so, we’re a bit surprised that after three months, the paper has a grand total of 35 paying subscribers. Yes, 35. I’m sure that extra $175/week comes in quite handy. Oh right, they also saved on the salary of their popular columnist who quit, rather than have his work hidden behind a paywall.
We’ve already described how ridiculously hypocritical it is for various newspapers to block UK aggregator service NewsNow from linking to their articles in its paid subscription service, but apparently it’s a difficult concept for some to grasp. The UK’s Daily Mirror has now started blocking access to NewsNow’s crawlers, claiming that its only problem is the fact that NewsNow makes money off subscriptions. If it wasn’t making any money, the paper wouldn’t have a problem.
As Scott said 90 years ago: “What a chance for the newspaper!” If we turn our back on all this and at the same time conclude that there is nothing to learn from it because what ‘they’ do is different – ‘we are journalists, they aren’t: we do journalism; they don’t’ – then, never mind business models, we will be sleep walking into oblivion.
Apparently times are hard over at ECN Magazine. Rather than come up with compelling content to draw people in, its Technical Editor decided to pen the mother of all troll-baiting editorials. NSILMike points us to Jason Lomberg’s recent rant on The Internet Entitlement Mentality, which I think may set a record for repeating pretty much every long-debunked fallacy about online content and business models, as well as how it describes those folks who actually understand basic economics, and how free works as part of an economic ecosystem.
Lord Mandelson is planning to make cut off internet subscribers pay to appeal in infringement of copyright dispute resolution processes. In short, if you are cut off by Ofcom for illegally downloading, even if you’re innocent, you’ll have to pay to appeal against the decision.
A House of Lords committee is currently going over the Dark Lord’s Digital Economy Bill. Last night, Lord Faulkner of Worcester highlighted for the committee Amendment 200A, which “allows for the possibility that subscribers may be asked for a contribution towards the costs of the appeals process”.
As more countries weigh whether to punish serial copyright infringers by taking away their Internet access, critics debated Wednesday whether such efforts have a deterring effect. A panel discussion at the Congressional Internet Caucus’ State of the Net conference examined such laws as one awaiting final approval in France that give infringers three chances to stop before their Internet access is cut off by a court and legislation working its way through the British Parliament that would impose graduated levels of notice against infringers with the ultimate sanction being a cutoff of Internet service.
You must use that one device exclusively. When the official WiFi went dead, I went in search of other networks, including one called “Free WiFi,” but when I accessed that, it still asked me for my username and password (which I obviously don’t have). It certainly is somewhat amusing to find out that the music industry execs are annoyed by the consequences of the law they so desperately claim they need.
THE BIG MUSIC recording companies have rejected a judge’s ruling that a central Minnesota woman found guilty of sharing 24 songs over the Internet should be ordered to pay ‘only’ $54,000.
The RIAA would just like the case to be over, but doesn’t want to set the precedent, so they ask Thomass-Rasset to pay less, but the “trade” is to get the decision deleted. Thomas-Rasset quickly rejected the offer, and now it seems likely that the RIAA will reject the reduced amount and everyone will go back to trial over just the damage amount.
The largest copyright pirates are the large corporations, particularly in the content distribution business. Yes, those companies who scream the loudest that their customers are ‘pirating’ movies, songs, books, etc. In this series, we are going to look at cases where these companies have engaged in large scare copyright infringement.
Rodwell’s latest target is Bob Garcia, “a detective novelist, jazz musician and Tintin aficionado,” who has been ordered by British courts to hand over £35,000 or face the possibility of having his house and belongings seized. His crime: writing five essays about the character.
All Honda wanted to do was save the Earth, one gallon of gasoline at a time. It turns out, though, that in the act of saving said Earth, the Japanese automaker stepped on a few toes – namely, those of Save the Earth Enterprises, an environmental group based in the United States.
The billboard catches the attention of drivers and truckers traveling on the highways. “YOUR WIFE IS HOT” — BETTER GET YOUR A/C FIXED,” it reads, in big bold letters.
[...]
Air Around the Clock, in a 28-page complaint, is accusing its competitor of trademark infringement and misrepresenting their services. The federal lawsuit also states that the advertisement is likely to cause confusion and deceive consumers as to the origin of the services.
Here’s a fun one for you lawyers out there. Richard points us to a story about a movie made entirely by chimpanzees who were given cameras, which is now being broadcast on the BBC.
I just read an article called: Life after Windows: What happens to tech if Microsoft dies?” The article made me think of what it really would be like without Microsoft. I didn’t like it. We need Microsoft over there competing with us. No matter what happens to the economy, to the PC hardware format or to the demographic of the common computer user; Microsoft and Linux will never be “best buddies.” And I know that “Linux” includes the major commercial Linux players: Novell, Red Hat and Canonical. I know that Novell and Red Hat have both crossed enemy lines with agreements but to think that the two camps will ever kiss, makeup and live happily ever after is pure fantasy. Frankly, I like it that way.
Dear Netflix,
I have learned that the Netflix Watch Instantly service is not available on Linux operating systems. So, I have canceled my Netflix account and will return as a paying customer when Netflix can offer its Watch Instantly service on Linux computers.
The Open-PC project, which developed an open source Linux PC based on community survey requests, says its KDE-flavored nettop will ship next month. The Open-PC is equipped with a 1.6GHz dual-core Atom N330 with 3GB RAM, but the nettop’s high $500 price has stirred some controversy.
Linux has definitely gained its popularity among the world-wide web-users recently mainly because of its high stability. Linux is probably one of the most stable operating systems in the world which had been highly sought. A huge numbers of web users have turned to Linux solution to take advantage of its great benefits which are worthy and crucial for the survival and expansion of their online business.
Along the way, a Unix mime was built called Linux, then added to a soup of utilities (GNU) and UIs (KDE, Gnome, among others).
Now there are operating environments like Google’s ChromeOS and Android…. not to mention Symbian, Palm, and a half dozen others. Virtualization breaks the rule that existed from RT-11 to just a few years ago in the microcomputer world: one operating system per machine. That idea that became a rule was a boon for hardware makers and operating systems licensors alike. Now that rule is broken by the advancement of hypervisors and desktop hypervisors.
There are few individuals in IT today that can escape knowing at least three major operating trees, starting with Unix, Windows, and to a lesser extent, MacOS. There are dozens of variants. More than a dozen sit on the machine I’m using to write this– like ducks in a row. Just click and in a few seconds, I’m in OpenSUSE or Windows Server 2008 R2, or in Android. It’s that easy.
It won’t come as a surprise to readers of this blog that China’s new supercomputer will be running Linux – over 80% of the world’s big machines do. What’s fascinating is that this is being built out of that home-grown Loongson chip – the one that Windows doesn’t run on. As the same article explains:
One of the talks that I saw came from Jon Corbet, who gave a run-down on recent changes to the Linux kernel. A statistic that he mentioned along the way has garnered much comment: the fact that “75% of the code comes from people paid to do it.” In particular, some have leapt on this figure as proof that kernel coders have “sold out”, and that the famed altruistic impulse behind free software is dead. I think this is nonsense.
In my view, this 75% figure indicates two things. First, that *most* of the top kernel hackers are being paid to code. That’s really great news, because it means that people can earn money doing what they love, and aren’t obliged to starve in garrets. Secondly, it means that very large computer companies regard the kernel as so important that they are prepared to pay these people good salaries to work on it.
The Linux Foundation today announced a free Linux training Webinar series and an expanded set of courses and course locations for its existing training program. There is no coincidence that this shortly follows the Foundation’s recent jobs board announcement.
Linux is experiencing significant growth in every category of computing. The new products and systems based on Linux you see announced every day will be deployed for a very long time. A shortage of qualified people to support this ecosystem could potentially slow Linux growth.
In order to keep Linux growing at its current record pace, the Linux Foundation and its members have made a strategic decision to address this increase in demand for Linux professionals with programs such as the jobs board, the new training offerings and, as always, its fellowship program.
Jobs have been the collective focus of much of the US population over the past two years. Whether it’s keeping the job they have, or finding a new position in a very tight job market, US workers are looking for all the help they can get with employment. It’s much the same in the rest of the world, too.
This one is a no brainer. Even though there is a GUI front end for nearly every command-line tool available, I often feel the command line is simply the best tool. And what better way to remotely administer a system than with good old secure shell? I won’t go into the specifics of what commands I can’t let go of (there are so many of them). Suffice it to say, the command line is one of my most-used tools.
A Linux desktop screen need not look drab. Whereas proprietary OSes like OS X and Windows have their widgets, Linux distro users can get just as much function-rich eye candy through Screenlets. Screenlets are miniature applications that reside on the desktop and provide constant information — everything from system performance readouts to news feeds to photo galleries.
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If your system runs the Compiz video enhancement feature, you will have extra-special eye candy. These additional options make using Screenlets even better. For instance, you can toggle Screenlets on and off. To do this, though, you need the latest widget plug-in for Compiz-Fusion installed.
Linux has several excellent personal finance applications. Today we’re going to look at KMyMoney. Though specifically developed with the KDE desktop in mind, KMyMoney works with any Linux desktop.
How useful KMyMoney will be to you and how easy it will be to use depends on two factors: One, whether or not your bank uses a supported online banking protocol, like OFX or HBCI, which applies when using any type of money management program. Two, if you can get a set of plugins working, which includes check printing support.
These days, buying a decent plasma is often a lot more expensive than building your own media center. If you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years, a media center is basically a PC that’s focused solely on media playback. Check out our PDF guide on how to set up your own media center, written by Stefan Neagu.
KPlato is a free tool for project management and it looks similar to the project management tool of Microsoft Office. You can allocate resources, define task and then let KPlato schedule the task according to the availability of resources. You can reschedule the project at any point of time. Here are the features of KPlato.
Empathy is an outstanding chat client that can be used for multiple and various services. Give it a try and you’ll find yourself never going back to your old client.
This release also includes a whole slew of new widgets for KDE. This includes a “Webslice” plasmoid to display a part of a Webpage, a spellcheck widget, an on-screen keyboard, and a blackboard widget that allows users to paint with the mouse or even multitouch devices “on platforms that support them.” KDE inherited multitouch support from Qt4.6, and could make KDE a contender on mobile devices and tablets.
Toma Albers, one of the KDE Developers sent out a note today that there will be an RC3 release for KDE 4.4, prior to the final release scheduled February 9th.
Querying data in Nepomuk pre-KDE-4.4 could be done in one of two ways: 1. Use the very limited capabilities of the ResourceManager to list resources with certain properties or of a certain type; or 2. Write your own SPARQL query using ugly QString::arg replacements.
With the introduction of Virtuoso and its awesome power we can now do pretty much everything in one query. This allowed me to finally create a query API for KDE: Nepomuk::Query::Query and friends. I won’t go into much detail here since I did that before.
About a year before the release of Vista I became so disgusted with Windows that I made the decision to switch completely to Linux and have never regretted the decision. My wife and son had no problem making the transition from Windows to Linux thanks in no small part to KDE. With KDE 3.5, I was in Desktop heaven. I had power and flexibility that Windows users cannot even imagine.
In that first run-up we basically had a couple of the usual chuckleheads waging war against a flimsly constructed straw man in hopes of discrediting RMS/FSF/Free Software with a secondary effect of promoting “Open Source” as the preferred term (and a tertiary effect of embarassing themselves). The usual tactics from the usual suspects.
Today, I saw that Bradley M. Kuhn is now a member of the GNOME Foundation. GNOME is in desperate need of people who understand and respect the Free Software ethos, so this is welcome news indeed.
As the GNOME 3.0 approaches, the GNOME Community is going to hold a Usability Hackfest in London from feb 22-26. Those who are not aware about the usability project, it aims to make GNOME appearance more efficient and pleasant to the users. In this hackfest, they are planning to work and improve the design and usability of some new GNOME 3.0 components.
* Low profile, able to run in small amount of RAM
* Fast booting
* Python
* Firefox 3.x, Opera 10.x or Chromium browser
* Mplayer or similar for video playback
NOT. No thanks. I want to live in a world where I have a choice. Where Jake can come along and tell me about a Linux distribution that I have never heard of before, but which is so right for his needs that he gets all excited in writing about it. A world where one of the major Linux distributions can stumble, and either make a major mistake, or just take a couple of years to get out the next version, and all the others just keep moving ahead, so I can use whichever one works best for me at the time.
I’ve been wanting to try Arch Linux for quite some time now. They seem to have a similar aesthetic to Gentoo in that the main mission of Arch is to build your operating system from the ground up. You only add the things you need. So you don’t have any cruft on your system based on what some other people think you should have. So let’s pop this CD in and see what happens! (I’m also following the directions on http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Official_Arch_Linux_Install_Guide) The disc is the 2009.08 snapshot. I booted into the LiveCD.
CRUX PPC 2.6 is now available. It works on Apple 32bit “NewWorld” G3/G4 and Apple 64bit G5, Genesi PegasosII and Efika, Acube Sam440ep, IBM RS/6000 CHRP (604e), YDL Powerstation, IBM Intellistation POWER, and IBM pSeries RS64/POWERn.
CRUX PPC 2.6 is, as usual, released via two different installation ISO: 32bit and 64bit. The 32bit version is based on a single lib toolchain instead the 64bit one comes with a multilib toolchain. These two versions share the same ports tree.
See the download page!
Still, the bigger area of competitive interest may involve Sun’s Java. Just last week, Ingres CEO Roger Burkhardt said potential issues around Java — rather than MySQL — are more strategic to the industry.
And today, Red Hat Middleware VP Craig Muzilla said Red Hat has…
“…high hopes that Oracle will not only serve as a faithful steward of this important technology, but will also be a positive force in driving the future of Java in collaboration with the members of the JCP [the Java Community Process].”
Red Hat has asked Oracle to help keep Java as one of the “most important technologies developed during the past twenty years” by creating an open and independent Java Community Process. The call from Craig Muzilla, Red Hat vice president for middleware, comes in a posting on the company’s web site. It points out that Red Hat have become much more involved in Java, with its acquisition and growth of it’s JBoss middleware and has been leading specifications such as JSR299 (Contexts and Dependency Injection) and JSR303 (Bean Validation) through the Java Community Process.
THE PRESIDENT AND CEO of Red Hat, Jim Whitehurst used the occasion of the US President’s State of the Union address to tell Red Hat’s customers and partners how well everything is going for the company.
I’m kicking off my third year at Red Hat this month and would like to take a step back as we move into 2010 to reflect on the past year. In keeping with the U.S. presidential tradition of delivering a “State of the Union” address each January, I’d like to maintain a similar tradition at Red Hat and highlight some of our milestones from 2009.
This is all somewhat rich, coming from a company which not too many years ago claimed it could offer “unbreakable Linux” support that is better than what Red Hat Software can provide. It’s also an interesting follow-up lawsuit to the one launched against SAP subsidiary and support services firm TomorrowNow, which Rimini CEO Seth Ravin also co-founded. That case also claimed illegal downloads of support-related information.
Have you been wanting to fly to the cloud, to experiment with cloud computing? Now is your chance. With this article, we will step through the process of setting up a private cloud system using Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC), which is powered by the Eucalyptus platform.
But where are the corporate UEC deployments? It’s still early in the UEC game. I’m hearing from more and more colleges and universities that are testing UEC. In particular, I’m trying to catch up with a few key sources at Auburn University.
Live in London? Looking for something to do this Friday? Canonical are looking for volunteers to perform usability testing of the Ubuntu Empathy instant messaging client. A paid incentive awaits!
Linux Mint 8 Helena is a wonderful creation. It works. It simply works. There can be no higher praise than that. You don’t need to tweak it. It’s a product. As simple as that. Someone is given a machine with Linux Mint Helena and they start using it, without going for the surgery knife. Just as you don’t hack your TV, you don’t need to hack Helena, because it delivers a complete, beautiful usage package.
Linux Mint 8 Helena is a great distribution. This is the Linux you want to showcase to your skeptical Windows friends and soon would-be converts. This is the distribution that has the look and feel and behavior of something Windows users can easily relate to.
It has the menu where Windows users want it, it has codecs and gadgets, it’s fast, stable, robust, beautiful. And best of all, if you’re a Linux user already, you can enjoy Helena as much as your fellow Windows friends!
Gentoo has turned up in lots of interesting places before, but Michael from Misa Digital has put Gentoo to work in something entirely different: a unique instrument he invented, a MIDI guitar that uses a touchpad and digital keys instead of strings!
In one of my earlier posts I had mentioned some of the things I was enjoying doing with my Nokia N900. Now that I have had the device to play with for a solid month I would like to highlight what I feel are the pros and cons of the device.
The German Mozilla Community Website camp-firefox.de reported that a first beta version of Firefox for Android (Fennec) would be coming out in February 2010. Apparently most of the work has been done and the application was started sucessfully on an Android phone, even though surfing was not possible yet.
Rogers, Canada’s only carrier with Android handsets, has cut off data to customers until they run a mandatory firmware update. Nominally, this fixes a 911 bug: but it also prevents you from jailbreaking your phone and activating features and applications Rogers doesn’t like (even if you paid full price for your phone).
Those of you with piles of cash might be interested in picking up a PLEN hobby robot for your desk. The roughly 9″ tall “droid” can be controlled via Bluetooth, either by your cell phone or PC keyboard. You know where I’m going with this… Check out the video below of a PLEN robot (android) controlled by an app on Android.
We didn’t anticipate running a tablet story on the site today being everyone we know will be watching the Apple event later today. Nonetheless, we have a new Android-based tablet to start following. Following on the heels of their 5-inch tablet, Archos has a 7-inch model with a front-facing webcam on the way.
Rumored to go on sale in March for £149.99 ($242 US), it will offer the same 8GB onboard memory found in the previous model. The 7-inch LCD screen has a resolution of 800 x 480 pixels, putting it (obviously) 2 inches larger than their first device. The software appears to be getting a slight tweak as well, with support for song yrics
On the first day of CES, I dropped by the Qualcomm booth looking for ARM-based smartbooks to try out. As I poked and prodded the Lenovo Skylight, I pulled out my Nexus One and dropped it on top of the unit for a size reference so that we could snap picture of it.
Slackware is one of the longest-running versions of Linux. And Slax is a version of Slackware that is meant to be run as a live CD but can also be used comfortably on a netbook. The base download of Slax is just 200MB in size. Slax’ most unique feature, however, is that the system can be customised before downloading. On the Slax site you can pick and choose features you want to include in your system and then download an image with this included.
In fact, we found open source apps for most of the most popular resolutions: apps to help you eat better and exercise more, apps to help you stop smoking or break other bad habits, lots of apps to help you get organized and make better use of your time.
Bacula Systems SA today celebrated a year of impressive growth as its Open Source enterprise backup solution passed the one million download milestone, driven by a maturing portfolio of Bacula backup products and growing enterprise adoption of open source software. This event marks a highly successful year in which Bacula Systems has made significant gains in its customer base and built excellent partner momentum globally.
Back in August we shared that Sun would be discontinuing SXCE, or formally known as Solaris Express Community Edition. Solaris Express Community Edition for the past five years has served as Sun’s delivery mechanism for the latest and greatest Solaris code that will eventually make it into the next Solaris stable release, but earlier this month Sun Microsystems put out their last bi-weekly build of SXCE and as of the end of this week all downloads will cease.
Only three days after posting my blog regarding the plight of Google’s Chinese customers and how their data is now at the whims of a US-based company and its conflict with the Chinese government, I read about the issues of SourceForge.net and the U.S. State Department’s Export lists and how the data stored in a US-based company, sometimes created by non-U.S. based citizens, is now being controlled by U.S. State Department rules.
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Is the argument being made that the populace of those countries will throw off their governments because it is hard for them to get access to Free Software? I suggest that it will simply be a matter of time before some entity will re-create a “SourceForge” in a more Free-Minded country, and yet another agency of Free Thought will be carried and championed outside of the United States.
10 lucky research organizations will stand to benefit from Willow Garage’s PR2 Beta Program, under which they will each be granted free use of one PR2 robot and earn the privilege to participate in the advancement of open source robotics development.
Writing in a journal or diary, where you may pour your heart out for no one’s eyes but your own, can be an intensely personal experience. Writing longhand in a paper notebook used to be standard practice for journal writing, but most people nowadays type faster than they write, and digital text is easier to search. But finding a journal application that suits your sense of style is just as personal a decision as finding the right notebook in which to write. When Jendrik Seipp couldn’t find what he was looking for in a journal app, he began coding his own, and that became RedNotebook.
From its humble beginning a decade ago, Mozilla Firefox is now a force to reckon with. Firefox 3.5 is now the most popular web browser in the world, which is an astonishing feat, when you consider the fact that, web was all about Windows and IE till a few years ago. Now, to all those Firefox fanboys, let me introduce, 15 awesome Firefox Wallpaper collection.
Similarly, Widenius denies being motivated by an attempt to receive more money for his former interest in MySQL or to make Monty Program AB profitable by placing himself in the spotlight. He has invested much of the 16.6 million Euros he received from Sun’s purchase of MySQL in Monty Program AB, and frankly admits that the company has next to no chance of making a profit. Nor is he interested in selling Monty Program unless he can find a buyer with open source’s interests at heart.
Instead, he claims to be opposing Oracle’s acquisition out of a sense of personal responsibility: to his employees, to his customers, and to the larger open source community.
Open source content management system Drupal is increasingly being used by organizations, corporations and governments to power their websites and communities.
To name but a few entities who rely on Drupal for their websites: The White House, AT&T, Intel, BBC Magazines, Forbes, Stanford University, Reuters and Procter & Gamble (and plenty more where that came from).
I have a pretty big update for you: we just launched Drupal Gardens into private beta. Since the first public Drupal Gardens demo at DrupalCon Paris, a lot of progress has been made. Today, we sent private beta invites to the first people that signed up to be beta testers, and if things go well, we’ll send out a couple thousand more invitations over the next few weeks.
The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) today announced the release of Apache SpamAssassin 3.3.0, the first major code release from the Apache SpamAssassin Project since May 2007. Apache SpamAssassin v3.3.0 marks the Project’s 4th major (and 24th overall release) since the SpamAssassin Project joined the ASF in December 2003.
The door of a dry-cleaner-size storefront in an industrial park in Wareham, Massachusetts, an hour south of Boston, might not look like a portal to the future of American manufacturing, but it is. This is the headquarters of Local Motors, the first open source car company to reach production. Step inside and the office reveals itself as a mind-blowing example of the power of micro-factories.
Open-sourcing is also helping further the development of the RepRap project. Bowyer explained that he wanted a powerful technology like the RepRap to be available to everyone, so he made it free. A list of materials needed for a RepRap and the instructions on how to put it together are all available on the RepRap website.
The long-anticipated Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) tablet, expected to debut tomorrow, carries a similar promise. In media circles, the Apple tablet has been heralded by many as a ray of hope for an ailing newspaper industry, marrying the slick software and design for which Apple is famous with its iTunes payment platform.
At the centre of my problem is the use of a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial licence for the “Open Access” option. This doesn’t qualify under the BBB declarations on Open Access publication and it doesn’t qualify for the SPARC seal for Open Access. But does this really matter or is it just a side issue for a bunch of hard core zealots? After all if people can see it that’s a good start isn’t it? Well yes, it is a good start but non-commercial terms raise serious problems. Putting aside the fact that there is an argument that universities are commercial entities and therefore can’t legitimately use content with non-commercial licences the problem is that NC terms limit the ability of people to create new business models that re-use content and are capable of scaling.
Finally done… We are proud to release the final version of Valkaama with Michael Georgi’s music score. You can download your copy here.
It was a long and stony road to get this movie done and still we are giving it away for free: Valkaama becomes one of the few full-length movies which are licensed under one of the Creative Commons licenses.
“A pamphlet distributed by blogger Cameron Laird’s local high school proclaimed that ‘Computer Science BS graduates can expect an annual salary from $54,000-$74,000. Starting salaries for MS and PhD graduates can be to up to $100,000′ and ‘employment of computer scientists is expected to grow by 24 percent from 2010 to 2018.’ The pamphlet lists The US Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics as a reference, so how wrong can it be? ‘This is so wrong, I don’t know where to start,’ says Laird…”
The Midgard Project has released maintenance release of Midgard2 9.09 “Mjolnir” – second release of the new generation of the Midgard content repository.
Steve Song has done it again. A fellow at the Shuttleworth Foundation, he critiques Nathan Eagle’s new txteagle venture to tap into the ‘cognitive resources’ of millions of mobile-phone users in developing countries. Nathan recently gave a talk at eTech, presenting texteagle. Here is the video of Nathan’s presentation.
Tishman Speyer Properties and its co-investors just walked away from the largest real-estate deal in US history, simply defaulting on the properties and the loans that bought them and leaving their creditors in the lurch. The properties, Manhattan’s 56-building, 11,232-unit Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town, were “under water” (worth less than the debt hanging over them), so the corporate developers elected to simply jettison them.
JUST suppose that Darwin’s ideas were only a part of the story of evolution. Suppose that a process he never wrote about, and never even imagined, has been controlling the evolution of life throughout most of the Earth’s history. It may sound preposterous, but this is exactly what microbiologist Carl Woese and physicist Nigel Goldenfeld, both at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, believe. Darwin’s explanation of evolution, they argue, even in its sophisticated modern form, applies only to a recent phase of life on Earth.
Giving a new meaning to the concept of a “finger buffet”, St. John’s Secondary School, in Epping, is introducing a new “biometric cashless catering system” which involves taking fingerprints of all its pupils.
The Iraq inquiry burst into life yesterday, thanks to a quiet, thoughtful yet furious woman who ripped into the government like a genteel but very hungry lioness. Elizabeth Wilmshurst was the first witness to get a round of applause from the public.
Why is there no mention of the increased threat from “domestic” terrorism, in Northern Ireland, and from crazed racist or animal rights fanatics etc. ?
Will there now be the usual Whitehall and Police “anonymous briefings”, as there were in the run up to the last General Election ?
A highly unusual ruling by Lord Hutton, who chaired the inquiry into Dr Kelly’s death, means medical records including the post-mortem report will remain classified until after all those with a direct interest in the case are dead, the Mail on Sunday reported.
Critics of Labour’s record on civil rights are sometimes accused of hysteria when they talk of Britain becoming a ‘police state’. This time last year, the day before the Convention on Modern Liberty, Jack Straw felt it necessary to write an op-ed for the Guardian entitled “Our record isn’t perfect. But talk of a police state is daft”.
United Nations human rights investigators have concluded that the British government has been complicit in the mistreatment and possible torture of several of its own citizens during the “war on terror”.
The debate over use of scanners in UK airports is rapidly turning into knock-about farce, as the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) takes a firm stand on some people’s right to privacy – whilst government disrespects everyone’s rights and prepares to hand over loads more dosh when it eventually loses the argument at the European Court.
Five websites run by Chinese human rights activists were attacked by hackers over the weekend, as a separate row continued between Google and China over political cyberattacks.
RFID tags for under $1!! This has been made possible by International Coding Technologies which has released rugged identification tags for steel, concrete, pallets and other assets breaking all price barriers. Here RFID, bar code and tag in human readable format have been clubbed together onto a single RFID inlay. It has been sealed in a tough, watertight and dust proof plastic unit which can be affixed to products and perform in cruel environment.
Computer scientists in Britain have uncovered weaknesses in electronic passports issued by the US, UK, and some 50 other countries that allow attackers to trace the movements of individuals as they enter or exit buildings.
The Ministry of Defence has admitted that staff leaked secret information 16 times on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter over an 18-month period.
Oregon voters approved two special tax measures Tuesday designed to close a $733 million state budget gap. With 91% of the vote counted, Measure 66 garnered 54% of ballots and Measure 67 received 53%, the Associated Press reported.
Elections here are by mailed ballot only. Tuesday was the last day ballots could be cast.
Measure 66 increases Oregon’s personal-income-tax rate by two percentage points for households earning over $250,000 a year. Measure 67 calls for an increase in the state’s minimum corporate income tax, currently $10 a year, and imposes a tax on gross revenues for corporations that don’t report a profit.
The banking crisis taught us that when things look good on paper, if the underlying accounting system is faulty, it can conceal high risk and imminent disaster – as Jared Diamond put it in Collapse, his book about societies throughout history that fell by wrongly estimating the resilience of their environmental life-support systems. What looks like wealth might just be a one-off fire sale of irreplaceable natural capital. Ecologically speaking, he writes, “an impressive-looking bank account may conceal a negative cashflow”.
Opposition has been mounting to the reconfirmation of Ben Bernanke as Federal Reserve Chairman. In recent days, Senators Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Russ Feingold (D-WI) and John McCain (R-AZ) announced that they would vote no. Today, Senator Tom Harkin told the DesMoines Register he would be a no vote. If Bernanke does not get a vote this week, before the formal end of his first term, it would send shock waves through Wall Street.
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“Under the watch of Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve permitted grossly irresponsible financial activities that led to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Under Chairman Bernanke’s watch predatory mortgage lending flourished, and ‘too big to fail’ financial giants were permitted to engage in activities that put our nation’s economy at risk. And as it responds to the crisis it helped to usher in, the Federal Reserve under Chairman Bernanke’s leadership continues to resist appropriate efforts to review that response, how taxpayers’ money was being used, and whether it acted appropriately,” said Feingold in a statement.
While President Obama is in Washington talking about putting a freeze on government spending, soon millions of American families will be out in the cold. In one month, one million Americans are slated to lose their unemployment insurance. Millions more will follow. According to Judy Conti, Federal Advocacy Coordinator at the National Employment Law Project, the expiration of this vital lifeline “would be a catastrophe for these families and their communities.”
Why is unemployment insurance ending, and what can you do about it?
The Obama administration is considering granting as much as $18.5 billion in loan guarantees to the nuclear industry to build new reactors, and Congress is considering adding billions more to expand nuclear power in the U.S., even though the problems of safety and what to do with nuclear waste remain unsolved.
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A Decade of Astroturfing Pays Off
The nuclear lobby’s activities are a case study on how industries influence Washington: In addition to the usual spending of vast sums on lobbying and campaign contributions, they have created a network of allies who give speeches, quote one another approvingly and showcase each other on Web sites, effectively creating a media echo chamber that creates the impression of widespread support for nuclear power. Compared to the big oil and big coal lobbies, though, the nuclear lobby has stayed in the background and used increasingly common astroturfing techniques, like making their case through surrogates, and paying a public relations firm to create a pro-nuclear “grassroots” group — the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition — which employs high-profile spokespersons like Patrick Moore and Christine Todd Whitman. The industry has also been busy lobbying all possible constituencies, as well as both sides of the political spectrum. The Nuclear Energy Institute has given presentations to the Congressional Black Caucus, and has taken a pro-union stance for the construction of new nuclear reactors, helping win it support from labor unions. In turn, unions have lobbied and obtained the support for nukes from House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, who is now championing efforts to fund the industry. The nuke industry has managed to do all this while also keeping its traditional base among Senate Republicans. The industry magnified its appeal to politicians by selling the construction of nuclear power plants as a sort of jobs-creation program, at a time when jobs are sorely needed in the U.S. Combine this with steadily increasing energy prices and concern for global warming, and all the stars are lining up for the nuclear energy industry right now.
History repeats itself today as the FBI arrests four people attempting to bug the district office of Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA). David Hammer of The Times-Picayune is reporting that the the right-wing “gotcha” man, James O’Keefe, who orchestrated the effort to discredit ACORN via spliced video footage last year, is one of those who were arrested in the plot against a sitting U.S. Senator who is up for election later this year.
The Republican Party is seeking input and money from GOP voters – seemingly under the guise of the U.S. Census Bureau.
“Strengthening our Party for the 2010 elections is going to take a massive grass-roots effort all across America. That is why I have authorized a Census to be conducted of every Congressional District in the country,” GOP Chairman Michael Steele says in a letter mailed nationwide.
The company says it deeply regrets “that these sanctions may impact individuals who have no malicious intent, along with those whom the rules are designed to exclude” but says that until either the countries are removed from the sanctions list, or the US administration changes policy, the blocking must remain in place.
I regret the chilling effect that will be felt in publishing and broadcasting even if Gaunt wins his case – and the prospect of him losing is an appalling prospect for those who cherish free speech in this country. So we here at Big Brother Watch are rooting for John today.
Your information is for sale, and the government is buying it at alarming rates. The CIA, FBI, Justice Department, Defense Department, and other government agencies are at this very moment turning to a group of companies to provide them information that these companies can gather without the restrictions that bind government intelligence agencies. The information is gathered from sources that few would believe the government could gain unfettered access to, but which, under current Fourth Amendment doctrine and statutory protections, are completely accessible.
In 2008, Baidu was sued for around $9 million by Sony BMG, Universal Music and Warner Music for providing so-called “deep-links” to copyright music tracks. A court has now ruled that providing search results does not breach copyright law, clearing China’s biggest search engine of wrong-doing.
More than 150 people have approached consumer publication Which? Computing claiming to have been wrongly targeted in crackdowns on illegal file-sharing.
This is just a partial list, and it may strike you as radical. But before you dismiss it, consider this: most copyright systems are supposed to work this way in theory. But between corporate bullies who like to assert that “all rights reserved” means that no one is allowed to do anything without permission, and personal theories of what copyright means based on half-remembered lectures from the company lawyer, we treat copyright as absolute. And when we do, we turn a system with a real purpose (providing a framework for participants in creative businesses) into a caricature of itself, one that no one can respect.
As readers of this blog will be well aware, the UK’s Digital Economy Bill is currently grinding its way through Parliament.
At the moment, it’s the Lords that are trying to knock some sense into its senseless provisions; later it will go to the Commons, where there’s probably less chance of things being improved, given the current distribution of the parties there.
Meanwhile, various groups are coming together in an attempt to rouse the British public from its slumbers on this hugely-important issue.
UK Digital Economy Bill: The infamous Henry VIII clause which will permit the Secretary of State to re-write UK copyright law without oversight from Parliament, will also permit the copyright industries to keep their trade secrets, under a proposed new amendment from Lord Mandelson.
Negotiations on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA)1 will take place from January 26th to January 29th in Mexico. ACTA aims at controlling the Internet, while conveniently circumventing democratic processes. Unelected negotiators – carrying out the orders of the entertainment industries – are attacking the very essence of the Internet. Let’s attack ACTA! Let’s expose its negotiators to make them face their responsibilities!
Luc Devigne for instance advocates for the French “three strikes” rule concerning ISPs. Such measures are not yet part of the acquis communautaire, in fact in the course of the Telecom package such measures were generally rejected, though the European Parliament could not overrule the French national decision to implement such measures (“Hadopi”). Sarkozy’s Hadopi rules are in troublesome constitutional waters, we will see.
Yesterday I was asking you to write to your MPs about the Digital Economy Bill. If you haven’t already done that, perhaps you could tack on a request for them to support this Early Day Motion…
Part Three of the ACTA Guide (Part One on the agreement itself, Part Two on the official and leaked documents) focuses on the issue that has dogged the proposed agreement since it was first announced – the lack of transparency associated with the text and the talks. As yesterday’s public letter from NDP MP Charlie Angus and the UK cross-party motion highlight, elected officials around the world have latched onto the transparency issue and demanded that their governments open ACTA to public scrutiny. Reviewing the ACTA transparency issue involves several elements: the public concern with ACTA secrecy, the source of the secrecy, and the analysis of whether ACTA secrecy is common when compared to other intellectual property agreements.
That this House is deeply concerned by the secrecy surrounding international negotiations on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA); notes that any agreement reached could affect the measures to protect copyright online currently being debated in the Digital Economy Bill; believes that if the companies affected by the agreement are party to the discussions and able to influence decisions, parliamentarians who represent the public and are responsible for legislation in these areas should also be kept up-to-date with developments and be able to contribute to the debate; seeks assurances from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills that the provisions of the Digital Economy Bill will not be superseded by ACTA; and urges the Government to work to achieve release of details of the negotiations to hon. Members as soon as possible.
By ensuring that our policies are clear, transparent, targeted and evidence-based we can create the right conditions for business success; promote innovation, enterprise and science; and give everyone the skills and opportunities they need to succeed.
The North Face filed the lawsuit, claiming that The South Butt is confusingly similar to The North Face, in violation of North Face’s trademark rights.
Hanff quotes the interview verbatim, and we reproduce it here: “Ex-Employee: ‘Telewest Broadband had an Intranet system called oneline – accessible at http://oneline.telewest.co.uk – the default homepage. Under this site employees could visit Broadtalk – Broadtalk Forum, where they could engage in discussion about the company across departments, across sites. Under this forum various topics of discussion revolved around downloading of copyrighted material – for example, employees would talk about downloading movies, music etc, along with how to transfer files to DVD media. Employees were posting links to BitTorrent sites with infringing material’.”
The law gives an author and the author’s descendants more than adequate control over creative work — a minimum of the author’s life plus 70 years. The public is better served if copyrights have a reasonable limit. Sherlock Holmes should belong to us all right now.
Then I go back to my computer, and see an anonymous submission of a wonderfully brilliant interview with music legend Brian Eno… and right there at the end, he has a beautiful description of what’s happening to the recording industry — comparing it to whale blubber:
“I think records were just a little bubble through time and those who made a living from them for a while were lucky. There is no reason why anyone should have made so much money from selling records except that everything was right for this period of time. I always knew it would run out sooner or later. It couldn’t last, and now it’s running out. I don’t particularly care that it is and like the way things are going. The record age was just a blip. It was a bit like if you had a source of whale blubber in the 1840s and it could be used as fuel. Before gas came along, if you traded in whale blubber, you were the richest man on Earth. Then gas came along and you’d be stuck with your whale blubber. Sorry mate — history’s moving along. Recorded music equals whale blubber. Eventually, something else will replace it.”
The French anti-piracy outfit Trident Media Guard has been chosen by the entertainment industry to track and report illegal downloaders in France. The company, known globally for its pollution of BitTorrent and other file-sharing networks with fake data, will assist in the recently passed Hadopi three-strikes law.
Hundreds of hairdressers and beauty centres in Barcelona, Sabadell and Lleida, Spain, are displaying a poster featuring a girl with a vinyl record and the words ‘Catalan hairdressers are ordered to pay royalties for playing the radio in their shops”.
To ease my paranoia, I’m guided to this article by techthrob.com. Truth be told, it’s hard to reverse the brainwash Windows has done, therefore, I’m still not 100% convinced.
All operating systems have problems. All operating systems have benefits and weaknesses. I think that’s an important point to remember. The reason that Linux isn’t mainstream isn’t because some doofus had a problem installing Firefox, it’s just lack of marketing, bad press, lack of commercial games, and user ignorance. On the plus side, Linux is a wonderful platform filled with thousands (millions?) of helpful people that share a common interest: they just want to use their computer, darn it. I think that’s ultimately why Linux will always be “mainstream” in my book.
The Linux Foundation announced a free webinar series on topics ranging from Linux administration to performance tuning. The Linux Training Webinar Series will launch with a webinar on Linux contributions on March 1 by Jon Corbet, while future sessions feature Linux Foundation technical advisory board (TAB) members and leading community developers.
Who says you don’t get something for nothing? Certainly not the good people over at The Linux Foundation (TLF) who’re offering free Linux training. TLF is doing its part for the worldwide Linux community by offering this free training plus the Linux Jobs Board and all of its other services. I paused to write this post before going there to sign-up for the whole list myself.
XGI had worked to provide a full open-source driver stack for the Volari 8300 series, but that graphics card never ended up being widely available. As XGI faded away, IBM worked on the XGI Linux driver and wrote the XG40 GPU support along with other changes as some XGI graphics processors wound up in some IBM systems. Ian Romanick was the one working on this unpopular Linux driver at IBM, but in 2008 he went to work for Intel, which meant a final blow to XGI’s Linux support.
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Providing support for the ARM architecture so late in the game is rather interesting, unless XGI Technology is looking to revive itself by providing GPUs for new mobile/netbook devices. XGI’s most recent press release is from May 2009 where they announced the Volari Z11 GPU for embedded ARM-based systems such as the Marvell Kirkwood.
Linux/Live CD/DVD: It’s one of the five features we desperately want in Ubuntu: a video editor that the average user can stitch together simple movies with. OpenShot 1.0 is mostly there.
That’s not to say the interface has much polish, or that you don’t have to install non-free multimedia codecs in your Linux system beforehand. Then again, unless you’re a FLAC/OGG music purist, you probably already installed your MP3 and other file supports.
This one I find myself coming back to quite frequently. I must agree that the standard disk usage command for Linux is a bother. If all I want to know is the amount of space a folder is taking up on the drive, I have a long and arduous string of flags to tack on to du before I can get the information I want.
KDE’s default web browser is Konqueror, and many users love it for its speed, integration with KDE, and its host of features. Nevertheless, some sites do not perform as well as they do in Mozilla Firefox, and some users prefer the large number of available Firefox add-ons. Furthermore, users who move from Windows to Linux might prefer Firefox for its familiarity
This scattered series of posts has been about the RDF support I’m working on for KOffice. The ODF document format lets you store RDF/XML data inside the document file, which in turn lets both a human reader and a computer know about things that comprise an office document. You can refer to a person, place, or time and have the computer know what you are saying without having to resort to heuristics.
Over the last 12 months, netbook and mobile Linux has made massive advances in features and install base. This is primarily thanks to two netbook distributions – Moblin and Canonical’s Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR).
Both have built on the massive potential that was unlocked by the Asus Eee PC but led nowhere, as its operating system failed to inspire a new generation of Linux users.
For those wondering, working on magazine content takes a lot longer than writing a blog, but is rewarding and worth while to me, as I want to support the community, which I feel involves all, including beginners that like to buy magazines with DVDs attached. I tried to cover things like installing Mandriva, setting up dual boot ( Transfug drake does need some improvement ), personalization of the desktop, multi users including parental controls and installing new applications.
I looked at Zenwalk 6.0 back in June and Zenwalk 6.2 is now out. I’m going to do a mini-review just comparing 6.0 to 6.2 to see what has changed. This may end up being very short if it’s mostly the same. One difference right away is that it’s using ext4 instead of XFS. The install was basically the same.
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So, what do I think about Zenwalk 6.2? Basically, as the version number indicates, it’s an incremental update on Zenwalk 6.0.
Red Hat’s JBoss middleware division is set to have a busy 2010 as it continues to improve its developer tools and Java servers. While feature improvements are always important for JBoss, this year’s focus will be on improving the way that developers work with their tools and servers.
Among the efforts that JBoss will be pushing this year are improvements to its JBoss Developer Studio (JBDS) . JBDS began its life as a closed-source technology from vendor Exadel, called Exadel Studio Pro, which was open sourced in a joint development with JBoss in 2007.
What you may not have realized is that for Red Hat, open source is not just about business. The company turned a tiny open source business into a stunning amount of shareholder value in the waning days of the dot-com boom a decade ago – remember in the months after Red Hat went public and the company had a $26.9bn market capitalization? – and despite the euphoria over open source and the desire to get rich by Wall Street investors, Red Hat has steadily grown that Linux business so it almost fits its much smaller $5.2bn market cap.
No doubt, channel partners can weigh in on each of those topic areas. But The VAR Guy wishes Red Hat built an area on opensource.com that specifically discusses issues and opportunities for solutions providers.
I know the value of pi (Π), the irrational number you get when you divide the circumference of a circle by its diameter, as far as 3.14159; after that, I’m clueless. Recently, French software engineer Fabrice Bellard calculated the value of pi to 2.7 trillion numbers — with a souped-up but otherwise ordinary home PC running Red Hat’s Fedora Linux.
If you are a fan of Fedora then you absolutely need to check out this great directory of spins from the Fedora community. Fedora, for those unaware, is an open source spinoff from Redhat. Spins are different versions of Fedora offering various different sets of applications that differ from the main Fedora release but are based on the core.
Irritated with my Desktop after an upgrade gone bad and an incident with the nvidia noveau driver that left me x less, I decided it was time to re-install. I turned to my bookshelf to find Ubuntu Unleashed 2010 Edition. Normally by the time a book hits my shelf the material is outdated, not necessarily useless, just not the most up to date. This is an exception. The Ubuntu Unleashed 2010 Edition was updated with an Ubuntu 9.10 DVD and a “Free Upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04″ which I found out that if you buy the book before the end of 2010 you can get an upgrade kit in the mail.
The missing second tier support is probably just a mechanic of the people we’re dealing with. Good programmers and admins are much less likely to hang about in the ubuntu forums or in the #ubuntu channel. So the standard support channels don’t help, it’s true. I can’t remember the last time I went to the forums or #ubuntu and I’m community, more likely to help when asked.
Now, ARM CPUs are invading the first tier. Earlier this month, for example, Lenovo introduced both an ARM smartbook called the Skylight (below left) and a hybrid smartbook/tablet called the IdeaPad U1 (below right). Both devices employ Lenovo’s Skylight Linux distribution, running it on a ARM-based, 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon, though the IdeaPad hedges bets by including a dual-core Pentium as well in its detachable keyboard/base unit, which runs Windows 7.
Mindspeed announced a system-on-chip family designed for mobile broadband 3G/4G basestations, including femtocells and macrocells. Mindspeed’s Transcede SoCs, starting with the 600MHz T4000 and 750MHz T4020, integrate dual ARM Cortex-A9 processors, 10 DSPs from Ceva, plus 10 DSP accelerators, and come with Linux BSPs, says the company.
Axiomtek announced a fanless, Intel Core 2 Duo-ready in-vehicle box computer that supports Linux. The eBOX310-830-FL resists vibration, can be switched on and off by a car’s ignition switch, and complies with E-Mark E13 and ISO-7637 standards for vehicle manufacturers, says the company.
What is worse than this, I feel, is the fact that people have come to expect to be locked out of their own hardware by default. Since I’ve gotten my N900, I’ve lost track of the number of people who asked if I plan on “jail-breaking” the device. I always respond with “No”. A large contributing factor to my purchase of Nokia’s latest internet tablet (that’s right it is a computer first and phone second) was that they allow the user unrestricted access to the device with out any hacks or cracks.
One of the most fascinating thing about open source is that it allows the collaboration between entities that are in many ways anomalous. One of my favorite examples of this are the Sakai and Kuali consortia, created by large universities dissatisfied by their proprietary software systems. They found it more economical to pull their efforts together and create something new instead rather than simply continuing to pay for something that delivered less than expected. The process ended up creating something of value to themselves and to other universities and groups; it also provided the basis for a profitable business for those companies selling consulting services.
Both are owned by corporate parents that have large market shares in their respective product categories: Linux servers for Red Hat, and corporate data center virtualization for VMWare, respectively, which allows the two subsidiaries of the parents to exert some sort of free-wheeling and experimentation with messaging, such as JBoss’ new non-Java EE push through other languages, and SpringSource’s anti-Java EE push through their own language, of sorts….but make no mistake about the competition, it boils down to a heavily intensive fight for the mindshare of Java developers worldwide, with the eventual victor controlling what is left of the corporate IT spend that does not go to Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle…this is major terrain for the once-small start-ups to undertake….
When OpenBravo — an open source ERP company — launched an open source exchange earlier today, The VAR Guy had a case of deja vu. From Digium to Red Hat to xTuple, numerous open source companies have launched online marketplaces for their customers and VARs. But can open source exchanges really stir application sales? Here are some thoughts.
Open source doesn’t just mean access to the source code. The distribution terms of open-source software must comply with the following criteria:
1. Free Redistribution
The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.
Have u checked my previous post Worlds smallest linux computer and linux networking server ?
After seeing the popularity of that post, i thought it would be good to inform you about worlds smallest Operating system too. Being a great Linux fan, i always support Linux.I am glad to inform you that the smallest OS is a linux based OS.Its actually not a linux, but its a Linux variant.
If you see a company which “owns” an OSS project, you can be 95% certain that they are pursuing at least one of the Ten Ways, and most often several. One audience member claimed to be “ten for ten”. Where companies are generally not screwing up, it’s usually because they’ve hired a battle-tested community adivsor or manager to steer them away from the obvious mistakes.
Back when the EU started the investigation of the Oracle-Sun deal, I made a bet. The bet hinged on whether Oracle would make concessions to get the EU’s approval. Please review the arguments, pro and con, and help us settle the bet.
EnterpriseDB, the enterprise Postgres company, and PostgreSQL co-founder Bruce Momjian today issued the following statements regarding the EU committee’s decision to approve Oracle’s acquisition of Sun, which includes ownership of the MySQL open source database project.
Oracle (ORCL) said this morning that it has received unconditional regulatory approval from the European Commission for its acquisition of Sun (JAVA). Below, the all-hands memo Sun CEO Jon Schwartz sent to employees following the announcement.
Firefox 3.6 was released late last week with which came some notable improvements and features like Personas and support for HTML5. I also noticed some improvement in speed and the overall feel of the browser. However, comparing Firefox to Google Chrome, I still think there are some things Firefox would do well implementing in their next release.
Google has released a new Windows version of its Chrome browser with what it says are two of the most requested enhancements: extensions and bookmark sync, and a significant performance boost.
Procter & Gamble (P&G) is a Fortune 500, multinational corporation that manufactures a wide range of consumer goods such as Gillette, Ariel, Pampers, Duracell, Braun and much more. With annual sales in excess of $83 billion USD, they are the 8th largest corporation in the world by market capitalization. Guess what? They are using Drupal for a microsite at http://www.pgsupplier.com/. The site provides easy access to information for prospective and current Procter & Gamble suppliers. The site doesn’t look pretty, but given Drupal’s bottom up grassroots adoption, this could be a big deal nonetheless.
The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) receives this year’s Theodor Heuss Medal for its extraordinary work for equitable participation in the information society. Since 2001 FSFE has been committed to the freedom to use, investigate, modify and redistribute software in all parts of society and politics. Theodor Heuss Foundation states: “FSFE as a forward thinking organisation contributes to the development and establishment of rules for good global governance.”
“Free Software is an indispensable component of a free society in the digital age. It ensures equal access to the information society for everyone, ” says Karsten Gerloff, President of FSFE, commenting on the award.
The Inverse Team [External] is pleased to announce the immediate availability of SOGo 1.2.0. This is a major release of SOGo which focuses on new features, improved stability and which includes many bug fixes and several small enhancements over previous versions.
When I received the news of youtube using html 5 for their video streaming I was interested. When I tested it out and saw how much better it worked for me than the flash video I was excited about this new development. My excitement quickly turned to concern when I learned why Mozilla is not supporting this new streaming video format in their Firefox browser.
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At least right now their is some competition. Not the kind of competition that the open source community would like to see. But as long as the h.264 codec exist then Adobe is not left to control the market entirely and as long as the Adobe flash format is in existence they force MPEG-LA to find a way to be competitive.
At its apex, the white colonists were supplanted by a new ruling class, made up largely of black and mulatto officers. Though these groups soon became bitter political rivals, they were as one in their determination to maintain in independent Haiti the cardinal principle of governance inherited from Saint-Domingue: the brutal predatory extraction of the country’s wealth by a chosen powerful few.
Looters and scavengers have moved into the downtown commercial district, taking what they can from the ruins as bulldozers demolished damaged shops and warehouses.
If you’re a Twitter user, congratulations: You’re also a Huffington Post contributor! For a few hours last night, it appears practically all of Twitter was republished on HuffPo. But now our tweets have disappeared from the site. What’s going on?
Vast state investment in schools, universities and research programmes has driven the rapid growth, with academic discoveries rapidly tapped for commercial potential. Chinese scientists are particularly strong on chemistry and materials engineering, both considered central to the country’s industrial development and economic future.
Oceans of liquid diamond, filled with solid diamond icebergs, could be floating on Neptune and Uranus, according to a recent article in the journal Nature Physics.
The White House has decided to begin funding private companies to carry NASA astronauts into space, but the proposal faces major political and budget hurdles, according to people familiar with the matter.
Not only did Dr David Kelly die in suspicious circumstances – but now, thanks to Lord Hutton, the medical evidence about those circumstances will not be revealed for 70 years.
Lord Hutton’s inquiry ruled that Kelly had killed himself. And Hutton heard all the evidence. If the medical evidence supports that conclusion, why seal it for 70 years?
Iraq’s health ministry said it has no specific figures but it estimates the number of physically and mentally disabled people at between 2 million and 3 million.
But speaking days before his predecessor Tony Blair testifies to Britain’s Iraq war inquiry, Brown — who will face the probe himself within weeks — insisted that the war was justified by a previous UN resolution.
Snooping powers have been exercised hundreds of times by Lancashire County Council over the last five years.
Cleaners who repeatedly failed to show up for work, and a care assistant who claimed too much on travel expenses, were among those caught through surveillance under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA).
“Jamie and I were kitted out in fake utility belts, we had the whole bulletproof flakjacket thing, we’ve got hairdryers in our belt, a kids’ £1.99 walkie-talkie, hairbrushes and all that kind of stuff, and we were being followed by a camera crew and a boom mike and we get literally pulled over by four policemen and we were issued with a warning ‘under the act of terrorism’.”
Jamie Rickers, 32, added: “We were stopped, not arrested, but they had to say ‘we are holding you under the Anti-Terrorism Act because you’re running around in flak jackets and a utility belt’, and I said ‘and please put spangly blue hairdryer’ and he was, like, ‘all right’.”
There is little connection between the use of stop and search powers by the Metropolitan police and reductions in knife crime, according to new figures analysed by a leading criminologist.
The US Department of Homeland Security says that its “government brainiacs” are on the verge of rolling out an airport bag scanner which would avoid the need to separate frustrated travellers from their “liquids, gels, sprays” and even “spreads”.
Police and prosecutors won’t give up their license to steal.
Around 3 in the morning on January 7, 2009, a 22-year-old college student named Anthony Smelley was pulled over on Interstate 70 in Putnam County, Indiana. He and two friends were en route from Detroit to visit Smelley’s aunt in St. Louis. Smelley, who had recently received a $50,000 settlement from a car accident, was carrying around $17,500 in cash, according to later court documents. He claims he was bringing the money to buy a new car for his aunt.
In the wake of a recent speech by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton condemning countries that censor the internet and engage in hacking, China has lobbed a return volley and accused the United States of hypocrisy and initiating cyberwarfare against Iran.
An editorial in the People’s Daily — the primary mouthpiece for China’s Communist Party — accused the United States of doublespeak and of using “online warfare” to instigate violent unrest in Iran with Twitter and YouTube following that country’s national elections in June.
“In my opinion, the use of this unique CRC implementation in Hydraq is evidence that someone from within the PRC authored the Aurora codebase,” Stewart wrote here.
Applications to join the ID card register are running at 50 a day, meaning the Labour government will achieve its aim of chipping the entire population of these islands in somewhere between 136 and 3,342 years.
There are many more features that make PostgreSQL well-suited to the enterprise. Security is huge, but PostgreSQL’s support and focus on data integrity, granular access controls, ACID compliance, and other core focuses, really explain why PostgreSQL is so highly favoured amongst many database administrators.
One-quarter of all the maize and other grain crops grown in the US now ends up as biofuel in cars rather than being used to feed people, according to new analysis which suggests that the biofuel revolution launched by former President George Bush in 2007 is impacting on world food supplies.
The legal claim accuses the US’s minerals management service, part of the federal interior department, of waving through permission to allow Shell to drill wells on the basis of an “abbreviated and internal review” of the environmental dangers of exploration.
The truth is that Americans are still losing jobs, the Fed is still inflating, and more regulations are in the works that will prevent jobs and productivity from coming back. We are on this trajectory for the long haul. The claim has been made many times that this administration has only had a year to clean up the mess of the last administration. I wish they would at least get started! Instead of reversing course, they are maintaining Bush’s policies full speed ahead. They are even keeping the Bush-appointee in charge of the Federal Reserve! They are not even making token efforts at change in economic policy. And for all the talk of transparency, we hear that some powerful senators will do all they can to block a simple audit of the powerful and secretive Federal Reserve.
So it’s not just un-Americans we need to fear but the Polluter-Americans, Pharma-mericans, Bank-Americans and Hedge-Americans that could manipulate campaigns while hidden behind corporate veils. And if so, our future elections, while nominally a contest between Republicans and Democrats, may in fact come down to a three-way battle between China, Saudi Arabia and Goldman Sachs.
Money from Exxon, Goldman Sachs, Pfizer and the rest of the Fortune 500 is already corroding the policy making process in Washington, state capitals and city halls. Now, the Supreme Court tells these corporate giants that they have a constitutional right to trample our democracy.
Southern California’s Menifee Union school district has banned the Merriam Webster’s 10th edition from use in fourth and fifth grade classes, over this salacious definition of “oral sex”: “oral stimulation of the genitals”.
However, the BBC notes that there were three ManU players who were believed to have real Twitter accounts, and all have suddenly disappeared — which suggests the real issue is that ManU banned players from using social networks to connect with fans. If that’s true, it seems incredibly short-sighted. Yes, players need to be careful when communicating publicly, but blocking them off entirely doesn’t help make fans any more loyal.
Rep. Howard Berman (who represents Hollywood and is sometimes referred to as “the Representative from Disney” given his longstanding support for any law that increases the scope of copyright law) is apparently speaking out against “repressive internet regimes” such as those in China, while at the very same time being a strong supporter of ACTA which could push for very similar “secondary liability” rules for ISPs in the US that are the foundation of Chinese internet censorship.
Here’s a nice little introductory article on TOR, The Onion Router, a privacy-enhancing technology that helps you to circumvent national, corporate and school firewalls and enhance your anonymity. Originally developed by the US military to help communications get in and out of countries that heavily filter their networks, TOR is free/open software and is maintained by many volunteers around the world, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Earlier today my fellow iTWire writer Stephen Withers reported of a campaign to place a “black-out” pop-up page over 500 Australian-based web pages in protest against the Federal Government’s Internet Filter proposal.
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We have to engage in a conversation with the general public, not continue to shout at them. So, as I started this piece, what will it prove? The answer unfortunately is very little.
“Buying You: The Government’s Use of Fourth-Parties to Launder Data about ‘The People’,” a paper by Columbia Law School’s Joshua L. Simmons in the Columbia Business Law Review, describes the way that US government agencies circumvent the fourth amendment and privacy statutes by outsourcing their surveillance to private credit reporting bureaux and other mega-databases. He argues that the law should ban the use of this improperly gathered information, binding paid government informants to the same rules that the government must follow.
The Public Domain is the rule, copyright protection is the exception. Since copyright protection is granted only with respect to original forms of expression, the vast majority of data, information and ideas produced worldwide at any given time belongs to the Public Domain. In addition to information that is not eligible for protection, the Public Domain is enlarged every year by works whose term of protection expires. The combined application of the requirements for protection and the limited duration of the copyright protection contribute to the wealth of the Public Domain so as to ensure access to our shared culture and knowledge.
Last week, the U.S. House Science and Technology Committee’s Roundtable on Scholarly Publishing (on which we served along with 10 others) released a report* arguing that journal articles derived from federal research funding should be made publicly available as quickly as practicable—generally in a year or less after publication—and in ways that will improve scholarship by maximizing the scope for interoperability across articles, among disciplines, and internationally.
Library database vendor EBSCO now has exclusive deals with content providers — Time, Inc., and Forbes. Libraries who had been getting access to this same content through other vendors will have to pay up or lose electronic access to popular titles such as Sports Illustrated, Time and People. Gale, a competing vendor, has responded with their Fair Access campaign including the Librarians for Fair Access facebook group.
The music industry will have to make some very tough choices within the next week about file sharer Jammie Thomas-Rasset.
The Recording Industry Association of America wants to put the Thomas-Rasset affair behind it. The Brainerd, Minn., mother–who refused to settle with the RIAA for $5,000 over copyright infringement allegations, instead fighting it out in court–has been found liable of willful copyright infringement by two different juries and was ordered to pay damages of $222,000 in her first trial (a decision later thrown out) and $1.9 million last June in her retrial.
Earlier this week, Pharrell Williams told the MidemNet conference that illegal file-sharing is “just taste-testing”. It’s fair to say that Chris Morrison – who manages Gorillaz, Blur and other artists – doesn’t agree.
In fact, he said so himself at the MIDEM Manager Summit this afternoon, responding directly to Williams’ claim. “It’s not [like taste-testing]. It’s like giving them the whole bloody meal!”
Morrison said he was fairly ambivalent about file-sharing until recently, when Stylo, the lead single from the new Gorillaz album leaked, mere hours after the first CD pressings were made.
We’ve seen all sorts of attempts to get around Section 230 safe harbors by various companies — almost all of which have failed. But they keep on trying. Paul Alan Levy alerts us to a new case, in which he (and Public Citizen) are helping out, that involves a company called Vision Media TV, whose business has been heavily criticized in the press. According to the various reports, the company calls organizations to get them to take part in a TV show with a semi-famous host, which they claim will be shown on TV.
Often overlooked in the hoopla surrounding the three-strikes provision in France’s Creation and the Internet law passed last year that established a procedure for cutting off Internet access for repeat copyright infringers, were other measures strictly regulating release windows for movies in France. Under the law, any movie released theatrically in France must be released on DVD and Blu-ray, as well as made available for authorized downloads, exactly four months after its theatrical debut.
Parents can be legally responsible for the unlawful behaviour of their children using home internet connections, a German court has ruled. It said that a woman had a duty to monitor the use to which her internet connection was put.
Negotiations in the 7th round of the ACTA talks open this morning in Mexico with civil enforcement issues on the agenda. Yesterday I posted on the developments to-date, including a chronology of talks, issues, and leaks that have led to this week’s round of discussions.
LinuxTag is the most important place for Linux and open source software in Europe. Last year, LinuxTag had over ten thousand attendees, and over 300 speakers. This year, the 16th LinuxTag will be June 9-12, 2010 at the Berlin Fairgrounds in Germany. LinuxTag seeks exciting and suitable proposals for presentations in the conference tracks.
A New Zealand high school running entirely on open source software has slashed its server requirements by a factor of almost 50, despite a government deal mandating the use of Microsoft software in all schools.
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The implementation uses Ubuntu on the desktop and Mandriva for four key servers (one firewall, one storage and two KVM hypervisors). Mandriva was selected because of the ease of using Mandriva Directory Server to manage the school’s LDAP directory, but Brennan said either desktop or server OS could easily be replaced.
The Linux.conf.au conference in Wellington is not all about keynote speakers. Some of the most interesting sessions come from the Birds of a Feather (BOF) gatherings, where people come together to talk about all things open source.
The ad hoc sessions are designed as a meet and greet for people with similar interests and experience to share ideas and issues.
In a press release the LSE told the financial markets that the Linux based software will bring significant benefits. The new trading system will give it “high performance” trading, as well as an “agile, efficient, in-house IT development capability”, it said.
After being in development for many years, GRUB 1.97 was released this past October as a major development release towards GRUB 2.0. GRUB 2.0 brings forth many new features and has already been picked up by Ubuntu and other Linux distributions. The GRUB 1.97 release though was quickly outdone by a point release to address some bugs and a security issue and since then it’s been a quiet few months. Robert Millan though has made a Sunday afternoon release of GRUB 1.97.2.
This week there was the release of QEMU 0.12.2 (and the subsequent release of KVM-QEMU 0.12.2) with support for block migration, but this point release was mostly made up of small fixes and tweaks. IBM’s Anthony Liguori though has begun making plans for the next major release of this open-source processor emulator. QEMU 0.13 will be the next big release and Anthony is hoping it will be completed by June and boast a large number of new features.
Fedora 12 and Debian GNU/Linux (2010-01-14) were tied with each having seven wins. Behind the Linux distributions, OpenSolaris 2009.06 and FreeBSD 8.0 were tied with each having two wins. Debian GNU/kFreeBSD and FreeBSD 7.2 each had one win.
Jerome Glisse, a long-time open-source ATI driver developer who now works for Red Hat, has shared that he’s finished up cleaning the initial R600/700 winsys API for which the R600/700 Gallium3D driver will be based. Once it is all cleaned up and ready, it will be hooked up into the Gallium3D pipe driver for the ATI Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 series hardware. In the context of Gallium3D, the winsys binds the state tracker and pipe driver together with the underlying software stack on the operating system.
Fishing Cactus the developers of many games meant for digital distribution platforms have announced that they are porting their game engine Mojito to GNU/Linux…
The feat greatly expands the functionality of the box by allowing it to run unrestricted versions of Linux and a wide range of games that are currently forbidden.
I have read/write access to the entire system memory, and HV level access to the processor. In other words, I have hacked the PS3. The rest is just software. And reversing. I have a lot of reversing ahead of me, as I now have dumps of LV0 and LV1. I’ve also dumped the NAND without removing it or a modchip.
Linux has a strong do-it-yourself tradition. Although new users are transitioning rapidly to the desktop, that tradition remains. Even on the desktop, users expect to be able to administer their systems directly, and to work in an environment customized to their tastes and needs.
As the leading desktops for the operating system, GNOME and KDE reflect this tradition. Both are more adjustable and flexible than any version of Windows.
Today, KDE has released the second release candidate of the next version of the KDE Software Compilation (KDE SC). KDE SC 4.4 Release Candidate 2 provides a testing base for identifying bugs in the upcoming KDE Software Compilation 4.4, with its components the KDE Plasma Workspaces, the Applications powered by KDE, and the KDE Development Platform.
Going into this review I was curious to see if Hymera would bring anything new to the community. More specifically, does this distribution provide anything special which would make it worth purchasing? One thing I will say for Hymera is that it doesn’t fall into the trap some commercial distributions before it have: it doesn’t try to be Windows.
Red Hat has launched opensource.com as a community site for open source. The Drupal powered site has been created by Red Hat but Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat’s President and CEO, says “This will not be a site for Red Hat, about Red Hat.
The most important is probably Venkatesh Hariharan (right), who goes by the screen name Venky and is listed as head of open source affairs at Red Hat. I see him as key because Venky is a journalist, thus I assume the editor here.
He has already done grand work bringing a South Asian perspective to the open source community through his own blog. He is co-founder of IndLinux, the team that localized both GNOME and KDE for the Indian Linux community and has been a Knight science journalism fellow at MIT.
As the CEO of Red Hat, this is a day I’ve been looking forward to for quite some time. In my travels, I often find myself talking to people from all walks of life who see opportunities for the lessons of open source to be applied broadly to the world around us.
At Red Hat, we’ve used open source principles as the backbone of a successful technology company. We know there are opportunities to apply the open source way broadly in business, in government, in education, in the law, and throughout our lives.
Red Hat just launched OpenSource.com on Drupal. The site will focus on exploring what happens when the open source way is applied to the world, beyond technology. The site has 5 main channels: business, education, government, law, and life. In each channel, they’ll explore how open source is having an impact on each of those areas. The content is meant to be very conversational and participatory, making Drupal a natural choice. Needless to say, it is great to see Drupal being used to promote Open Source way beyond technology. It is also rewarding to see Red Hat, the mother of all Open Source companies, using Drupal.
Red Hat has just launched a new portal at opensource.com – for information and articles about open source. The site uses the Drupal open source content management system and it looks like Red Hat has been working on the site since at least October.
To rate an application in Lucid you will be asked to sign in with your Ubuntu ‘Single Sign-On’ account – better known currently known as a Launchpad account. (This account will have uses further along the line with the Ubuntu Music Store. Stay tuned!)
I’m sure the community can think of plenty of other ways to stir up a frenzy for Ubuntu 10.04. But it has to start now. The seed of desire must be planted before the sun ever shines on this patch of dirt. I am calling out the Ubuntu community and throwing down the gauntlet. You help make this, you help sell this. If you love your distribution as much as you say you do, then it’s time for you to take your distribution to the masses. And to do that, you are going to have to give to Linux what Linux can’t give to Linux – marketing. It’s the Achilles’ heel of Linux.
Many users have refrained from using the cloud storage solution thus far due in part to the lack of cross platform syncing. As such, the UbuntuOne team will be running a ‘sprint’ at PyCon 2010 to provide just that.
The firm did not list figures for other OSes, but noted that Android will benefit from “having a growing footprint of handset vendors supporting it.” As for Symbian, it will continue to stay strong due to Nokia’s strength outside the U.S., says IDC, which made no mention of the impact of Symbian’s transition to open source.
According to the report (which is called BoomBox), Android pulled far ahead of the iPhone in terms of traffic this year. “Visits from users on the Android operating system grew almost 350% from December 2008 to December 2009, compared to iPhone visits which grew 170%,” it stated.
Motorola has opened a new store for Android applications in China called SHOP4APPS or Zhi-Jian-Yuan, to purchase and download applications designed to customise Android-based Motorola phones.
In addition, the company also introduced a new feature on their Android handsets enabling users to customise their Android devices by selecting their own search provider. Users will be able to select their search experience from a number of providers including Baidu and others, with whom Motorola has signed strategic agreements.
The announcement on Thursday of a partnership with Google’s arch-rival Baidu, China’s No. 1 search engine, and Motorola’s promise of more search deals, follows Google’s threat to exit China due to a cyber attack and censorship dispute.
With the Google Nexus One winging its way over here, and Android phones being perhaps the most customisable smartphones around in all their open-source loveliness, we’ve come up with a selection of ways to personalise your Android phone, inside and out. So, let’s get creative and pimp those phones right up…
Packt – the UK publishing company specialized in books on software running yearly the open source CMS award – published “Funambol Mobile Open Source“, the first ever book on Funambol server.
The company leverages Asterisk (News – Alert) Open Source IP-PBX telephony platform to design and produce its hardware telephony solutions for commercial installations.
While celebrating the birthday of Martin Luther King a few days ago, it seems we still have a long journey to walk against discrimination in all its ugly faces, even with having the Open Source and OpenNet initiatives. It is kind of misleading to hide behind political considerations or terrorism threats to justify those acts of discrimination (which are not that different from the Third World governments’ justifications of Internet censorship), as those acts would only affect, if they would really do, normal peaceful people. Actually, the only effect I see is not simply an increasing feeling of prejudice or suspicion among the computing society, but more remarkably, distrust and losing faith in initiatives raising shiny mottoes with supposedly great ethics behind, such as “Software Freedom”. When a student or an academician in one of those banned countries read a report like “Access Denied” or know about OpenNet Initiative [4], they feel a bitter irony. They believe that the people behind such efforts should pay more attention to the behavior of their own government, which is leading the “Free World”.
Arabcrunch has accused major open-source repository SourceForge from blocking all access to software projects it hosts for anyone in Syria, Sudan, Iran, North Korea and Cuba.
Not surprisingly, this policy comes in for a fair amount of ridicule over there. Filtering out the political rhetoric, and the main point is: Either open source is “open” or it’s not.
One of the big success stories in the wake of the Haiti earthquake is being driven by open source. (You can help.)
Partners in Health has been on the ground in Haiti for 20 years. During that time it has learned many lessons about delivering IT resources in an environment without infrastructure. Most of its communications are satellite links.
An open-source MDM (master data management) suite from Talend is now available, giving companies a lower-priced option to proprietary products from the likes of Tibco, Kalido and IBM, the company announced Monday.
Functionally, the enterprise version of Talend MDM has the features that you would expect from an MDM product; it is based heavily on Java and Eclipse, and uses JBoss for event management.
Obsidian Systems and its media partner, ITWeb, are hosting quarterly Free Beer Sessions to provide the IT industry with insight, networking opportunities, and free beer – all in the name of open source.
Playing on Richard Stallman’s famous explanation that free software is “free as in speech, not free as in beer”, these sessions are aimed primarily at open source enthusiasts and businessmen looking to incorporate open source solutions within their organisation. The Free Beer Sessions will have a technical and a business speaker.
Another open-source mobile development platform is PhoneGap. Its development is led by Nitobi, a decade-old company coming into mobile from the wider software development world. PhoneGap is similar to Rhomobile’s Rhodes product, but is based on HTML and Javascript.
Until recently Maven allowed for two ways to upload an open source project to the central repository. One could file a request for a manual addition which would take forever to get fixed (the last time a batch of manual requests was processed happened two months ago) or, alternatively, one could setup an rsync repository and request an auto-sync — which was the preferred way. The auto-sync procedure was covered in this blog entry by Torsten Cudt.
Shaun Nichols: When people like Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds created the pillars of the open-source software movement, they did so with the fundamental belief that software and digital data should be open and accessible to all users. This is, of course, quite conflicting with the basic tenants of tyrannical rule.
One of the great things about open-source software is that it can be opened up and tinkered with by just about anyone who wants to. Additionally, open-source tools and applications can be more or less shared freely on the web. This allows people who may otherwise not have access to the resources to both use the software and learn how to build and tinker with it themselves.
In other words, the judgments should come from the mind, and not the heart. Your heart should be put into improving the Open Source application. That will certainly help Open Source grow.
ByWater Solutions, an open source community supporter and official Koha support company, announced today that The Farmington Libraries, of Farmington, CT. has partnered with them for the implementation of the open source community version of the Koha integrated library system.
Mozilla is now embarking on a new development and release model for its flagship Firefox open source Web browser. The model will meld both fast-moving Agile and more traditional “waterfall” development methodologies in an attempt to more quickly iterate new features while maintaining backwards compatibility, security and overall code quality.
Mozilla’s new Firefox 3.6 is about 15% faster than its predecessor, Firefox 3.5, but still is a slowpoke compared to the current speed demons, Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome, benchmark tests show.
According to tests run by Computerworld , Firefox 3.6, which Mozilla launched on Thursday, is the third fastest of five Windows browsers tested. Firefox renders JavaScript three times faster than Opera 10 and more than four times faster than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 (IE8). It’s also 14.5% faster than Firefox 3.5, the Mozilla browser that debuted in June 2009, a slightly larger speed increase than Mozilla has claimed.
“Firefox 3.6 is more than 20 percent faster than Firefox 3.5 and includes extensive under the hood work to improve performance for everyday Web tasks such as email, uploading photos, social networking, and more. It also delivers new features like customizable browser themes called Personas, a ground-breaking Plugin updater, improved JavaScript performance, and enhancements to familiar favorites like the Awesome Bar for a better, more personal Web experience,” announced Mozilla via their blog on January 21.
Firefox downloads boosted by new release and Internet Explorer security scare.
Mozilla’s open source browser experienced a healthy boost in popularity last week on the back of a new release and security concerns about Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
I do see how arguments arise about whether Ubuntu (or any other Linux) is user-friendly. In this case I considered it user-friendly because it allowed a user with very little experience the latitude to muddle about until he found a route to the result he wanted. I can also see the viewpoint of a user in a hurry who is upset because it takes more than one push of a button to achieve his goal. It’s a sensitive balance between ease of operation and scope of control.
Of course, vendors that fit into both the open source and cloud-related categories will be among the most attractive targets. And truth be told, a startup in 2010 is more than likely to use open source to drive developer adoption and monetize that adoption in the cloud. As a result, it’ll become increasingly difficult to distinguish an open source vendor from a cloud vendor. Either way, the exit potential for these vendors looks bright.
A JUBILANT Oracle is gearing up to relocate its Scottish headquarters from Edinburgh to Linlithgow, following the European Commission’s approval of its £4.5 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems.
European Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes ended several months of uncertainty last week, saying she was now satisfied that the proposed takeover of one US technology giant by another will preserve competition and innovation.
Cheminformatics firm Schrödinger announced last week that it had reached an agreement with the estate of the late Warren DeLano to continue developing, supporting, and selling DeLano’s open source PyMOL molecular modeling software.
SugarCRM CEO Larry Augustin said open cloud innovation will be primary focus for the new year. The company has partnered with Microsoft to provide SugarCRM applications on Windows Azure, Microsoft’s cloud platform. The company also released its Community Edition on Amazon EC2, allowing developers to access, test, and develop Sugar code.
Following the GeoServer 2.0.1 update that was released last week, OpenGeo today released OpenGeo Suite Enterprise Edition 1.0, the complete package of open source mapping software that OpenGeo will professionally support.
A number of members of the European Parliament are about to start an informal cross-party working group on ‘New Media, Free and Open Source Software and Open Information Society’. The intergroup is expected to begin in February 2010, with the support of the European People’s Party (EPP), the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats (Alde) and the European Greens.
So what does it mean for San Franciscans? Not much, yet. It will probably be a few years before the city realizes significant savings, much less improved efficiency and interoperability. And for open source developers in San Francisco, it will probably be a long time before city IT employees (or citizens) are enabled or empowered to contribute to the codebase of open source software on city time or for the city’s benefit. But hey, the taxpayer-funded Web site built for Newsom is apparently powered by open source solutions, so there’s that.
While there is no way most cities can compete with national and state governments in terms of scandal and sleaze, there are many ways they can enhance public awareness and involvement. One innovative way to do this is by adapting open-source software.
San Francisco recently enacted the nation’s first open-source software policy for city government, and Austin should follow because it will save the city millions, lead to greater public involvement and improve how our city runs.
Open-source software is software for which the source code is free to access and modify and not copyrighted. Essentially, it means that anybody who wants to can access the software and improve upon it. This is ideal for city government because it allows the public to collectively utilize its talent to improve the way the city runs.
Last night, I was catching up with a friend who is as far from me in lifestyle outlook as you could possibly be. She is a extremely left wing type working for an environmental advocacy organization in DC. I, on the other hand, am an entrepreneur with one foot planted firmly on the right and one foot firmly planted on the left.
The open source community behind the Riversimple project works together at the 40 Fires Foundation, which has been going for about a year now. 40 Fires intends to become a registered charity for people to donate to in order to “provide a platform for the development of energy efficient vehicles to benefit society and the planet.”
Bioengineers from Stanford and UC-Berkeley are ramping up efforts to characterize thousands of molecular players and processes critical to the engineering of microbes.
With seed money from the National Science Foundation, bioengineers from Stanford and UC-Berkeley, are ramping up efforts to characterize thousands of molecular players and processes critical to the engineering of microbes, so that eventually researchers can mix and match these “DNA parts” in synthetic organisms to produce new drugs, fuels or chemicals. They’ll do this in a lab in Emeryville, Calif., called BIOFAB.
Poppler has a CMake ebuild now. Given how poppler is used it seems to me quite a bad move, poppler is small and used in system that may not have cmake already installed.
Yana from Oxfam sez, “I thought you’d enjoy watching this short animation from Oxfam America that follows our gas dollars, to show where they really go. Oxfam has been working hard to deliver aid to victims of Haiti’s earthquake, but they’re also working to achieve transparency about oil and gas companies’ payments to foreign governments – Empowering people living in resource-rich developing countries to demand that such revenue can be used to address basic needs (education, clean water, health care, etc). The animation was done by Talking Eyes Media.”
Top American boffins have warned that the US government’s efforts to prevent global apocalypse caused by meteor strike are inadequate. The scientists add that nuclear weapons are the only practical means of defence against large, planet-wrecker sized asteroids.
You’ve heard the controversy. Particle physicists predict the world’s new highest-energy atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland, might create tiny black holes, which they say would be a fantastic discovery. Some doomsayers fear those black holes might gobble up Earth–physicist say that’s impossible–and have petitioned the United Nations to stop the $5.5 billion LHC. Curiously, though, nobody had ever shown that the prevailing theory of gravity, Einstein’s theory of general relativity, actually predicts that a black hole can be made this way. Now a computer model shows conclusively for the first time that a particle collision really can make a black hole.
Police in the UK are planning to use unmanned spy drones, controversially deployed in Afghanistan, for the ”routine” monitoring of antisocial motorists, protesters, agricultural thieves and fly-tippers, in a significant expansion of covert state surveillance.
YET more delays have hit a “blighted” CCTV system which was meant to be installed next week.
Braintree Council agreed to give Halstead CCTV back in September 2007, but wrangles over cost, camera positions, red tape and then snow have meant it has missed three promised dates.
The Wycombe CCTV Lay Panel will present its annual report to the district council on February 15 and there will be an opportunity for members of the public to ask questions.
“Terrorism is a crime, and to treat terrorism that takes place far from any battlefield as an act of war is to propose that the entire world is a battlefield, to give criminals the elevated status of warriors and to invest whoever the current president may be with the authority to imprison a broad category of people potentially forever, without ever being afforded an opportunity to defend themselves,” noted ACLU’s Romero.
Using the same lines as in Manchester, where the pilot was started, young people are told the card will help them buy booze, cigarettes, mucky movies, travel to Europe and even open a bank account.
Young Londoners are to be the first in the capital to be issued with ID cards, the Home Office announced today.
People aged 18 to 24 will be able to spend £30 on a biometric photocard that can be used to prove their age when buying alcohol or age-restricted goods, to gain entry to a nightclub, or even to travel in Europe.
Breathtaking: Luxor Temple, a 3,000-year-old testament to endurance at the heart of the ancient capital of the Egyptian empire; the genial anarchy that prevails at the Pyramids of Giza, a Wonder of the World strewn across a gigantic car park and camel-rental location; and the fact that, when I flew from one to the other last weekend, no-one paid attention to the security risk I might pose.
New genetic findings suggest that early humans living about one million years ago were extremely close to extinction.
The genetic evidence suggests that the effective population—an indicator of genetic diversity—of early human species back then, including Homo erectus, H. ergaster and archaic H. sapiens, was about 18,500 individuals (it is thought that modern humans evolved from H. erectus), says Lynn Jorde, a human geneticist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. That figure translates into a total population of 55,500 individuals, tops.
James Hoggan, the director of the James Hoggan & Associates public relations firm, has authored a book titled Climate Cover Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming, in which he describes PR techniques that industry groups use to create the impression of a scientific controversy about climate change.
Stolen emails and erroneous predictions have damaged the image of climate science, leaving many wondering if global warming is real. But this seemingly rational doubt, says the author of ‘Climate Cover Up’ James Hoggan, is not founded on facts but on a sophisticated campaign of disinformation.
Last week, President Obama said that as part of his radical banking reforms, he wants to ban US lenders from investing in hedge funds to limit their exposure to risk. At the same time, Brussels is debating proposed legislation that would cap the amount hedge funds can borrow, and limit ownership.
Shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down rules limiting corporate spending in elections, the Center for Media and Democracy’s Lisa Graves stood up to spin by Citizens United about the ramifications of the case.
Professor Hansen has been driven into a strange situation, and produced a strange book. For one-third of a century now, this cantankerous scientist has been more accurate in his predictions about global warming than anyone else alive. He saw these disastrous changes coming long before others did, and the U.S. government has tried to censor or sack him for his prescience. Now he has written a whistle-blower’s account while still at the top: a story of how our political system is so wilfully, deliberately blind to environmental realities that we have no choice now but for American citizens to take direct physical action against the polluters. It’s hardly what you expect to hear from the upper echelons of NASA: not a call to the stars, but a call to the streets. Toss a thousand scientific papers into a blender along with All the President’s Men and Mahatma Gandhi, and you’ve got this riveting, disorienting book
The bankrupt Tribune Co. wants to give up to $45 million in bonuses to hundreds of their managers. A bankruptcy judge in Delaware is waiting for objections to their proposal and is set to make a final decision this week.
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The Chicago-based Tribune Co., which owns 25 television stations and major newspapers including the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2008. They faced what chairman Sam Zell called a “perfect storm” of forces troubling the media industry, along with $13 billion in debt.
Talk about bankster envy! What’s a failing media conglomerate that has slashed staff and frozen salaries doing giving such golden parachutes to management, while ad revenues plummet? It must be hard for the top dogs to take a critical look at the big bankster bonuses when they are pressing hard to line their own wallets. I must confess that I do have a bias, having seen some great investigative reporters I know laid off by the Tribune’s “cost-saving” measures, which apparently do not including saving millions of dollars at the top.
Oil and tobacco companies and other businesses hoping to press their agenda in the California legislature picked up most of the tab for a gathering of about 25 Republican state legislators and a dozen of their aides at a luxurious beach resort in Santa Barbara, California.
Companies pressing an agenda in Sacramento, including oil and tobacco firms, funneled $120,000 to a group that covered much of the three-day event at a luxury resort in Santa Barbara.
Five Web sites run by Chinese human rights activists were attacked by hackers over the weekend, as a separate row continued between Google and China over political cyberattacks.
Google made headlines when it went public with the fact that Chinese hackers had penetrated some of its services, such as Gmail, in a politically motivated attempt at intelligence gathering. The news here isn’t that Chinese hackers engage in these activities or that their attempts are technically sophisticated — we knew that already — it’s that the U.S. government inadvertently aided the hackers.
In order to comply with government search warrants on user data, Google created a backdoor access system into Gmail accounts. This feature is what the Chinese hackers exploited to gain access.
Google’s system isn’t unique. Democratic governments around the world — in Sweden, Canada and the UK, for example — are rushing to pass laws giving their police new powers of Internet surveillance, in many cases requiring communications system providers to redesign products and services they sell.
According to the Associated Press this morning, a spokesman for China’s Ministry of Industry claimed that, not only did the Chinese government have nothing to do with the attacks, but its anti-hacking policy was transparent and consistent. “Any accusation that the Chinese government participated in cyber attacks, either in an explicit or indirect way, is groundless and aims to discredit China,” he said.
China has denied any state involvement in alleged cyber attacks on Google and accused the US of double standards.
A Chinese industry ministry spokesman told the state-run Xinhua news agency that claims that Beijing was behind recent cyber attacks were “groundless”.
It’s Australia Day tomorrow, and the country’s subjects are using it to mark a week of protests against government plans for compulsory internet censorship.
www.internetblackout.com.au/ is calling for opponents of the government’s plans to black out their profile picture on social networking sites, black out their websites, write to their MP and join a real world protest too.
Unlike advanced Western countries, Chinese society is still vulnerable to the effect of multifarious information flowing in, especially when it is for creating disorder.
Western countries have long indoctrinated non-Western nations on the issue of freedom of speech. It is an aggressive political and diplomatic strategy, rather than a desire for moral values, that has led them to do so.
The DMCA has been used to invade the privacy of Internet users, harass Internet service providers, and chill online speech. The subpoena and takedown powers of Section 512 are not limited to cases of proven copyright infringement, and are exercised without a judge’s review. The following is a small sampling of abuse, overreaching, and mistakes in the use of Section 512(h) subpoenas, Section 512(c)(3)(A) notices, and equivalents. Judicial oversight could curb these abuses without interfering with copyright enforcement.
It’s been 18 months since O’Reilly, the world’s largest publisher of tech books, stopped using DRM on its ebooks. In the intervening time, O’Reilly’s ebook sales have increased by 104 percent. Now, when you talk about ebooks and DRM, there’s always someone who’ll say, “But what about [textbooks|technical books|RPG manuals]? Their target audience is so wired and online, why wouldn’t they just copy the books without paying? They’ve all got the technical know-how.”
Scherlis and other advocates of FCC regulation are encouraging gamers to support net neutrality out of a very real fear that your ISP may begin limiting access to select websites or imposing bandwidth caps in the near future.
A Federal judge has dismissed a complaint against the National Security Agency’s (NSA) Bush-era warrantless wiretapping programme, prompting suggestions the US government is now able to mount mass surveillance operations unhindered by the courts or constitution.
Due to the length of the interview, there is also no new hacker word of the week this week.
The feature this week is an interview with Danny O’Brien on ACTA. I was inspired to contact Danny after hearing him on FLOSS Weekly. In the course of the interview, we mention Michael Geist, Knowledge Ecology and Public Knowledge. Visit EFF to learn more about ACTA and the other issues on which Danny is working and take action at their action center.
Bob Pisano, MPAA president and chief operating officer since 2005, will become interim CEO, and the search for Glickman’s replacement continues. Pisano came to MPAA after heading the Screen Actors Guild, and serving at several major movie production companies.
Perhaps the greatest challenge to all of the technologists that participate in the New Music Seminar is to correct that issue so that great music can rise to its true potential regardless of politics, power or money. I believe that the next decade will bring improvement to the music web that allow that to happen. In the meantime, artists can still make a very good living without selling 10,000 albums by careful cultivation of their fan relationships. This is another theme of the New Music Seminar…redefining the music business around the artist/fan relationship…how to manage it…how to monetize it. Records are no longer currency in the next music business…fans are.
Here’s the list of the 12 artists that sold over 10,000 albums in 2008 for the first time. Remember these are 12 albums out of 105,575 new album releases that year.
BON IVER
Record Label: Jagjaguwar (US/CAN)
Album: For Emma Forever Ago 103,112
TMI BOYZ
Record Label: TMI Entertainment
Album: Grindin’ For a Purpose 29,119
Instead, let’s let the magic of the market continue to work. New technologies are making it easier than ever for musicians to create, distribute and promote music — and also to make money doing so. In the past, the music business was a “lottery,” where only a very small number made any money at all. With these models, more musicians than ever before are making money today, and they’re not doing it by worrying about copyright or licensing. They’re embracing what the tools allow. A recent study from Harvard showed how much more music is being produced today than at any time in history, and the overall music ecosystem — the amount of money paid in support of music — is at an all time high, even if less and less of it is going to the purchase of plastic discs.
This is a long and drawn out answer. It isn’t a simple question.
I’ve been using computer systems for more than twenty years, from micros to mainframes, so I’m no beginner. I was in on Microsoft operating systems from DOS 3.2 and I dabbled with Linux for a number of years. It was only recently that I made the full switch.
The drive towards Linux has been partly because of what Linux offers, but more because of what Microsoft doesn’t, or rather how their company works. Apple are the same.
Enter an old Dell Dimension XPS R400 PC that has been gathering dust in the closet. It has an 80GB Western Digital IDE drive, a Startech 10/100 NIC and 192MB of RAM in it. I received this old PC from a client that bought a new, custom built system from my company in October 2007. He no longer needed the Dell and was just going to trash it. Instead I convinced him to let me wipe the drive, install Mandriva 2008 on it and try to sell it on eBay. It did not sell when I listed it. The client did not want it back, so I just stuck it in the IT junk closet with several other old systems and flaky monitors. I decided to make this old Dell PC into my “new” router. Since it already has Mandriva 2008 on it I figured I could use that to get routing going and then upgrade the Mandriva later.
Amarok has plugins that directly consume content from popular web sites and displays them to you as you play music. For example it can look in Flickr for photos of your currently playing track’s artist and display them in a nice slide show to enhance the mood, or display a Wikipedia page about the artists, or look up the lyrics of the song, or even look up similar Youtube videos and offer to play them – inside Amarok. Think you need a web browser to browse Youtube? Amarok has changed that! And this is what it is about – enhancing the power of desktop applications by giving them the ability to consume from similar web services. The possibilities are endless. Fact is that we have come to rely on the browser for too many things, and if you really stopped to think about it it’s really rather senseless. When I’m listening to music, why do I need to open an extra browser window just to find lyrics or look up artist/album information? When I’m writing a document, why should I have an extra browser window to look for material? When I’m writing a program, why should I have an extra browser window open just to look up API references? The browser is today trying to do too much! This awkward work flow needs to change – we need to make our desktop programs more ‘web-sensitive’ and independent of the browser. (Remember the documentation widget I built into PlasMate?). At KDE we have already identified this as a critical path in the evolution of the desktop, and are already setting plans in motion to this end. We even have a cool codename for the movement – Project Silk.
The stand received financial sponsorship from Red Hat, Linux IT, University of London Computing Centre and The Learning
Machine (Ingots) for which everyone is very grateful. Canonical, the commercial entity behind Ubuntu very kindly provided us with 600 Ubuntu 9.10 CDs (500 Desktop and 100 Server) to give away (thanks Larry) and there were a similar number of CDs containing a great collection of Education-centric Open Source desktop applications for Windows from Free Software for Students that was compiled and produced by Peter Kemp and David Wilmut. That’s around 1200 CDs in total full of completely Free goodness and fun. We encouraged all the recipients to copy, share and pass them on too! At the end of the show we had only a few (quite literally) of each remaining.
Wellington’s Convention Center this week hosted 700 open source software engineers – i.e. geeks – for a festival of discussion of all things linux at Linux.Conf.Au the annual Australasian Linux conference. Carl Suurmond was dispatched to catch the atmosphere with his camera on the final day. Tomorrow the conference will open its doors to the public for an Open Day for all things linux from 11am to 2pm.
New York University anthropologist Gabriella Coleman says the open-source software movement has emerged relatively unscathed from the economic downturn.
Ms Coleman was the opening keynote speaker at Linux.Conf.Au, a trans-Tasman conference held in Wellington last week that attracted more than 600 open-source software developers and enthusiasts.
She took the plunge and immersed herself in the world of open source in 2001, perceiving it was a culture worthy of academic study.
Simmtronics Semiconductors Ltd. has entered into a global agreement with IBM Corp. As per the agreement, IBM has authorized Simmtronics to preload its IBM Client for Smart Work software solution in the Simmbook on Ubuntu operating system. This includes Lotus Symphony office productivity software which is made available at no charge to Simmbook customers.
Since churches and ministries are always looking for ways to save money, learning as much as you can about free computer software alternatives is a good idea. Operating systems like Windows Vista and Ubuntu Linux do pretty much the same things, but in different ways.
Cost and licensing
Linux operating systems are published under open source licenses that make the source code available to everyone. Microsoft products, including Windows Vista and XP, are protected by copyright and other intellectual property laws. As for cost, most Linux distributions are free and can be used on an unlimited number of computers. Windows operating systems are expensive, and legally each license can only be used on one computer.
Second: Remember that the way software is installed/maintained in the GNU/Linux world is completely different from Windows’. In Windows, as the writer said, you grab the software from internet (hopefully form a reliable location…. but we know that’s not always the case, is it?), click on it, maybe will have to restart your computer…. a couple times (why the hell installing Adobe Reader requires you to reboot Windows? Is Adobe Reader the equivalent for Windows of glibc or something?) and then finally you are done with the software. In GNU/Linux, at least in Ubuntu (and every other distro that prides itself of being such), you have to wait for the maintainers of Ubuntu to review software to make it available. That’s right…. they do that job for you, the user. And it’s not just firefox that they maintain… they take care of thousands (literally) pieces of software to make them fit together and not mess with each other when you installed them on your beloved Ubuntu-powered box. And that not only sounds like a dauntin task… it really is. And what would be the equivalent of that in the Windows world? It would be like waiting for Microsoft to review the software when it’s made available by its developers (have you seen how long it takes Microsoft to work on their own bugs? How long would it take them if they had to review other people’s software as well?) and make it available to you through the centralized software they provided Windows with so that their beloved customers don’t have to go leaping from site to site to grab the latest piece of malware-infested piece of software… oh, but there’s no such thing for Windows, is there? Such a shame, you know.
I run Mandriva 2010 at the moment on my desktop system here at the ERACC Intergalactic Spaceport and Karaoke Bar, otherwise known as my home office. I have been running releases of Mandriva for several years now. At first I too wanted to always have the latest, cutting edge release of every package out there. After a while I came to understand that if Mandriva package maintainers saw that a patch was necessary for an application I run then they would patch the version in the distribution and release the patched version in the update repository. If there were a new version of a software application that had security implications for a desktop user, then after testing the new version it would be included as an update for the life of that desktop release, usually 12 to 18 months. Long term desktop releases would get these updates if needed for their lifetime as well, usually 3 years. Then the next time I install updates I get the patched or new version.
I was really having fun! At one site, I found a laptop with Windows 7 installed, but also with a selection to have none and an instant price-reduction when the “No OS” choice was made. That felt good!
I finally found a computer which met all my needs; weight, size, quality of hardware and Ubuntu installed (one of many choices) at LinuxCertified.
I hope others will join me in buying your next computer this way. You will find competitive prices and the satisfaction of not paying the Windows tax.
Panasonic has signed a deal with IBM to migrate its global workforce from Microsoft Exchange to IBM’s hosted LotusLive service. IBM will initially migrate 100,000 employees to LotusLive iNotes, increasing to 300,000 over time. This is one of the largest commitments to cloud services by a global enterprise to date, and is a feather in the cap for IBM in its struggle with Microsoft for email and collaboration seats. However, in our opinion this is as much about delivering commodity services from the cloud as it is about IBM’s win over Microsoft.
Even though it recently landed a giant software deal with Japanese electronics firm Panasonic Corp., IBM Corp.’s Lotus unit, based in Westford, is still playing catch-up against archival Microsoft Corp.
Google last night released the second version of its Google Voice Chrome extension with some very notable new features. If you are using the Mac or Linux versions of Chrome, you’ll need to be running a beta version of Chrome that supports extensions.
An office suite is a collection of related software for business and other uses. The software is distributed together in a single package, with a consistent graphical interface, and with strong interaction between the different components.
The types of software included in an office suite typically consist of word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, database and much more. For many users the office suite (together with a web browser and email client) represents the cornerstone of their computing day. A high quality office suite is therefore a necessity for any computing platform.
Back to the 0.9 version and the developer himself describes the release a more of a “polish” than packing in shiny and “mind-blowing” new features. As such it fixes many issue users – including myself! – have found troublesome.
On the whole, Alarm Clock is an excellent application that can be used for so much more than just alarms. If only it could sync with one of the online calendar or scheduling web apps, it would be truly awesome. That being said, if you can find a use for it in your day to day work, it can prove to be much easier than using a combination of cron and zenity to remind you of tasks that need your attention.
Liferea (Linux Fead Reader) works on Linux and Unix, and is definitely our favourite. Rated 4 stars, it provides great functionality, including optional pop-up notification of new items. News items with headline, image and summary can be browsed easily in its clean GUI (see image at the top of this article), and it provides various options and great functionality.
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We also tried the Blam feed reader, rated 2 stars by the Ubuntu community, but did not get good results with it. Canonical does not provide updates either. However, this may be a work in progress and the Blam developers site could be checked for any future developments.
Two weeks ago I was at the annual KDE PIM meeting at Osnabrück. It was the eighth time that this meeting took place, and it was a blast, once again. This is amazing, so I’m taking the opportunity to reflect a bit on what makes this meeting so successful, how it evolved over time, and what we all can learn for running great developer sprints.
Day 2 of Camp KDE kicked off with a bang when Frank Karlitschek announced the start of a significant new KDE project. The ownCloud initiative will complement the Social Desktop and Get Hot New Stuff efforts which are already dealing with social and collaborative data. Like those, the ownCloud initiative strives to combine the rich desktop interfaces made possible by the Qt and KDE libraries with the large amount of social information and data users are putting online.
In my Slackware 13 review mfillpot gave some suggestions to improve the Slackware experience and I thought I would give them a shot. First off, changing the init level to 4 to allow KDM to show up instead of this startx business. I was happy to note that Slackware had emacs. So many distros have vi and I never really learned how to use it well. So I changed the value to 4 and restarted.
Overall, I am really happy with Arch, although to be fair, I haven’t been using it for more than a day yet. However, the documentation is great and the installation was relatively quick and painless, so I am pretty pleased at this point. I look forward to getting more comfortable with it and switching my other machines as well.
DigAnTel-2 is a FREE Digital / Analog VOIP Telephone system utilizing CentOS Linux (RedHat), Asterisk 1.4.22, FreePBX 2.6.0 with VoicePulse module, Openfire, vtigerCRM with click to dial, PostFix, OpenVPN, and automated Polycom Phone suppot. DigAnTel is the glue to bind these technologies thus creating a unified telephony system for your home or small business. The installation is completely automated and doesn’t require a working knowledge of Linux or Asterisk.
The novelty in this is not in the desktop arrangement; I’ve been slowly tweaking and adjusting this setup for the better part of a year. In fact the fun part of this is that I’ve never been able to arrange it on this machine, even though I wanted to for quite a while.
Test runs at 120Mhz suggest this is a clean and brisk way to browse without overburdening the machine to a point of unusability. Firefox with Flash it is not, but if you are an unbeliever and demand a graphical browser on a Pentium Pro, this will satisfy. Furthermore, adding fbi to your system brings along fbgs, which allows you to display images and pdf files, respectively. For the reverse, try fbgrab and share your desktops with the world.
Now that Alpha 2 of Lucid Lynx is available (it was posted late last week) it’s easy enough to install that code onto the same PC test bed and measure the results. This version of the Ubuntu 10.04 beta booted up in — wait for it — 15 seconds. If you were around during the days of Windows 3.1, the concept of a 15-second boot time would be almost unfathomable. Come to think of it, it would be tough to imagine during the days of Windows Vista.
I’ll get to Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 LTS Alpha 2 later, but the “safe graphics mode” boot option in that very Ubuntu live DVD helped me figure out how to get Sidux 2009-04 to boot on my Intel 82830 CGC (aka Intel 830m) graphics-running Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101.
Over the course of two computing sessions I experienced both the Alpha 2 of the upcoming Ubuntu LTS release as well as the Sidux take on Debian Sid, circa early last year, both of which I’ve wanted to do in order to “plan” this laptop’s future when I decide to leave Debian Lenny behind.
Ubuntu Lucid isn’t even in the beta stage, let alone a release-candidate or fully baked release, and on my hardware it’s looking very, very good. I’m no fan of free-software hyperbole, but Ubuntu Lucid really does look like the best Ubuntu LTS release ever, and I’m anxious to see it at release time in April.
The Ubuntu User Days Team would like to announce the first Ubuntu User Day, on January 23, 2010. This will be a very informative one day session geared towards beginner and intermediate Ubuntu users, as well as people who are interested in using Ubuntu. We have 14 classes covering topics ranging from installing Ubuntu, finding help, equivalent programs, using IRC, getting involved in the Ubuntu Community and more. We have enlisted the help of many talented people to lead these classes throughout the day.
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #177 for the week January 17th – January 23th, 2010. In this issue we cover: Developer Membership Board election results, Ubuntu User Days A Big Success, Bugs and hugs, Ubuntu Developer Week: January 25th – January 29th, 2010, Canonical Blog: ISV support for Ubuntu Server Edition widens, January 20th America’s Membership Review Board Meeting, Ubuntu LoCo Re-Approval Process, LoCo Stories: the Ubuntu Honduras School Tour, Launchpad 10.1 roll-out 09.00-11.30 27th January 2010, Anonymous Access to the Launchpad Web Service API, Introducing Ubuntu Electronics Remix 9.10, and much, much more!
The Ubuntu Manual Project has stirred up veritable carnival of publicity over the last few months, signifying a huge appetite for such a document within the community.
I decided to find out more on the project and its origins by interviewing the manual project leader (dare i say creator?) Benjamin Humphrey – also known as HumphreyBC.
Ubuntu 9.10 also offers its Server Edition, which provides the performance and security of Linux for the enterprise servers. Ubuntu Server Edition easily integrates with a user’s existing networks while providing a low total cost of ownership. The Server Edition goes further to offer multiple life cycle scenarios for users to choose from, and is supported by free life maintenance.
Version 6.1 of the system and network monitoring suite GroundWork Monitor Enterprise is now available. For this release the development team focused on improving performance and have also added support for Ubuntu Server to the monitoring solution. GroundWork Monitor Enterprise supports both Ubuntu 8.04 LTS and the latest Ubuntu 9.10 release.
Recently I popped down to the BT Young Scientist Exhibition here in Dublin. This is for secondary school students/ High school junior students in Ireland. It’s pretty amazing to see the enthusiasm they show for science and technology at an early age.
The process starts months ago, students submit a one page proposal on a topic, if it’s accepted they research and come up with the results, prototype or something to show from it all. It also gives Industries who are based over here to come and show case their projects and encourage students into those areas. IBM, Google, Analog Devices to name a few all took part and all have offices here in Ireland.
ÜberStudent is a free, Ubuntu-based operating system for higher education and emerging-generation high school students, those who wish to learn to excel at the tasks and habits of top students and researchers, and anyone who can benefit from easy-to-use yet powerful computing. Like Ubuntu, ÜberStudent is a complete operating system with programs for everyday computing tasks, but comes with an additional core of expertly configured programs, and many user-friendly extras, designed to increase your academic success. It’s Software Explorer enables you to easily extend ÜberStudent still further for specific academic disciplines, and it doesn’t stop there. Music and movie lovers, gamers, budding graphic designers, and those who insist on an ascetically eye-popping user interface will also be very pleased.
Linux is gaining popularity in the mobile phone industry, thanks to Android. Sony Ericsson has also joined the Gnu-Linux club and announced the launch of their first Android-powered phone — The Xperia X10.
The Xperia X10 phone, named SO-01B, will be launched in Japan in April 2010 with NTT DOCOMO. This Xperia phone creates a unique Sony Ericsson user experience by combining best-in-class entertainment features with signature applications.
The lead engineer for Google’s Chrome Operating System told Ars Technica the emerging product and its Chrome Web browser sidekick will have a complete media player that approximates the functionality of Windows Media Player. Chrome OS boots up a netbook in a fraction of the time it takes to start today’s existing computers. With Google’s Chrome Web browser, Chrome OS loads Web applications in just a few more seconds.
The latest AdMob metrics report is out today and it’s nothing we haven’t seen yet. To sum it up quickly, Android continues to grow both here in the US and abroad. In the span of one year Android traffic (in the AdMob network) has grown from 1% overall to 16% for North America and Western Europe.
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This time last year year, Windows Mobile accounted for 12% whereas now it sits at 3% right next “other.” Ouch.
Google has just dropped Android software 2.1 (which the Nexus runs on) into the open source trough, making it rife for hacking and modding. This is the first, and is described as a simple job. Chris Paget of H4RDW4RE, describes the tweak as “very much low-level Linux kernel hacking as opposed to a full on ROM.”
I’ve seen many similar reports that talk of Linux overtaking Windows for UMDs in a broadly similar timeframe. One thing’s for sure smartbooks and the like are here to stay.
Despite the current developments and the latest advancements in x86 chips power efficiency, analysts seem to think that, even though Intel currently controls the netbook market with its new Atom chips, this dominance may be short lived. ABI Research suggests that the ARM architecture may make a strong incursion into this segment, likely taking away most of the mobile market share from Intel’s units.
Horizons Regional Council will take open-source software for a spin on its desktop computers early this year under a push to bring free software to public sector PCs.
New Zealand Open Source Society president Don Christie says NZ Post and the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet will also trial the software as part of the Public Sector Remix project.
Fourteen government agencies have signed up for the project, and as of Wednesday 32 firms had responded to a survey seeking to identify the number and capability of New Zealand companies providing and supporting open-source software.
The code refactorings and clean ups that have been made to enable single-window mode to be implemented has also resulted in improvements to multi-window mode. The most significant is the support for multi-column dock windows, as you can see used in the screenshot above. People having dockables on one screen and an image in full screen on another will probably find this useful, for example. Before this, you could only have one column of dockables inside a dock window.
We’ve discussed the singlewindow GIMP before – even telling you how to install it! Now GIMP developer Martin Nordholt has revealed that the ‘target’ release date for version 2.8 (AKA ‘Single Window GIMP) is December the 27th 2010.
I have uploaded a pre-release version of IceCat 3.6, if there will not be major problems, at the beginning of next week I’ll make an official release. Please report on this mailing list any problem you may encounter.
However, permissive licences don’t ensure the ongoing freedom advocated by Richard Stallman, which underpins the FOSS philosophy. Significantly, though, Stallman is himself beginning to accept that they are sometimes necessary, as evidenced in a recent article in which he admits to having mixed feelings on selling licence exceptions. Could this shift in Stallman’s thinking be evidence of a fundamental change in the broader licensing landscape?
The Obama administration on Friday is posting to the Internet a wealth of government data from all Cabinet-level departments, on topics ranging from child car seats to Medicare services.
The mountain of newly available information comes a year and a day after President Barack Obama promised on his first full day on the job an open, transparent government.
When you combine the two, you elevate the art of literal misinterpretation to a higher form of genius. In Dr. Pun’s latest article, you will learn all about writing scripts using Python, just not the Python you may expect. The calembour or the equivoque is so potent here, that essentially a bad idea becomes fantastic. Follow me.
Recently, Vimeo and YouTube announced that they were moving to support the HTML5 video tag, as DailyMotion did last summer. This is an important step in making video a first-class citizen of the modern web, and that is great news. Unlike DailyMotion, however, Vimeo and YouTube chose to rely on the patented H.264 video encoding, rather than an unencumbered encoding like Ogg Theora. This means that the <video> pages on those sites will not work with Firefox.
The proprietary flash player has left alot to be desired for Linux and Apple users. Especially if you are running with accelerated 3d and with compiz fusion. Finally it is possible to watch youtube videos in html 5 format instead of the flash player. And I have found an easy way to take advantage of this new feature. This experience for me at least has been so much better. No more low quality jerky video, but instead with html 5 the video can be viewed in high definition and still be smooth.
Jack Straw, the justice secretary, today disclosed that he offered Tony Blair a last-minute way out of the war in Iraq by drafting a secret contingency plan that would have seen Britain support the US-led invasion but not send troops.
The Swiss Federal Administrative Court [official website, in French] ruled [judgment, PDF, in German; press release, PDF, in French] Thursday that an American taxpayer’s financial information at Swiss bank UBS [corporate website] may not be disclosed to the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) [official website] pursuant to an August 2009 agreement [text, PDF; JURIST report]. The court ruled in favor of an undisclosed American taxpayer, who appealed a November decision by the Swiss Federal Tax Administration (AFC) [official website, in French] that would have allowed the disclosure.
We present Albert Edwards’ latest in its complete form as it must be read by all unabridged and without commentary. These are not the deranged ramblings of a fringe blogger – this is a chief strategist for a major international bank.
As Peter Wallison argues in his great book on party finance, the real evil of American politics is that politicians must beg interest groups for the money to finance their campaigns. What we need is not “less money” and CERTAINLY not less speech – but more distance between donor and recipient. The mechanism for that is the political party. Reformers should be focusing on lifting limits on the flow of money from parties to candidates and restoring the role of the parties as the funders of campaigns. Instead of Candidate Smith asking Donor Gonzalez for money – and Donor Gonzalez asking for a favor in return – party chairman Robinson will ask thousands of donors for money on behalf of a slate of candidates, who will never know precisely whose gift was directed to them. That step will diminish corruption and the appearance of corruption.
President Barack Obama took a populist tone Saturday, denouncing the Supreme Court’s decision to ease curbs on big business spending on election campaigns.
Battered by a stunning Republican win this week in the liberal bastion of Massachusetts that robbed Democrats of their 60-seat supermajority, Obama defended his political agenda and vowed to continue fighting against “the special interests in Washington”.
“In my first year in office, we pushed back on that power by implementing historic reforms to get rid of the influence of those special interests,” the president said in his weekly audio and video address.
In a Special Comment, Countdown’s Keith Olbermann envisions a future United States in which today’s Supreme Court ruling permitting unbridled corporate campaign spending purchase all the power greed can afford.
The Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that the constitutional right to a public trial in criminal cases means that jury selection, including questioning of prospective jurors, should not be done behind closed doors.
Google Inc., clashing with the Chinese government over Web censorship, praised U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for calling for an unrestricted Internet where people can operate without fear of repression.
“At Google we are great believers in the value to society of unfettered access to information,” the company said in a statement today. Google said it will work with governments, human-rights organizations and bloggers to promote free expression and increased access to information.
Remember the Russian cop’s YouTube narrative on police corruption? Reader Max_W writes with the news that Alexei Dymovsky, the cop whose videos started a movement, was arrested (Google translation; Russian original) on January 22, 2010. He is in prison in the south of Russia. Max_W adds: “It seems only a president is allowed to have a video blog in Russia.”
“Paypal has as of 23rd of January 2010 frozen WikiLeaks assets. This is the second time that this happens. The last time we struggled for more than half a year to resolve this issue. By working with the respected and recognized German foundation Wau Holland Stiftung we tried to avoid this from happening again — apparently without avail.”
Suffice to say that it, ‘clixpy’, records everything I do when online to the text portal, key strokes, mouse movements, selections made etc., as shown by a live demo on clixpy.com, if I use a web browser. So it appears to be very intrusive and I’m extremely concerned for my privacy.
What is the reason for ‘clixby’s presence? Is it a consequence of new UK laws or EU regulations, or is it something else. WHATEVER, I *DON’T* LIKE IT! Makes me think of PHORM.
Russia’s police force was today at the centre of another national scandal after a journalist beaten in custody died in hospital from his injuries.
Konstantin Popov, 47, was arrested two weeks ago in his home town of Tomsk, Siberia, after neighbours complained that he was drunk and playing his guitar too loudly.
How is that possible? It cannot be found out because the mandate is not made public. Magic, it reminds me of the charlatans who say they live without food and water supply, and it is their personal secret what makes them survive.
The Obama administration is backing $675,000 in damages a Massachusetts student must pay the Recording Industry Association of America for file sharing 30 songs.
Recently many Software Freedom activists have started to question bundled operating systems. If one goes to buy a PC, you will have to pay for the pre-installed Microsoft Window. Today there are many alternatives to Microsoft Windows — GNU/Linux based Ubuntu is one of the most popular Operating Systems. It is not only free in terms of cost, but also free in terms of control that the user has over his or her computing. GNU/Linux operating systems are very much more secure than Microsoft technologies.
If you want buy a branded PC from HP or any other major player and you want to run GNU/Linux on it then what are your choices? Irrespective of what software you want to run on your machine, you will have to pay the cost of pre-installed Windows, even if you are going to remove it and replace it with GNU/Linux. Will Mrs. Clinton take measures to save citizens from paying forced Microsoft Taxes?
With the ever increasing user-friendliness of Linux, the fact that its not as demanding on the hardware, the fact that more and more companies are making programs for Linux and the strides of companies like Canonical with their Ubuntu product, I see the popularity of Linux doing nothing but growing.
This two-day introduction to Linux broadens attendees horizons with a detailed overview of the operating system. Attendees learn how to effectively use a Linux system as a valuable tool. They get familiar with the architecture and various components of the operating system, learn both graphical and command line tools, and learn to do basic networking. This class is scheduled for January 28th – 29th, 2010.
Dell no longer has desktop systems available on their Linux system page. Only laptop and netbook systems are now available. This is the second time in the past few months that Dell has dropped Linux desktop systems. Attempts to contact Dell to ask about the status of desktop Linux systems have so far been unsuccessful.
Google has confirmed that its upcoming lightweight, browser-centric Chrome OS operating system will include a built-in media player. In an interview with ArsTechnica, Matthew Papakipos, the engineering director for the Chrome OS project, says that the developers are currently working on “integrating a whole media player into Chrome and into Chrome OS”. The Chrome browser, for example, already includes support for Flash and HTML5 audio and video playback, however, users also need to be able to “play JPEGs and MP3s and PDFs and all that stuff when you’re off line” said Papakipos.
Sometime in 2010, Google will release Chrome OS, its take on a netbook operating system. It will be far more than just that though. It’s an entirely new take on the desktop operating system. While a final version is still months away from release there’s already enough of Chrome available that we can begin to see what it’s going to look like.
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You also won’t need to be on the Internet to view or play some media files. We already know that Chrome OS will be able to read Adobe PDF files and play Adobe Flash videos. Now, we know that Google is integrating a media player into Chrome OS that will play at least MP3 music files. It will surely play other media file types as well, but exactly what those will be we don’t know yet. We do know that you won’t need to be on the Internet to play them. So, for example, if you have an MP4 movie on a USB stick, you’ll be able to watch it even if you’re not online. Again, the intent isn’t to have you click on a movie file and have a media player pop-up to play it. Instead, the movie will start playing in a browser window. Chrome OS is all about integrating everything into the Web browser experience.
Not a lot of fixes, LCA rather slowed down the patch flow. There’s a number of patches in the queue for master, so I expect 1.7.4.902 to be a bit more exciting.
The Swedes from Gothenberg that run Craft Animations have announced the first-ever Linux release of their Craft Director Studio software. Craft Director Studio, which is an advanced real-time 3D animations tool, is now officially supported under Fedora Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
What’s new in this release (see below for details):
– A number of fixes in AVI file support.
– Several MSXML improvements.
– A few MSI fixes.
– Various bug fixes.
The Bordeaux developers have announced the release of version 2.0.0 of Bordeaux for Solaris and OpenSolaris. Bordeaux is a GUI configuration manager add-on for Wine and is also available for Linux and BSD. Wine, which is an acronym for Wine Is Not an Emulator, is free open source software that allows users to run Windows applications on Linux and Unix by providing its own native versions of Windows DLLs.
The third day of talks at Camp KDE was somewhat shorter, due to the afternoon Cmake training provided by Marcus Hanwell of Kitware. However, in order to provide complete coverage of the talks for the readers of the dot, summaries of the third day’s technical talks are provided within.
I have been really lazy to write anything here for quite some time now. I enjoyed the simple life away from the blogocube (it’s actually a dodecahedron, but blogododecahedron is a mouthful) but now I’m back.
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The next step was the /fork/ from the title. The data models (aka every item list you see in Lancelot) are moved into a separate library called liblancelot-datamodels. Both libraries (liblancelot and liblancelot-datamodels) now reside in kdeplasma-addons/libs so that they can be used by any other plasmoid (or any other program for that matter).
This is a way of saying “liblancelot is now considered stable enough to be used even outside of Lancelot”.
I used to have a silk dress shirt. It was a rich blue color, a bit loose fitting and just great for the hot and humid semi-tropical climate of Hawaii where I was living at the time. That isn’t the kind of silk this blog entry is about, however. Rather it’s going to be about KDE Silk which is a project which aims to deeply integrate online content and communication into the user experience.
To quote the KDE Silk wiki page: “The goal of Project Silk is deep coupling of the web with the user experience while overcoming limitations of the browser. “Freeing the Web From the Browser”, so to say. Project Silk takes the opposite direction of Google’s Chrome OS, instead of making the browser the Operating System, we integrate the content and the communication deeply into the desktop and application ”
When I was contemplating the topics for my “Key Quests for 2010″ list in December 2009, even before I had decided whether I’d share the list with others, the issue of KDE’s web footprint came up pretty quickly in the process. It is very often our first impression for people who would like to get involved or who would like to find out more about us. It is where people go before they know how to (or if they want to) communicate with us directly. It also has been something we’ve really struggled with improving.
The list of “Key Quests for 2010″ was alphabetical. It was a sensible ordering and it prevented me from having to prioritize them in some linear fashion that could never be definitive anyways: all the points are important, though often in different ways, for different reasons and even with different key audiences. So, alphabetical ordering it was! This meant that WebKit was going to be the last topic, and now here we are. (Honestly, I’m glad I’ll be able to get back to more “stream of consciousness, spur of the moment” blogging!
The first beta of what will become Element MediaOS version 1.0, an HTPC centric distribution based on Ubuntu 9.10, is available for testers and developers. Element is designed for HTPCs and aims to integrate GTK applications into a ten-foot user interface through a unique implementation of the XFCE environment. Its started as my own project to set up an effective media center for my own HTPC that would allow me to utilise certain GTK applications without straining my eyes to read the dialog fonts. I decided it would probably be beneficial to other users who were seeking something similar so I am hoping I can get an active community of media center enthusiasts to get behind it and support it.
While the recession has battered many U.S. software companies, Red Hat — which has staked its future on open-source Linux software, virtualization and cloud computing — has flourished. The company has a number of secrets behind its success, some of them unique.
Last month, more than 200 Fedora Project developers and contributors gathered in Toronto for FUDCon, the Fedora Users and Developers Conference. Paul Frields, Red Hat’s Fedora Project Leader, talks about FUDCon, what lies ahead for the next generation of FOSS, and how to address some of the lingering problems of Linux communities.
It’s been over a week now, and my wife is settling in to her new Debian system with no further problems. There were a few extras I needed to install when I first brought Debian up, and a few more I’ve needed during the last week.
Debian developer Alexander Reichle-Schmehl has announced that security support for Debian 4.0 (code named “Etch”) will end on the 15th of February, 2010. Debian 4.0 was originally released on the 8th of April, 2007 and included version 2.6.18 of the Linux kernel. After the 15th of February, no new updates, including security updates and critical fixes, will be available for Debian version 4.0.
The second alpha of Ubuntu 10.06 boasts 15-second boot-time, says an industry report. Meanwhile, the Ubuntu project posted a controversial survey about which proprietary apps might be considered for inclusion with the distro, and Canonical announced a support plan for IBM’s Ubuntu/Lotus “Smart Work” cloud distribution.
To be worked on for Ubuntu Server 10.04 Alpha 3 is migrating from MySQL 5.0 to MySQL 5.1, an upgrade to Eucalyptus 1.6.2, PHP/Python/Perl libraries for Amazon’s cloud computing platform, integrating Puppet and Etckeeper, boothooks and user based configuration for UEC/EC2, and various QA improvements.
Sams Publishing has published a 2010 version of its book Ubuntu Unleashed for Karmic Koala and Lucid Lynx releases. The publisher also launched an Ubuntu Linux Starter Kit combination book and boxed distribution, and has updated A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming.
Now that Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) is out and stable I thought I would look into what is on the horizon for the next release of Ubuntu. There are a lot of questions that I have about the next release and I have found some solid answers, rumors and a lot of speculation as to what the next release will have.
Ubuntu has committed to have a regular release schedule. I came across a lot of mixed feelings about this idea/concept. Some people feel that this regular release gets in the way of how users see the distribution. Some users like to be on the edge of technology and what the developers have made for the release. Once people get used to that release it is about time for another release that uses new ideas and concepts.
Believe it or not, there are several distributions of Linux intended for use by children as young as 3 years old. Child-oriented Linux distros tend to have a simplified interface with large, “chunky”, colorful icons and a specialized set of programs designed with kids in mind.
The latest generation of devices are easy on the eye, lightweight and packed with some nifty features such as the ability to take notes, make lists and — for some — even watch video. They also offer far better battery life than any netbook or notebook, often come with an unlimited wireless connection for downloading new books, and give you access to libraries of e-books that can top a million titles. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this year, there were so many e-readers that they had their own special section carved out on the show floor.
Version 0.2 of both Flickr Addict and Flickr Addict Lite have been released on the Palm App Catalog, just three hours or so after submission, so kudos to Palm!
T-Mobile launched an Eric Clapton-backed Fender Limited Edition of its Android-based MyTouch 3G phone. Meanwhile, China-based Hisense announced an HS-E90 Android phone, Motorola is launching an Android app store in China, and Taiwan’s Gigabyte is rumored to be releasing an Android handset in Russia, say reports.
Pre-release downloads of Processing with built-in support for Android. Note that this code is incomplete and contains many bugs. It is not ready for widespread use. It should be considered “nightly build” quality. Do not use this code while operating heavy equipment. Do not rely on this code for thesis or diploma work, as you will not graduate. Do not use this code if you’re prone to whining about incomplete software that you download for free.
ARM-based systems introduces greater choice and differentiation for system vendors, although an estimated 90% of ultra-mobile devices (UMDs) shipped in 2009 were based on an x86 processor architecture, according to a new report by ABI Research.
The firm forecasts that annual UMD shipments of netbooks, MIDs, smartbooks and UMPCs based on ARM instruction sets will surpass x86-based UMDs by 2013.
ZSL, a leading ISV & Global Software Solutions and Services provider, today launched “PowerCube” DaaS (Desktop as a Service), an open source-based desktop collaborative solution with supporting ZSL consulting practice. Available today in the U.S., Africa, and India, “PowerCube” will help mid-market customers using proprietary platforms to migrate to the IBM Client for Smart Work on Ubuntu’s operating system.
At the Gran Canaria Open Desktop Summit in July 2009, the Open-PC project was announced. The statement said the project aimed to “cooperatively design a Free Software based computer by and for the community”. Further this PC would use only hardware for which there are free software drivers available. This would be a PC with the minimal compromise required for running a free desktop. In January 2010 the project announced the launch of its first product.
What you’re looking at above left is the construction site of the Cleopatra Water Courts project in Cairo, Egpyt, a shopping mall complex that’ll likely cost tens of millions dollars to complete. What you’re at looking above right is the architect’s conceptual model that got his design for it approved — not a real world model, not a watercolor painting, not even an AutoCAD file. Rather, it’s a build created in Second Life, which Los Angeles-based architect David Denton (known in SL as DB Bailey), showed his client, an Egyptian tycoon who funded the project. On that score, this is almost certainly the most expensive, ambitious real world project using Second Life as a platform.
linux.conf.au describes itself as a “conference about Open Source Software, including Linux that brings together the world’s community of Linux enthusiasts who contribute to the Linux operating system”. The description is apt because it clearly states how focused on the “open source” philosophy that conference is. Their views and conclusions would differ if they focused more on software freedom instead. “Free software” and “open source” are terms expressing different values and different values give rise to different conclusions.
Fidelity Information Services Free/Open Source GT.M Mumps database is gaining traction outside of private-sector Veterans Affairs VistA Electronic Health Record. Veterans Affairs VistA development in the private sector is proceeding at a furious rate. Companies such as M/Gateway, Astronaut (owned by the same conspiracy that owns Linux Medical News) Medsphere, DSS and others are making announcement after announcement of new development in the Veterans Affairs VistA Electronic Health Record or closely related space.
*Open source in consumer devices
*VMware-Zimbra deal highlights open source, cloud
*A capitalist’s guide to open source licensing
*Latest on Oracle-Sun-MySQL, M&A implications
This week there is only a little bit of GIMP, but a lot more about the free video editor Cinelerra. I use it to make a kind of slide show video used to illustrate a short “bumper” for Martin Bailey’s blog and podcast about his (mostly nature) photography. Martin is living in Japan and has a lot to tell about photography and Japan. Highly recommended!
I’m very grateful, personally, that the EU Commission cares about Open Source, but after its extensive investigation into MySQL, despite some misinformation, as I viewed it, it found, “The Commission’s in-depth investigation showed that although MySQL and Oracle compete in certain parts of the database market, they are not close competitors in others, such as the high-end segment.” That is true.
Intriguing stuff. But the really interesting dialog begins in chapter two, where Burkhardt shares his views on Oracle’s buyout of Sun, and the potential implications for MySQL.
OpenStreetMap and Sahana are two free software projects that are facilitating aid to Haiti.
We wanted to call attention to two free software projects that have been involved in the Haiti humanitarian effort, both because of the usefulness of their work and because they can surely use the help of skilled volunteers.
PatientOS EMR is an open source health care information system with a comprehensive toolkit to customize the EMR to meet the needs of Hospitals, Clinics and Businesses seeking to integrate an EMR with their software.
This latest release includes a new AJAX web client for end users to access the clinical documentation through the browser. PatientOS Inc. worked closely with the Ila Trust foundation to create a light weight application which can meet the needs of seeing hundreds of patients per session.
This release candidate is the final step before the official release of opentaps 1.4, which is expected in the next few weeks, and there should be only limited changes to opentaps 1.4 before its release.
The San Francisco Committee on Information Technology has published a new software evaluation policy that requires departments of the city government to consider open source software solutions alongside proprietary commercial offerings.
In December the U.S. White House set guidelines for an open and transparent administration. The Open Source for America (OSFA) organization is now following up with tips for a governmental move to free software.
People are voting for Google to offer HTML5/Ogg video support on YouTube, in Google’s own product ideas voting space.
This piece of Ogg activism is getting some traffic on identi.ca and Twitter right now. If you haven’t already, you should jump in.
YouTube is, obviously, the largest source of videos in the world by far, so keeping pressure on Google to support web standards and free formats (over proprietary formats like Flash) is really important.
In early December a beta of Google Chrome for Linux was released (though Chromium could be built on Linux in an alpha form for months earlier) while just days prior was the first public code release of Google’s Chromium OS. Google’s Chrome web-browser has been quick to attract new users on Linux thanks to its speed and features, but some are having issues with this web-browser over its multimedia support.
When Google began soliciting feedback from users about what features they would most like to see in the next version of YouTube, the response was an overwhelmingly enthusiastic request for standards-based open video: users called for Google to support the HTML5 video element.
Both YouTube and Vimeo have announced that they are launching HTML5-based players on their video streaming sites, thus booting out the long-standing champ of multimedia delivery, Adobe Flash. With recent security issues plaguing Adobe products, it’s no surprise that media giants such as YouTube are jumping ship. What makes HTML5 special is that the new Web standard doesn’t require Adobe’s software to stream content to viewers.
So the question rises: “Why is there no OGG support in Youtube?” Numerous people claimed it is because Google is afraid of submarine patents for the Theora video format. While Xiph, the foundation behind Theora claims it is not patent encumbered but you cannot be sure until it is used by the masses and it would be an interesting target for companies. It’s only an interesting target if royalties for patents will generate enough income to justify legal costs. Apart from that there is also the mid-2009 discussion about which format offered the best video quality.
[T]hey only offer video in H.264 format, and that is not good news for free software. A lot of people have noticed that Firefox doesn’t support H.264, and apparently many people don’t understand why, or know what the problems are with H.264. This is a good time to restate the facts and re-explain why Firefox does not support H.264. I’ll be mostly recapitulating the relevant chunks of my talk. (Hopefully a full recording of my talk will become available from the LCA site next week.)
The basic problem is simple: H.264 is encumbered by patents whose licensing is actively pursued by the MPEG-LA. If you distribute H.264 codecs in a jurisdiction where software patents are enforceable, and you haven’t paid the MPEG-LA for a patent license, you are at risk of being sued.
I’m sure there will be a lot of exciting events this year. Google is planning to release a simple OS centered around web browsing and web apps. It is intended for netbooks, but will surely impact the web platform, by proving that the shift towards the web apps is already happening today.
The sugar on top comes through with web applications. No matter what platform I am running there are many online application suites that promise to bring us OS independent applications. Google and Microsoft are both working on this, and in the future we can expect more of it. What does this mean?
POLICE have apologised to a man after he was given two speeding fines from a camera outside his house – despite the fact his car was parked at the time.
A driver was twice sent speeding tickets after parking in front of a camera because police officers failed to notice his vehicle was stationary, it has emerged.
Mr Hussain is calling for a change in the law to favour victims of burglary and home intrusion who act as he did in defence of their families, homes and property and I hope that he gets it. We ought to be entitled to defend ourselves in our own homes, and to know that the state will back us and not the criminal intruder when we do so.
One of the suspects, Doni, was caught when he was about to withdraw money from a Bank Mega ATM on Jalan Enggano in Tanjung Priok. The police confiscated 20 cellphones, hundreds of cellphone SIM cards and Rp 120 million ($ 12, 282) in cash.
A TSA agent at the Philadelphia International Airport slipped a baggie full of white powder into an unsuspecting passenger’s baggage, then terrorized her when he “found” it, before announcing that he was just kidding. When she complained to airport security, she was dismissed because “the TSA worker had been training the staff to detect contraband.”
One of the most common ways of preventing insider security breaches is to have an auditing system in place, which monitors who is doing what within the system. Another method of preventing insider security breaches is to implement a system of job rotation or separation of duties. But Multi-Party Authorization is a better method for proactively preventing insider security breaches because, as Knowledge Center contributor Craig Palmore explains here, Multi-Party Authorization requires two or more people in order to allow access to certain sensitive files.
Charlie Mitchener is a 61-year-old general building contractor with an office near Patrick Lane and Fort Apache Road in Las Vegas. He holds permits allowing him to legally carry concealed weapons in Nevada, Florida and Utah.
Documents obtained by the Guardian reveal that the chief constable of Kent police, Mike Fuller, lobbied the power generation company E.ON UK to seek injunctions to counter protests against the proposed Kingsnorth power station.
A chief constable was tonight accused of undermining the public’s right to protest after documents revealed he urged the owner of a power station to do more to disrupt environmental demonstrators.
Last December, Congress approved a $290 billion increase of the debt limit to support the government’s borrowing through February. This lifted the total amount the federal government can borrow to $12.4 trillion.
Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley lost her special-election for the Senate seat vacated by the untimely passing of U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy. Much has been said about the role of health care reform in the race. Apparently everyone in Massachusetts has health care and reasonable doubts about an expensive national plan that might not improve their services.
President Obama proposed Thursday that banks should be restricted from making investments that are not intended to benefit customers, an activity known as proprietary trading.
Though the roots of the financial crisis were in lax loan underwriting, followed by lax underwriting of derivative products containing those loans and a poor grasp on the exposures banks were amassing on their books, the administration is relying on populist outrage to regain momentum.
The Obama administration struggled on Friday to secure confirmation of Ben S. Bernanke to a second term as chairman of the Federal Reserve, underscoring the political upheaval as both parties tried to find their footing amid a powerful wave of populism.
President Barack Obama’s administration is scrambling to save the nomination of Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke as more opposition emerges from members of the president’s own party.
Two Senate Democrats announced they would vote against Bernanke’s bid for a second term on Friday, underscoring a major populist shift in the political landscape after a Republican’s stunning Massachusetts victory ended the Democratic supermajority in the Senate.
Meredith Whitney, the banking analyst who forecast Citigroup Inc.’s dividend cut in 2008, said plans to limit risk-taking at financial companies will probably be approved and may “dramatically” reduce trading profits.
In what seems to be a relentless and increasingly dangerous mentality by Barack Obama concerning the banks of America, he continues to attack them from every angle as he suffocates the ability to generate revenue based on what looks like some type of inner torment from the failures of his first year in office as president.
Barney Franks and his House Financial Services Committee will open hearings today to discuss ways to impose limits on executive pay and the risks these bankers can take. Good for him. Will we skip the obvious question—what took Barney so long?—and wish him well.
One of Congress’ premier watchdog panels is investigating Goldman Sachs’ role in the subprime mortgage meltdown, including how the firm sold securities backed by risky home loans while it simultaneously bet that those bonds would lose value, people familiar with the inquiry said Friday.
The investigation is part of a broader examination by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations into the roots of the economic crisis and whether financial institutions behaved improperly, said the individuals, who insisted upon anonymity because the matter is sensitive.
The crisis that began in 2008, with the near-failure of Bear Stearns, triggered a host of policies to shore up the investment banks. First, investment banks like Bear and Goldman were allowed to borrow directly from the Federal Reserve’s discount window—a privilege heretofore afforded only to commercial bank holding companies. After the failure of Lehman Bros., Goldman and Morgan Stanley hastily transformed themselves into bank holding companies, which allowed them to take full advantage of all the Fed’s and FDIC’s new programs. First, the FDIC boosted the amount of deposits it would insure, and then it offered to guarantee debt issued by financial institutions. Goldman was one of the biggest users of this new subsidy.
Buffett also told Fox Business that he doesn’t plan to sell off his holdings in Goldman Sachs, and that he foresees holding the shares at least five years.
With the impact of President Obama’s banking plan on Goldman Sachs Group (GS) far from clear, some analysts trimmed their 2010 Goldman forecasts on other worries following the company’s fourth-quarter earnings report.
Analysts have this morning scrambled to respond to President Obama’s surprise proposals for reform of the banking industry. Financial News summarises the views of some of the first to comment on the new regulations.
This move was applauded by public interest groups. “Ten years ago, the financial lobby convinced our leaders that the country’s most important banks should be allowed to operate like hedge funds. That deregulatory gamble cost us trillions in household wealth and millions of jobs. President Obama’s proposals greatly improve the reform package needed to prevent another crisis,” said Heather McGee from DEMOS.
When I look at Goldman’s staggering 2009 profits, I suspect some of their success comes from the fact that they have much of the field to themselves in the wake of Merrill Lynch’s collapse and the general retrenchment in the finance world. Regulations that crowd out JP Morgan and Bank of America would leave Goldman even freer of competition. This is how regulation often functions: driving out smaller competitors and keeping out new entrants, thus preserving profitability by alleviating competitive pressures.
To believe that the administration’s latest proposals alone are responsible for sinking the markets is to believe that what’s bad for Goldman Sachs is bad for America.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. will benefit from President Barack Obama’s proposal to limit Wall Street risk because it may force its competitors to unwind trading operations, Rochdale Securities analyst Dick Bove said.
President Obama received a lot of support from Wall Street during his 2008 campaign. For the next election, he might want to plan accordingly without it.
Happy Goldman Sachs Bonus Day! As we mentioned earlier, Goldman announced today that its 2009 bonuses will total $16 billion, spread (very unevenly) among its 32,500 employees. We thought we’d take a look at how they spend our money.
Goldman Sachs’ decision to restrict its annual bonus pool to $16.2bn (rather than an expected $22bn or so) on the day that Barack Obama announced a sweeping set of Glass-Steagall like reforms that strike at the heart of its business model, turns out to be too little, too late.
As Goldman Sachs prepared to announce its fourth quarter earnings and employee compensation levels yesterday, the bank had bomb-sniffing dogs and police barricades on hand at its New York City headquarters, the New York Post reports.
New York isn’t alone among the cash-strapped states (read: all of them) in looking to take a tax sip from the nation’s “sugared beverages.” Today in New Hampshire, hearings are being held on soft drink taxes, and a bill is already in the pipeline. In Mississippi, a bill to impose a 2 cent per ounce tax is under consideration by the legislature. New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson says he is getting increasingly serious about soda taxes as well. And the California Senate must not have given way to total despair, since they are working up a plan for taxing sweetened drinks. Because legislators and governors tend not to be too hot on math, the pro-tax Center for Science in the Public Interest offers a handy little calculator that shows how much money could flow into state coffers from a soda tax. And once they see those numbers—$400 million in free money!—it’s hard to forget them when it comes time to add up the columns on a budget spreadsheet.
If you care about fighting spin and you are concerned about the health of American democracy, I hope you will join me in saying the Supreme Court really got it wrong today, and this must be fixed. You can help put Americans — and people — before corporations by signing here today. It’ll only take a moment to say NO to the Supreme Court’s arrogant effort to elevate corporations “rights” and undermine the power of the people in our democracy.
Bowing to Pentagon concerns and an international outcry, a Michigan arms company said Thursday that it would immediately stop embossing references to New Testament Scriptures on rifle sights it sells the military.
Cruise giant Royal Caribbean plunged into a public storm last week, when it resumed bringing passengers to Labadee for daylong beach retreats.
How do you snooze in a rope hammock while, on the far side of those emerald mountains, tens of thousands of desperate human beings are still trying to extract their dead from wreckage?
The Supreme Court decided Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission this week link here. It declares that corporations and other groups have the same rights as live humans. The left considers this a great defeat which will lead to a flood of corporate money in elections to the detriment of the average voter while the right only sees a justified extension of corporations and other groups freedom to speak and spend money to affect political races.
MrJM sez, “The Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. FEC allows corporations and unions to pour unprecedented amounts of money into elections. Now more than ever, when Congress acts, we won’t be able to know whether it was because of reason or judgment… or only because of the need for campaign money. The system is broken, and we need to act.”
China blocks Web sites including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, and has long forced domestic Internet companies to censor their own services. Blog providers, for instance, are expected to delete user posts that include pornographic content or talk of sensitive political issues.
Amazon dropped a bomb on the publishing world Wednesday morning by announcing a new royalty program that will allow authors to earn 70 percent royalties from each e-book sold, but with a catch or two. The move will pay participating authors more per book than they typically earn from physical book sales so long as they agree to certain conditions—conditions that make it clear that Amazon is working on keeping the Kindle attractive in light of upcoming competition. Still, authors and publishers are split on how good this deal really is.
Amazon tells The Reg that no-DRM was always the default with its Digital Text Platform – used by small publishers and authors as opposed to large publishing houses. In the past, the company says, if authors wanted to add DRM, they had to download separate software. Now, they can add DRM simply by checking a radio button.
But in a surprise buried at the end of the 289-page report, the inspector general also reveals that the Obama administration issued a secret rule almost two weeks ago saying it was legal for the FBI to have skirted federal privacy protections.
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The telecom employees were supposed to be responding to National Security Letters, which are essentially FBI-issued subpoenas. But those Patriot Act powers say the target must be part of an open investigation and that a supervisor has to approve it. While they require some paperwork, FBI agents have been issuing about 40,000 such NSLs a year.
But an AT&T employee provided the unit with a way around some of those requirements. The employee introduced them to so-called ‘exigent letters.’ Those letters, first used immediately following 9/11, asked for information by saying that the request was an emergency and that prosecutors were preparing a grand jury subpoena. The letter falsely promised that the subpoena, which gives the telecoms legal immunity, would be delivered later, the report said.
What’s more, the report noted that the cozy relationship between the bureau and the telecoms made it hard to differentiate between the FBI and the nation’s phone companies.
“The FBI’s use of exigent letters became so casual, routine and unsupervised that employees of all three communication service providers told us that they — the company employees– sometimes generated the exigent letters for CAU personnel to sign and return,” the inspector general reported.
In fact, one AT&T employee even created a short cut on his desktop to a form letter that he could print out for a requesting FBI agent to sign.
Even that became too much. Agents would request “sneak peeks,” where they’d ask if it was worth their time to file a request on a given phone number, the inspector general noted. The telecom agents complied. Soon it graduated to numbers on Post-it notes, in e-mails or just oral requests.
A federal judge has dismissed Jewel v. NSA, a case from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on behalf of AT&T customers challenging the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans’ phone calls and emails.
“We’re deeply disappointed in the judge’s ruling,” said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn. “This ruling robs innocent telecom customers of their privacy rights without due process of law. Setting limits on Executive power is one of the most important elements of America’s system of government, and judicial oversight is a critical part of that.”
“General” Larry Platt — the musical mastermind behind “Pants on the Ground” — hasn’t seen a dime since everyone and their mother started singing his tune … and now he’s lawyering up in the hopes of finally raking in some cash.
Perhaps if you’ve been living under a pop culture rock for the past few years, you were unaware of the popular hobby of creating subtitled videos of an angry Hitler reacting to something going on in the world today, using a clip from the German movie Downfall.
A mother who doesn’t understand computers and forbade her children from downloading and sharing music on the Internet has been held responsible for their actions. A court in Germany ruled that parents simply banning file-sharing is not enough, and this has to be followed up to check compliance.
Once again the music industry has come out with disappointing results for physical music sales, which they blame entirely on file-sharing. What they failed to mention though, is that their findings show that music pirates are buying more digital music than the average music consumer. Since digital music is the future, pirates are the industry’s most valuable customers.
Have you ever heard one of the major movie studios complaining about the decrease in sales of VHS tapes? We haven’t. The music industry on the other hand continues to blame the decrease in physical sales on digital piracy, ignoring the fact that there’s a generation growing up that has never owned a physical CD.
Of course, right after the rumors, Glickman came out and announced that he would be stepping down at the end of his contract in September of 2010. So it seemed like maybe the studios would let him stick around to the end, since it was clear he wasn’t coming back. Apparently even that plan has been thrown out the window, as Glickman has now announced that he’s leaving as of April 1 in order to take over Refugees International, which seems like a worthy enough cause.
But a year after the RIAA made its announcement, not one major ISP had acknowledged supporting the RIAA’s plan. The question raised by Henson’s statement is whether Verizon has quietly signed on. An RIAA representative declined to comment.
To date, not a single major ISP has publicly acknowledged adopting a graduated response, yet Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast have for some reason stepped up the issuing of warning letters.
I was interviewed yesterday by Mark Edge, as part of his “Edgington Post Interview Series,” for his Free Talk Live radio show, about my Mises Daily article, “Reducing the Cost of IP Law.”
The IP advocate’s argument is dishonest. He says, well, my IP rule limits your property rights, but so do all property rights. So what’s the big deal? The big deal is that the only limits we recognize are that you may not violate others’ property rights! Murder or normal theft or trespass is obviously an instance of this. But using my own property peacefully is not! The IP advocate needs to show that my use of my own DVD somehow interferes with his own property in his own scarce resources. Obviously, it cannot. So, it fall back on IP itself: it says, well, it doesn’t violate B’s physical property, but it does violate his intellectual property. Hellooooo–THIS is the circularity. The circular reasoning is done by the IP advocates, NOT by the libertarian who is simply a consistent opponent of aggression.
How does one make it through the fire from Linux newbie to a full-fledged user? The process is no harder than any other system — just different, argues Slashdot blogger Barbara Hudson. Switching to Linux is no harder than switching to OS X, for example — “just without the black turtlenecks and the cool ‘I’m a Mac, I’m a PC’ commercials,” she said.
Day four of the conference opened with a keynote entitiled “Hackers at the End of the World” by Glyn Moody. Glyn explored the history of sharing in science and art as inspired by the open source movement, and contrasted this with the anti-sharing ‘my gain is your loss’ culture of the global financial community. Glyn postulated that the sharing and indeed sharing of sharing that characterises the FOSS community held a tantalising glimpse of a solution to the global financial and environmental crisis.
A start-up teaming up with IBM to build “Microsoft-free” virtual desktops and deliver them through a cloud computing model has secured $4 million in first-round venture financing.
Virtual Bridges, founded in 2006, is part of IBM’s attempt to undercut Microsoft’s Windows 7 with a set of cloud – and Linux-based desktop packages.
I have been a Linux user for years now, and mostly I don’t think about the cost of software anymore. Just about everything I want to do has a free software app that does it. I only run one piece of paid proprietary software: TwonkyMedia UPNP server, which cost me $29 about four years ago. Considering how much I do with computers all day long, that is a trivial amount of paid software. Contrast that with a Windows box, where you can wind up paying over $1000 just to have an operating system and an office suite.
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Most expert Windows users are irritated by the condescending attitude Linux users have toward them, but this is one of the big reasons why that attitude exists. The majority of web and mail servers use free software. I don’t see a compelling reason to buy software for these uses when I can do everything for free. Ditto with my desktop machines; all the things I need to do, I can do with free software. So I probably do come across a little condescending to people who are still in the paid-software paradigm. They’re not used to having people regard them the same way they regard AOL users: people who are paying to have someone bring them something they could get for free.
As purists are fond of saying, Linux is just the kernel running the operating system. The rest of what the average person calls a Linux distribution are the hundreds of other packages bundled up with the Linux kernel. This combination of packages is what is most commonly seen as and called Linux. Now every Linux distribution is different. They have a different, although similar, package mix and those programs are of differing versions.
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For those who claim that windows just works far better or easier than Linux just google “windows problems” and then “Linux problems”. You will find that there are about the same number of results. I retrieved 151,000,000 for windows and 141,000,000 for Linux. Try the same with individual Linux distribution names or versions of windows, ie. “ubuntu problems” or “xp problems”. What did you get?
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the idea of grid computing, a type of distributed computing that harnesses the power of many computers to handle large computational tasks, was all the rage, at least among organizations with high-performance computing (HPC) needs. One of the most notable projects to make use of grid computing was SETI@home, which utilized thousands of Internet-connected computers to search for extraterrestrial intelligence (and still does).
This week, the Outlaws bring you a lot of Google/China hacking stories, a review of the Mustard microblogging client for Android, Microsoft DDoSing Perl hackers, Google hiring Ted Ts’o and the Hawkman is in the house too…
Hmm. I don’t think there is anything earth-shaking here, although the i915 KMS changes might be noticeable. Notably if you have eDP (“embedded DisplayPort” – I think mainly a feature you’d find on a new imac), in which case it now hopefully works, but more commonly if you saw the flickering on your laptop panel due to LVDS downclocking (which saves power, but is now disabled by default until that thing is resolved).
Plagued by duplicate files that clog up your system? Quantum, a company once known mainly for hard drives, yesterday unveiled a new version of its StorNext File System that it says optimizes storage efficiency by implementing automatic data deduplication. It’s part of StorNext 4.0, Quantum’s high-performance sharing and data management platform, which now can also automate data tiering and retrieve partial files based on timecode, for the video editor in you.
Linux 2.6.32 is to be maintained for 2 to 3 years within the stable series – the maintenance of 2.6.27, however, will probably soon be discontinued or at least downscaled considerably. The util-linux-ng tool collection now contains three additional programs; fdisk provides optimised partitioning. The configuration of X Server has become more flexible and now HAL is no longer needed.
Today kvm maintainers released qemu-kvm-0.12.2 based on upstream qemu 0.12.2. qemu-kvm provides the userspace component qemu with kvm specific enhancements. This means you can use this either with your default kernel kvm module or with the most recent kvm-kmod kvm kernel module.
Roderick Colenbrander, or better known by his Internet name of Thunderbird (not to be confused with the Mozilla mail client), will soon be announcing a new software project that is supposed to be rather interesting, according to him. Roderick is known for starting the NVClock project years prior to the existence of CoolBits support for Linux to enable NVIDIA graphics card overclocking (and other tweaking) with Linux.
Hopefully the Evergreen support with mode-setting and ShadowFB support will be here by FOSDEM on the 6th of February, but it will still be longer before there is real 2D acceleration (EXA) or any 3D acceleration within the open-source stack.
This afternoon two patches hit the xorg-devel list that were written by Robert Morell and reviewed by Aaron Plattner. Both Morell and Plattner are NVIDIA employees. One of the patches is to cleanup of use of improper types in size calculation with the RENDER extension. The second RENDER patch is more important and it adds PanoramiX wrappers for gradients and solid fills with Xinerama.
Shot of jaq is bloody awesome. Well us ubuntu people are a little bit biased here because its done by two people who make ubuntu awesome but still it is very cool.
Want to have some fun using a web-cam on Ubuntu? I suggest you get your hands on the Cheese application. You can grab it straight from the Ubuntu Software Centre in the applications menu by searching for the term “cheese”. This neat little program can be used to snap some still images or video shots with fancy effects applied in real time. I cannot possibly understate how awesome this program really is and you will be playing with it for hours on end if you are lucky enough to have so much time. One thing is for sure, your Facebook profile shots will never be the same.
PGP Corporation, a global leader in enterprise data protection, today announced availability of the latest version of PGP Desktop. This new release extends PGP’s leadership position in enterprise data protection and enables client convenience and compliance across all of the major desktop operating systems environments — Windows, Mac OS X, Ubuntu Linux and Red Hat Linux. In addition to allowing disk encryption across mixed environments, PGP Desktop for Mac now also supports Boot Camp, so users can have complete protection for machines running dual Mac OS X and Windows environments.
As I’ve said in the past: I think Cedega is good software, however there is more to buying software than just the product itself. Here is to hoping Transgaming can get their customer service act together in 2010, because – while I like CXGames, competition is a wonderful driving factor in the business world.
Last night Sutor then shared numerous Linux gaming links about some of the best games for Linux along with others that are open-source. Some of the great Linux games out there include Nexuiz, Alien Arena, ET: Quake Wars, and soon we should have some Unigine-based titles available along with many others.
I have on several occasions been asked “why do you work on KOffice when OpenOffice.org already exists and does everything people need?”. Well, there are several reasons why OpenOffice.org (OOo) is not the end-all of free office suites. This blog is the first in a series that will outline why KOffice is necessary and why it may in fact be the real future of the free office suites.
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So, the combination of these two makes KOffice uniquely suited for non-standard platforms. Non-standard by desktop standards, that is. Most people today agree that mobile is the future. And maybe so is KOffice…
The approach? Think Google Summer of Code — complete with internships, mentors, and sponsors — with an emphasis on team contributions rather than stand-alone projects.
GNOME ran a similar outreach program in 2006, and received one hundred applications within two weeks. Because funds are (always) limited, great projects (and talent) had to be turned away — but Google was so was impressed by the proposals, it funded three additional projects. The 2006 Women’s Outreach Program had six participants, but organizers are tentatively planning on five participants this season.
Back in December Zeitgeist 0.3 was released with many changes and its engine was even largely reworked. Since then there have been a few point releases as GNOME Zeitgeist is in the process of being stabilized for a Zeitgeist 0.4 release in time for GNOME 2.30. Yesterday afternoon Zeitgeist 0.3.2 was released to deliver on more stabilization work along with better support for GNOME’s Activity Journal. The release announcement can be read on the mailing list.
Well Puppy Linux is a winner.
I decided to give the newer version a go.
This one is 431 which has support for my wireless internet.
I have a side bar like vista and all my browsing is done using firefox just as it was on windows.
So far I am loving it.
Pardus is a distro developed by (I quote) “The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey”. It is a KDE based distro with lots of tools designed so that it becomes a lot easier to use. Since its a government run project I’m guessing the idea is to stop Turkish money flowing out of the country and into Microsoft’s coffers, and well as gaining control over software running on the countries critical systems.
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All in all, I like Pardus. It is a system you could recommend to a beginner, and is very user friendly.
I have a place reserved in my heart that only Slackware Linux fills. Strange as it might be, Slackware was the first Linux distribution that seemed to understand me and, I it.
I recently read an article which brought to mind, the time that I started my venture into the Linux community as a new user.
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Slackware remains true to being the most similar to Unix of any Linux flavor available. Patrick Volkerding cleaned up a version of SLS for a professor at MSU to use in teaching LISP. This was the start of a beautiful thing. For many years, Patrick was the sole maintainer of Slackware Linux. This is still largely true to this day and has it’s advantages. Nothing goes into Slackware unless it’s ready. Packages must require little or no tweaking for maximum performance. Even Gnome was dropped because it required too much configuration.
Torrent downloads for Slackware 13 can be found here. I’ll be using the full DVD ISO for this article as it includes all the packages necessary for a typical install.
A large chunk of the wallpapers to be packaged up with Ubuntu Lucid Lynx will be drawn from the public “Ubuntu Artwork” group on photo sharing site Flickr.
I’ve been hesitant to plunder the talented depths of this Ubuntu Artwork pool on Flickr; pullling out some of the more ‘spiffing’ examples and presenting them here as I’m not too fond of pointless lists that come hand in hand with a meaningless adjective – “10 cool wallpapers”, “10 awesome wallpapers”, etc. Are those 10 wallpapers really “awesome” or are they 10 you found in a hurry and thought “Hmmph. They’ll do.”?
We are proud to present today a new Ubuntu-based (or Remix) Linux distribution, this time for electronics. Called Ubuntu Electronics Remix, or UER for short, it is based on the popular Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) operating system and comes as a Live DVD ISO image with lots of free electronics software. Except for the electronics software, everything else is exactly the same as in the original Ubuntu 9.10 distribution.
Canonical’s Tim Gardner is seeking comments regarding a new build of Ubuntu Server that he is proposing. Canonical is considering another build of Ubuntu Server (there is already Ubuntu Server 32-bit and 64-bit along with specialized builds for cloud computing with Amazon EC2 and UEC), but this one would be specialized for just 64-bit platforms that have low-latency requirements and on power consumptive systems.
Clement Lefebvre and the Linux Mint community are proud to present today (January 21st) the first release candidate of the upcoming Linux Mint 8 KDE Community Edition operating system. Powered by Linux kernel 2.6.31 and built on top of the KDE Software Compilation 4.3.4, Linux Mint 8 KDE RC1 comes with many improvements in various areas of interest. It is now based on the Kubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) Linux distribution.
Your editor has just completed an important transition: moving his Internet connectivity from one evil branch of the local telecom duopoly to the other, equally evil branch. This change required the acquisition of a new router; that, in turn, provided the opportunity to play with Linux-based router software, and Tomato in particular. Read on for your editor’s impressions of this impressive bit of (mostly) free software.
Having everything connected is a bliss. I bought a Chumby last week. It is an alarm clock. With a touchscreen and wi-fi connectivity. Built on open source (you can easily get root access in the Linux box), with a thriving community of developers building widgets for it. Therefore, it doubles as an Internet radio, an online picture frame, a weather station, it plays your Google Voice messages and a lot more.
Adeneo Embedded announced today a Linux Embedded training course in Paris, France, from March 15th to March 19th 2010. This event is a unique opportunity for software system designers to develop an application based on Linux Embedded, using Freescale’s i.MX25 applications processor solution. Freescale’s i.MX family, based on ARM® core technology, is engineered to offer Smart Speed, low-power consumption with MHz performance to spare and a high degree of integration to reduce your design time signify cantly.
A clever bunch of boffins have managed to port Android to an x86 platform, allowing people to run Google’s OS on Asus’ Eee PC netbooks as well as several other already tried and tested 32-bit (x86) platforms.
When it comes to the mobile Web, increasingly there are only two mobile platforms that matter: Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android. According to market share data put out today by AdMob (which is being acquired by Google), the iPhone and Android combined captured 81 percent of U.S. mobile ad impressions on smartphones in the fourth quarter of 2009, up from a combined 55 percent in the first quarter of 2009. Most of that growth comes from Android, which nearly doubled its market share from the third quarter to 27 percent. The iPhone OS made up the other 54 percent. (Worldwide, the iPhone had 51 percent share and Android had 16 percent, for a combined total of 67 percent).
While we recently reported that Google’s Nexus One had a slow start coming out of the gate, the Android operating system, which is spread across a number of devices, is not having the same issues. A report by Myxer, a mobile entertainment company with over 30 million members, says that visits to its mobile site by Android users grew 350% in 2009, strongly outpacing the iPhone, which grew 170% during the same period.
To refresh your memory, the Touchbook is a ARM based device that has been released that has Linux installed on it. It was their own version of Linux called AI OS. However, today I noticed the Always Innovating site has been updated.
The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, which has developed a low-cost notebook computer to help children in developing countries improve computer and learning skills, has announced that it is looking for volunteers and interns to help out with projects in countries including Afghanistan and Haiti.
The good news for Microsoft users who need DOS compatibility brought to you by Open Source, not Microsoft. If this is you, check out DOSBox, FreeDOS, and VirtualBox.
Tendered to the Apache Software Foundation last year, the Pivot platform for developing Java-based Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) has become an Apache Top-Level Project (TLP). Although the foundation has only recently published a press release, this information has apparently been up on the project page for quite some time.
So what ReactOS will now start to do, is to leverage the work that the WINE project has been doing on the win32 system. It’s an idea that makes a whole lot of sense, seeing as WINE has been working at replicating win32 for years (with some success, just look at CodeWeaver’s CrossOver apps) while ReactOS has been focused on win32 as part of a larger open source windows implementation.
Out of all the operating systems we looked at, ReactOS is the one most likely to have Steve Ballmer tossing chairs. Originally named FreeWin95, the developers’ original goal was to create a completely open-source clone of, you guessed it, Windows 95. As time went on, however, there was little serious code to show and it was clear that the NT code base was the future for Microsoft.
In 1998, ReactOS rose out of the ashes of FreeWin95. Early progress was slow, but in 2004 version 0.2.0 arrived with a usable desktop and respectable, albeit very limited, Windows compatibility. Today, ReactOS is based around a home-grown kernel, but the project makes heavy use of the WINE libraries that are popular for running Windows applications on Linux.
Barely one and a half years after the initial plan, a new print UI has now found its way into OpenOffice.org with the integration of CWS printerpullpages into the latest developer milestone DEV300m70. This took a while longer than intended, but I think the result is worth the effort. Many thanks to all the many people who made this possible (in no particular order): Mathias Bauer (Sfx), Andre Fischer (Impress), Thomas Lange (Writer), Christian Lippka (Impress), Niklas Nebel (Calc), Christoph Noack (User Experience), Regina Henschel, Hasan Ilter (QA), Jörg Skottke (QA), Thorsten Bosbach (QA), Oliver Craemer (QA), Eric Savary (QA). (I hope I didn’t forget anyone).
I look forward working with “another you”, inside the broader Oracle Corporation, and I am sure that it will be exciting. So farewell, Sun. Hopefully your employees will not forget who you were, what you stood for: excellency in technology, freedom, genius, and inspiration.
The PluginCheck feature is made possible by a Web service that Mozilla launched last year which matches the user’s plugin versions against a remote database of plug-in information. The backend Web service, called PFS2, is also used to help users find the appropriate plug-ins to enable support for certain kinds of content.
With Firefox 3.6′s release earlier today you may be falling in love with your browser all over again – especially thanks to the integration of ‘Personas’.
A month or so back we posted the mocked up interface to Firefox 4 in Linux and the opinion on it was almost unanimous – it looked gorgeous!
Over the course of several days this week, a series of mysterious billboards popped up in New York and other cities showing romantic photographs of the co-president of Oracle with a woman.
On one of the billboards that appeared in New York on Times Square, the words “Charles & YaVaughnie” were posted along with “You are my soulmate forever!” The note was signed “cep,” referring apparently to Charles E. Phillips Jr., the Oracle co-president.
The Insecure.org developers have announced the release of version 5.20 of Nmap, their popular network scanner and mapper. According to the developers, this first stable update since Nmap 5.00, released last July, includes more than 150 “significant improvements”.
Moving forward, there is an opportunity to save millions of dollars in software costs by using open source software. We are only scratching the surface. We can and must do more in the face of historic budget deficits. Our new open source policy requires the City to choose new technology wisely.
This is just the beginning of the Open Gov movement in San Francisco, but our early efforts are paying off.
Since the launch of DataSF last summer, the City’s clearinghouse of government datasets, we have seen our tech community create new services and products never dreamed of within the walls of government. And now we are giving people access to technology systems like our 311 call center through open source, so they can decide how and when they interact with government.
Kaltura’s vision is sound and solid, and enabling more and more open source platforms is definitely an important part of their strategy, allowing a drammatically growing number of third parties to take advantage of Kaltura’s video platform.
WordPress founder and Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg has just announced that his nonprofit, charitable foundation is officially an open shop. The WordPress Foundation is an organization dedicated to supporting and promoting the very mission of WordPress itself. Simply put, as on the Foundation website: “to democratize publishing through Open Source, GPL software.” Everybody dance!
Web founder Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt unveiled Data.gov.uk today. The new website offers public sector data, ranging from traffic statistics to crime figures, for private or commercial use. It is designed to be similar to the Obama administration’s data.gov project, run by Vivek Kundra, Chief Information Officer in the US.
We have drafted a simple and enabling set of terms and conditions for the site which means that the data available through data.gov.uk will be re-usable both commercially and non-commercially. These terms and conditions have been aligned so that they are interoperable with any Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Licence. The terms and conditions are also machine readable meaning that the licence is presented and coded in such a way that applications and programs can access and understand the terms and conditions too.
The Guardian quotes developer Ben Fry on the future of searching government data: “This is only going one way: there is no trend towards less data.”
Following an era when the quantity of data available online increased in orders of magnitude, thanks largely to easy publishing tools for end-users like blogging and social networks, many people expect the next era of development online to focus on strategic moves to make the most valuable data available in standardized formats that facilitate innovation by 3rd parties independent of the original sources of the data.
Number 10 has responded negatively to a petition signed by over 2,000 people that asked the government to convince the Royal Mail to offer a free postcode database to non-profit and community websites.
Sadly, a day is a long time on the internet, and following yesterday’s data.gov.uk love-in, Prime Minister Gordon Brown today returned to appeasing commercial interests.
Every time I explain something in the Modern Perl book under development, I have to change the way I think. I’ve spent a decade writing Perl 5, testing Perl 5, writing about Perl 5, editing writings about Perl 5, and thinking about how to do all of those. I still learn new things, but I haven’t been a novice for a very long time.
Mature projects need the perspective of determined and intelligent novices to help find gaps in tutorials and documentation. It’s too easy to assume that the mental model experienced users have is obvious for novices. After all, the design is clearly an effective design for the problems it has to solve.
An introduction to Flex and Bison gives an overview of how and why they are used to create compilers and interpreters, and demonstrates some simple applications including a calculator built in Flex and Bison – a good start to this volume, always useful for people who know nothing. Using Flex follows along with Bison. Parsing SQL is an invaluable part of the book.
We’re rolling out a new beta test today: the HTML5 player!
What’s the HTML5 player, you ask? Simply put, it’s an alternative to our current Flash player that looks and works almost exactly the same way. What are the benefits?
* The player loads right away — no more spinning butterfly thingy
* You can jump anywhere in the video, without having to wait for it to buffer
* Smoother, less jumpy playback (we hope)
An internal document seen by EurActiv shows that 11 out of the 26 spokespersons that have already been designated to the incoming European Commission are Anglo-Saxon. Of these, seven are English and four are Irish (EurActiv 21/01/10).
Most revealing – in the case of L’Express, the paywall is being delayed not by questions over whether readers would pay, but whether the paywall can come in at a reasonable cost. In the case of L’Express, online director Corinne Denis says that the model they are currently looking at would cost more to implement than subscriptions could bring in.
It is one of the great ironies of China’s rise on the international stage: a nation that reveres Confucius and the devotion to truth and learning symbolized by the great sage has become one of the world’s leading perpetrators of academic fraud. Cheating among Chinese scholars has reached such epidemic proportions that at least one leading academic journal will no longer consider their submissions.
This month, a prominent British medical journal, The Lancet, urged the Chinese government to take action against rampant cheating in scientific research. But that call is likely to go unheeded in a university system that has taken the maxim “publish or perish” to the extreme. For a Chinese lecturer aspiring
Just as countless Chinese people young and old study, live and travel internationally, so do people from countries throughout the world go to study, live and travel in China. They have been lured by the economic boom and employment opportunities, by educational opportunities, or just by the desire to see what is happening in a place that has been the talk of the world. Many I have encountered have found employment in big cities, or in teaching, or in entertainment, or in a host of other professions.
DNS Security Extensions is supposed to be the technology that helps to secure the Domain Name System, or DNS , against attack. Yet DNSSEC servers aren’t always infallible, as a pair of vulnerabilities proved this week.
Check out this German TV clip highlighting the failure of the new, privacy-violating full-nude scanners going in at an airport near you. As Bruce Schneier notes, “The scanner caught a subject’s cell phone and Swiss Army knife — and the microphone he was wearing — but missed all the components to make a bomb that he hid on his body… Full-body scanners: they’re not just a dumb idea, they don’t actually work.”
Nearly 200 men remain imprisoned at Guantánamo. In June 2009, six months after Barack Obama took office, one of them, a thirty-one-year-old Yemeni named Muhammed Abdallah Salih, was found dead in his cell. The exact circumstances of his death, like those of the deaths of the three men from Alpha Block, remain uncertain. Those charged with accounting for what happened—the prison command, the civilian and military investigative agencies, the Justice Department, and ultimately the attorney general himself—all face a choice between the rule of law and the expedience of political silence. Thus far, their choice has been unanimous.
The people of Manchester have either lost all interest in travelling abroad and drinking, or couldn’t give a monkey’s about the government’s lame duck ID card scheme, if a commons answer is anything to go by.
A Bronx pit bull attack that prompted the friendly-fire shooting of two undercover cops took a tables-turning twist Thursday when a gotcha video surfaced showing blatant police brutality.
Researchers said this was the first time peacemaking behavior has been observed in orangutans, which are, in the wild, loners. Basically, it looks as though this group of captive orangutans—forced to live together—have learned a behavior that’s previously only been known among more social apes, such as chimpanzees and gorillas.
Focusing on dolphins: the last decade of studies into dolphin behavior has highlighted how complex their communications actually are; so much so that it is difficult not to draw parallels to the complexities of human communication. Empirically, their brains have many key features associated with high intelligence. It would seem that we have long underestimated their capacity, and while their intelligence is different in form, it is difficult to dismiss that it exists.
Why is this move so significant? Because to date the public sector has enjoyed a near monopoly on the employment of the professionals who have expertise on drugs. Nearly all of the senior medics, civil servants, policy advisers, social workers, academic researchers, customs officials, judges, lawyers, and police, prison and army officers who should be contributing to the policy debate are either employed directly by government or depend on it for funding. The Nutt affair seemed to confirm the long-established principle that they put their careers at risk by speaking openly against the absurdities of prohibition. Politicians, fearful of a media drubbing and punishment at the polls, were always poised to come down on them like a ton of bricks.
Last week at the annual Australian national Linux conference in New Zealand, Waugh, a former self-styled open source advocate, was using loads of tired bizspeak to promote the so-called open government policy – but she avoided saying anything about the filter. When someone dd try to engage her on the subject, she did a deft sidestep.
Meanwhile, yesterday, at the closing ceremony of the same conference, the other half of the family, Jeff, was urging people to black out their avatars on their social networking sites to protest against the policy.
The prepared text of U.S. of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s speech, delivered at the Newseum in Washington, D.C.
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But it’s also the smart thing to do. By advancing this agenda, we align our principles, our economic goals, and our strategic priorities. We need to create a world in which access to networks and information brings people closer together, and expands our definition of community.
Given the magnitude of the challenges we’re facing, we need people around the world to pool their knowledge and creativity to help rebuild the global economy, protect our environment, defeat violent extremism, and build a future in which every human being can realize their God-given potential.
Last June, a federal jury in Minnesota found Jammie Thomas-Rasset liable for willful copyright infringement and ordered her to pay nearly $2 million. Michael Davis, chief judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota, chopped the amount to $54,000, or $2,250 per song.
The original bill had proposed ISPs and rightsholders split policing costs 50-50. But Timms, in a speech at the Oxford Media Convention on Thursday, said the government is issuing a “draft statutory instrument” that requires the likes of labels and studios to pay more. They will be the “primary beneficiaries” of the proposed graduated-response scheme, Timms said: “The benefits of what we are doing will go to the rightsholders. So I have not been convinced by the arguments of rights holders that the Internet companies should bear much of the costs.”
The global music industry trade group IFPI has released its Digital Music Report 2010, a 30-page document that makes a single argument: copyright infringement is a form of “climate change” for creative industries, and “we look to governments for action.”
According to this view of the world, the music business has now tried its hand at being “innovative” and “customer focused.” It disaggregated albums, it allowed music to go up on everything from Amazon to iTunes to Spotify to Last.fm. It sued users, it launched education campaigns. Nothing worked. It’s now time for governments to step up.
After months of waiting, the Ipredator anonymity service from the founders of The Pirate Bay has finally opened its doors to the public. For 5 euros a month users can now hide all their Internet traffic, including torrent downloads, from third party outfits who might want to spy on their downloading habits.
Along with the discussions, a lot of inaccuracies and lacks in the image of reality presented to humanity by RIAA, MPAA, MAFIAA and other corporate lobbyists appeared. Because I hate lies and injustice, I decided not to tolerate the false propaganda and to write this article which is a finial of few years of thinking, mentioned discussions and arguments used by both sides of the barricade.
Concluding the review of submissions to DFAIT regarding the Canada-EU Trade Agreement, the submission of the Canadian Publishers’ Council is important because it highlights the hopes of those lobbying for extensive new copyright reforms. The submission makes clear that those groups hope that CETA could force Canada into reforms such as copyright term extension and the creation of new database protection:
Send this to a friend 
but this is a wakeup call and this needs to be said:
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