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07.06.10

Links 6/7/2010: Linux 2.6.35 RC4, Wine 1.2 RC6 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 9:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Linux: We Put Our Money Where Our Mouth Is

    This press release is to announce that for the month of July 2010 ERA Computers & Consulting (ERACC) is following the idiomatic phrase, “Put your money where your mouth is!” when it comes to our Linux PC sales. What do we mean? Read on.

    For every PC purchased from us in July 2010 with any Linux distribution preinstalled ERACC will donate 5% of the sale to the Free Open Source Software (FOSS) project of your choice. As with most such offers there are caveats. These are:

    * The PC must be ordered and paid for within the month of July 2010.
    * The PC must be configured with at least the minimal configuration to have a working PC (case, power supply, motherboard, cpu, ram, hard drive, video adapter and operating system). You can choose to use your existing monitor and input devices.

  • Non-Geek Use of GNU/Linux

    When it comes to GNU/Linux, even though I was a late adopter amongst geeks, I am still an early adopter compared to many. I found another article describing the experiences of a non-geek with GNU/Linux. The important points I get from stories like these:

    * non-geeks can use GNU/Linux well
    * they do appreciate some of the many advantages of GNU/Linux
    * they do appreciate some help from family, friends or whoever sold the PC
    * if we all helped our friends migrate to GNU/Linux, the share of GNU/Linux would be pretty decent

  • Desktop

    • Review: Lenovo ThinkPad Edge 15

      The first step was booting Ubuntu 10.04 from an USB hard disk to check the Linux support. Using Ubuntu, everything worked out of the box, including stuff like HDMI audio support or output switching. An exception may be the DVD drive, which only works if you set the SATA mode to compatibility. Non-DVD media also works in AHCI mode, but only if you start with a disc inserted in the drive. Playing DVDs requires setting a region code using setregion(8) [otherwise they do not work at all] and SATA compatibility mode [otherwise they only work partially].

    • My First LXDE Desktop

      LXDE is desktop environtment like KDE and Gnome. But it’s lighter than KDE and Gnome. But it’s still need middle spec computer like pentium 3/4 and with Minimum Ram 128-256 MB Ram. LXDE is simple, but for newbie user like me it’s still little hard. LXDE support compiz fusion for eyecandy your desktop. My First LXDE Linux distribution was PCLinuxOS 2009.1 KDE. I install PCLinuxOS 2009.1 then install task-lxde, then remove kde 3.5.10.

  • Server

  • Audiocasts

  • Kernel Space

    • SELF: Anatomy of an (alleged) failure

      Like most community-run events, the second SouthEast LinuxFest (SELF) featured the standard set of positive talks on Linux and open source. It also featured a somewhat more controversial talk about failures to get some features merged into the Linux kernel by Ryan “icculus” Gordon.

    • Linux 2.6.35-rc4

      So go out and test -rc4. It fixes a number of regressions, a couple of them harking back to from before 2.6.34. Networking, cfq, i915 and radeo. And filesystem writeback performance issues, etc. It’s all good.

    • A flood of stable kernel releases

      Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of several stable kernels: 2.6.27.48, 2.6.31.14, 2.6.32.16, 2.6.33.6, and 2.6.34.1.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

      • Akademy Day 2

        After a successful first day of talks and the Akademy party, hundreds of KDE contributors returned to the University of Tampere for the second day of the conference. Already, the slides and videos are starting to be uploaded on the Akademy website, for those of you who couldn’t make it to Akademy or are here but couldn’t attend two presentations at once.

      • KDE Akademy 2010 conference: First videos and slides published

        This year’s general assembly of KDE e.V., the non-profit organisation that represents the KDE Project in legal and financial matters, is also taking place today during the event. The annual Akademy KDE world summit is taking place in Tampere, Finland. It began on July 3rd and runs until the 10th of July. All of the latest files are available to download from the Conference Program page.

      • More on netbooks, devices and everything

        KDE SC and Plasma:why?

        We still hear again and again that KDE is to heavy and too bloated to run on any modest hardware. Of course technically the situation can be improved and it will, for instance the platform profiles that are being cooked right now will be able to provide a law fat (as in Kevin words :) you will find information about that in the upcoming future on the planet.

        n the other hand, complaints are often not completely true, we need better communication about what the advantages of a KDE based solution are, and where the problems are: we pushes the edges of what all the layers of our platform can do, Being Qt, X, or graphics drivers, due to our hard beating the quality of the whole stack is really increasing (and this funningly enough is benefiting non KDE users as well).

      • Kubuntu developer wins KDE Akademy 2010 Award

        Top Kubuntu developer Aurélien Gâteau (agateau) has been honoured with an Akademy Award for 2010. The Akademy Awards are given out each year at the annual KDE Akademy conference; the jury being formed of previous prize-winners.

        Aurélien won the award for his work on Gwenview, the image viewing application which ships with Kubuntu. He was also commended at Akademy for his work in getting the KDE Status Notifier specifications adopted by the Ubuntu project, where they are known under the name Application Indicators along with necessary DBusMenu additions.

    • GNOME Desktop

  • Distributions

    • Absolute 13.1.2 Screenshots

      The Slackware-based Absolute Linux 13.1.2 was release yesterday. Absolute Linux features the IceWM window manager which is very fast and lightweight. This version of Absolute has opted for the popular Chrome web browser where previous versions included Firefox as the default. Numerous other features, enhancements, and security fixes can be viewed on the Absolute news page.

    • Big distributions, little RAM 2

      I will point out though that almost all of the distributions have done a good job of lowering memory usage with system updates, which is very commendable. Also it’s important to note that even though RAM and disk space increase with updates so might performance so it’s all about which metric you hold as most important.

    • New Releases

    • PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Mandriva Linux 2010 Spring delayed

        Mandriva has confirmed that the next major release of its Linux distribution, originally expected to arrive on the 3rd of June, has once again been delayed. In early June, the French Linux distributor surprisingly issued a second release candidate (RC2) and postponed the release date for the distribution indefinitely. According to a post on the Cooker mailing list by Mandriva Director of Engineering Anne Nicholas, the delay was caused by “internal organisation and some hardware problems”.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Rapache on Ubuntu 10.04 ? Not likely.
      • Ubuntu 10.10 Alpha 2 Gets Linux Kernel 2.6.35 and Btrfs

        A few minutes ago, the Ubuntu development team unleashed the second Alpha release of the upcoming Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) operating system, due for release in October 10th, 2010. As usual, we’ve downloaded a copy of it in order to keep you up-to-date with the latest changes in the Ubuntu 10.10 development.

      • Impression GTK Themes Get radical update for Meerkat

        As the 10.10 development cycle rolls along various user-created themes are submitted for potential inclusion in the ‘Community Themes’ package.

      • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 200

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Aurora is the new face (and name) of Eeebuntu netbook OS

          EeeBuntu Linux has been one of the most popular independent Linux distributions for netbooks for the last few years. And when I say independent, as the name makes clear Eeebuntu started out as a modified version of Ubuntu Linux — which is maintained by a nice big institution called Canonical. But Eeebuntu releases typically pack a number of customizations that make Ubuntu run better on low power netbooks with small displays. The latest release wasn’t even based on Ubuntu anymore, instead using Debian Linux as its base (Ubuntu is also Debian-based).

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Panel: Smart consumer devices market to explode

      Open-source software has also been maturing for the last decade, and now has passed Microsoft in keeping up with usage trends, according to Michael Kress, senior director at Canonical Ltd., a provider of support, engineering services and hardware and software certification for the Linux-variant Ubuntu.

      “We are taking the best of all the open source software available today and bringing it together into a single platform. Linux continues to evolve, coming out with a new version every six months, unlike Microsoft which is much slower to respond,” said Kress. “We think that Linux is the one—with Android, Amigo and Ubuntu leading the smart devices revolution.”

    • Android

      • A look at CyanogenMod 5.0.8

        One of the core features of Linux has always been the ability to switch to a different distribution in the eternal pursuit of something shiny, new, and different. Linux on handsets should be no different. Someday, with any luck at all, we’ll be able to change between systems like Android and MeeGo on a single handset. For now, the options are a bit more limited, but there are still toys to play with. Your editor took the CyanogenMod 5.0.8 announcement as the perfect opportunity to avoid real work for while. In short: CyanogenMod is a classic demonstration of what can happen when we have control over our gadgets.

      • Google Looks to Emerging Markets for Android’s Growth

        Google plans to push its Android mobile software in India and China and is exploring ways for developers to make more money from applications, stepping up competition with Apple and Nokia.

      • HTC HD2 Android and Ubuntu Builds Now Available
      • HTC HD2 Gets Android, Ubuntu Options

        That’s right. The HTC HD2 can now run Android as well as Ubuntu with the official XDA Developers blog confirming that early builds of the OSes are working fine on HD2s.

    • Sub-notebooks

      • Netbooks: Facts, Figures, Options and Opinion

        Yes, we are getting to it. :-) It is in the world of open source that most of the operating systems, that are tailor-made for netbooks, have emerged. While Ubuntu had always been in the lead, with the Ubuntu (and Kubuntu) Netbook Remix, Intel is also inching forward with its much celebrated Moblin (recently out of beta and now launched as v2.1). Th en there is one of the most interesting distributions we have come across—JoliCloud, developed by Tariq Krim ( founder of Netvibes), and based upon Ubuntu Netbook Remix.

    • Tablets

      • Cisco Cius Android Tablet Unveiled, Loaded with Business-friendly Features

        The table computer trend continues with the announcement of Cisco’s Cius Android-powered tablet. The device is targeted at business users providing them access to a wide range of Cisco mobile communication and collaboration tools that include HD video streaming, multi-party conferencing, email, messaging, web browsing, and creating, editing and sharing content or files stored locally and in the cloud.

Free Software/Open Source

  • 5 popular open source eCommerce platforms

    There are so many off-the-shelf web solutions out there, many website owners are asking: Why should I bother building it myself? When thinking about their eCommerce platform, a site owner faces three key choices: the Software as a Service hosted solution, download and install an open source or purchased solution, or just build it yourself.

  • Events

  • SaaS

    • IT in the Age of the Cloud

      Cloud computing represents the rise of the Internet of services. As digital technologies are increasingly penetrating every nook and cranny of the economy and society in general, we are seeing an explosion in the volume and variety of cloud-based services flowing through the Internet. Consequently, the cloud computing model requires a highly disciplined approach to the management, delivery and consumption of services for individuals and companies.

  • Oracle

    • New branch for OOo 3.3: OOO330

      With entering the timeline for the new feature release OOo 3.3, a new master workspace (MWS) was created: OOO330. In HG (Mercurial) the OOO330 branch can be found here: hg.services.openoffice.org/hg/OOO330. It was branched off from DEV300 m84 and will help to stabilize the new milestones towards 3.3. The first milestone is scheduled soon.

  • Business

  • Project Releases

  • Licensing

  • Openness/Sharing

    • The Biocep R Project Brings Open Science to the Cloud

      Using these tools, any number of geographically distributed users can collaborate simultaneously on scientific projects, using the same virtual machine, the same analytic tool, the same data.

    • Open Data

      • iRail is back

        Also, dear NMBS/SNCB, please provide us with an API. Clearly, I’m not the only one interested in open data and APIs. This would make small projects like this quite a bit easier and would greatly increase the end quality. Data scraping just doesn’t fit web2.0.

      • 10 Rules For Radicals – Open Data

  • Web

    • Overbite Project brings Gopher protocol to Android

      The Overbite Project is an open-source effort to produce browser plugins and client applications that enable support for Gopher, an early network protocol that preceded HTML and the contemporary World Wide Web. The lead developer behind the project is retrocomputing enthusiast Cameron Kaiser, one of the few remaining champions of gopherspace. His latest undertaking is a mobile Gopher client for Google’s Android operating system.

    • A tale of a tale of a shareable future, part 3: Apache Web Server conquers the world

      There was a moment, sometime near the end of the last century, when it rather suddenly became clear that Apache’s web server was going to cement its position as the dominant webserver — what the Web ran on. This meant that a loose nonprofit affiliation of moonlighting, largely unpaid volunteers had just massacred the giants of Silicon Valley — Sun, Netscape, Microsoft — on their own turf, on their central battleground, a space on which those corporate giants (I knew from reading their annual reports) had focussed their full attention and hundreds of millions of dollars.

    • June 2010 Web Server Survey

      Global web server usage: The Apache server leads by some 55 percent share serving 112,663,533 web sites.

Leftovers

  • New donation pool to raise funds for Ripple development

    A new donation pool has been created to raise funds for development of the Ripple project, with an initial contribution of $500.00. The final amount will be donated to the Ripple project to support the development of a standalone Ripple server to provide open decentralized payment through the Ripplepay site as well as other services using Ripple. All content created will be released under an open license.

  • Killer chemicals and greased palms – the deadly ‘end game’ for leaded petrol

    At least $9m (£6m) was corruptly paid during the “endgame” in Iraq and Indonesia, simultaneous court hearings in London and Washington were told in March. According to court documents, Octel bribed at every turn. Brown envelopes with £1,000 “pocket-money” were slipped to various officials visiting London. Octel even agreed to pay $13,000, purportedly for a top Iraq oil ministry official to honeymoon in Thailand in 2006.

  • China’s population rapidly moving to cities, getting old

    Figures released by the National Population and Family Planning Commission have estimated China’s population will reach 1.39 billion by the end of 2015, with those aged 60 or over topping 200 million people. Over the next five years, China’s urban population will also surpass its rural counterpart, with city dwellers expected to exceed 700 million.

  • Processor Whispers – About Launches and Corsairs

    On the other hand, there are no real technical flaws or an absurd selection of workloads that the Intel crew, under captain Victor W. Lee, could be accused of. The fourteen benchmarks they used are classics, mostly taken from the scientific sector: SGEMM, FFT, Lattice Boltzmann (LBM), Ray Casting (RC), Search & Sort, Collision Detection (GJK), Constraint Solver (Solv) and so on.

  • Environment

    • Sunday Times admits ‘Amazongate’ story was rubbish. But who’s to blame?

      In criticising Dr Richard North, below, for not having checked [ eureferendum.blogspot.com/2010/01/and-now-for-amazongate.html] whether there was a reference to the claim that up to “40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation” in the WWF Report, I was unaware of, and therefore omitted to mention, that Dr North had himself later spotted that there was a reference to the 40% figure in the WWF report. His initial mistake had been corrected on another page [ eureferendum.blogspot.com/2010/01/corruption-of-science.html ] (before the Sunday Times article had been written) and he had added a cross-link to the original page, which I failed to note. Apologies.

    • Paris looks for power from turbines beneath the Seine

      River currents could be harnessed at four bridges across the capital

    • Galápagos giant tortoise saved from extinction by breeding programme

      Reintroduction of species that Charles Darwin saw raises conservation hopes for other wildlife

    • Invasive Asian Carp advancing through Indiana

      Environmental groups are nevertheless saying the Wabash River discovery creates a new threat to Lake Erie’s fishing and tourism industry and that safeguards must be put in place to keep the carp out of Ohio.

    • BP

      • Biologists find ‘dead zones’ around BP oil spill in Gulf

        Methane at 100,000 times normal levels have been creating oxygen-depleted areas devoid of life near BP’s Deepwater Horizon spill, according to two independent scientists

      • What’s so bad about the biggest Gulf spill ever?

        Are environmentalists putting the Louisiana fishing industry in peril by overstating the potential disastrous consequences of the Deepwater Horizon spill? That might seem like a crazy question to ask on the same day that the Associated Press reports that the BP disaster may have just passed the 1979 Ixtoc gusher as the worst oil spill in Gulf history. But that’s the message conveyed in a Financial Times article this morning, claiming that while the fish will surely come back to the Gulf, the fishing industry may be permanently damaged.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Farmers’ Markets Protest Safeway Look-Alikes

      Farmers markets are hot right now — so hot that big supermarkets want in on the act. But attempts by local Safeway stores to host so–called farmers markets have created an uproar.

    • Arizona to Spend $250K on Tourism PR Campaign

      On May 13, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer appointed a task force to address flagging tourism amid the backlash created by Arizona’s strict new law on immigration enforcement. The task force recommended that Arizona undertake a public relations campaign to reassure potential visitors that Arizona is “a safe and welcoming destination” and promote the idea that boycotts against the state hurt “the most vulnerable employees.”

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

  • Finance

    • 21st century depression

      And this third depression will be primarily a failure of policy. Around the world – most recently at the weekend’s deeply discouraging G20 meeting – governments are obsessing about inflation when the real threat is deflation, preaching the need for belt-tightening when the real problem is inadequate spending.

      In 2008 and 2009 it seemed as if we might have learned from history. Unlike their predecessors, who raised interest rates in the face of financial crisis, the current leaders of the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank slashed rates and moved to support credit markets. Unlike past governments that tried to balance budgets in the face of a plunging economy, today’s governments allowed deficits to rise. And better policies helped the world avoid complete collapse: the recession brought on by the financial crisis arguably ended last summer.

    • US banks off the hook until 2022

      It was billed by Barack Obama as the toughest crackdown on Wall Street since the great depression. But top US banks could be given until 2022 to comply with the so-called Volcker rule, which is supposed to restrict financial institutions’ risker trading activities.

    • Hearings That Aren’t Just Theater

      Were A.I.G.’s credit-default swaps — which were supposed to be insuring billions of dollars worth of AAA subprime securities — fatally flawed? Did the collateralized debt obligations — those infamous C.D.O.’s — that Goldman was creating and A.I.G. was insuring offer anything of value to the larger society, or were they simply a means by which Wall Street made giant, useless, bets? Given that the taxpayers have put out $185 billion to prop up A.I.G., these are certainly questions worth asking.

    • Goldman Sachs Pressed for Derivatives Data

      Banks including JPMorgan Chase & Co., the biggest derivatives dealer, have provided estimates to investors. The top five U.S. commercial banks, including Goldman Sachs, generated an estimated $28 billion in revenue from privately negotiated derivatives in 2009, according to company reports collected by the Federal Reserve and people familiar with banks’ income sources.

    • Feds query Goldman’s part in economic crisis

      A federal commission questioned whether the investment bank deliberately discounted prices to push markets lower because it had bet on a decline in the value of subprime mortgage-backed debt.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • European Parliament report on IPR Enforcement stalled

      A report that attempts to force the hand of the European Parliament on IPR enforcement – including a possible weakening of the Telecoms Package outcome – has been temporarily stalled.

      The Gallo report dealing with copyright and IPR enforcement has been stalled following a vote today in the European Parliament in Strasbourg. The Parliament voted 140 to 135 in favour of postponing it until September, which will allow more time for scrutiny of the text.

    • Copyrights

      • Hurt Locker Lawsuit Doesn’t Affect BitTorrent Downloads

        Despite a pending lawsuit against 5,000 Hurt Locker downloaders and the promises from its makers to sue even more, the film is still being downloaded by thousands of people every day. Interestingly, the makers do not seem to be sending takedown notices to torrent sites, most likely because that would ruin their business plan.

        In recent years copyright holders have been trying to find creative ways to turn piracy into profit, with some success. One way to make money from file-sharers is to collect the IP-addresses of the people sharing a particular file, get a court to subpoena ISPs to reveal the identity of the sharers, and then ask the alleged sharers for a settlement of several hundred dollars to avoid a $150,000 fine.

      • Kookaburra gets last laugh in Men At Work case

        Men At Work have been ordered to pay 5 per cent of royalties for plagiarising part of their 1980s hit Down Under.

        In February the Federal Court ruled the iconic Aussie band plagiarised part of the song, which was penned in 1979 but only achieved worldwide success after a flute riff was introduced to the track two years later.

      • Woot To The AP: Nice Story About Our Sale — You Now Owe Us $17.50

        Gotta love those guys at Woot. They just sold to Amazon for $110 million, but that’s not stopping them from calling anyone out as they see fit. In this case, we particularly love it because they’re calling out the AP — and they’re doing so right on their highly trafficked homepage.

      • Prince Primes Pirates For Huge Download Fest With 20Ten

        Pint-sized popstar Prince will be giving his latest album away for free in a UK newspaper this week. Declaring the Internet “completely over”, iTunes nor any other online store will get access to his music. “Computers and digital gadgets are no good,” he declared in an interview, just as millions of file-sharers line up to use their hopeless number crunchers to suck his latest offering down the pipes.

      • ACTA

        • WD12 on ACTA: It’s the Final Countdown!

          A round of negotiations on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) just finished last week in Luzern, Switzerland. While the negotiators expressed their will not to release any further draft of the text, the European Parliament has now a unique opportunity to oppose both the process and the content of ACTA. There is just a few days left to collect 110 signatures from Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) to Written Declaration 12. Will you spend 5 minutes to help defeat ACTA?

        • ACTA slouches on, will be final within 6 months

          The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement rolls on. Negotiators have just wrapped up another round of talks this week in Lucerne, Switzerland, and more than two years into the ACTA process, have actually started to meet with civil society groups to talk about the actual ACTA draft text. (Many governments have previously asked for comments on ACTA, but before releasing the full text.)

Clip of the Day

CLUG Talk – 29 Jul 2008 – Open Source advocacy, awareness and community building in Europe, with emphasis on women in IT (2008)


Gates Foundation Still Sponsors Blogs That Praise Its Work, Lobbies Governments, Takes Over School Districts

Posted in Bill Gates, Marketing, Microsoft, Patents at 1:36 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

School in the UK

Summary: Latest examples of lobbying and agenda-setting by lobbyists and investors from the Gates Foundation

PETER FOSTER HAS just published an article titled “Conspicuous donation” [1, 2]. Therein, he speaks about the acts of the Gates Foundation, whose donations are not just giveaways. For some background, see our lengthy posts about philanthrocapitalism.

Last week we showed that Canada’s Prime Minister was being used by Gates. The role had an impact which is mentioned here right now:

You could say Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s effort to raise $5 billion for child and maternal health in poor nations wouldn’t have succeeded without the G8 and G20 summits.

Gates is using marketing/applying PR tactics and putting pressure on them. It happened just before the summit, in a private meeting. Harper was the right man to lobby because he was the host, but Gates previously lobbied other heads of nations who attended the summit [1, 2, 3, 4]. It includes pressure on Nigeria (first reference), which relates to last month's lobbying visit.

Anyway, here are portions of the good article from Peter Foster:

Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and the dangerous rise of philanthrostatism

A couple of weeks ago, the world’s richest men, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, launched a scheme to “invite” America’s billionaires to give away half or more of their wealth.

This move was widely interpreted as applying “pressure.” It thus left the impression that America’s Super Rich are a stingy bunch. Similarly, it tainted any signatory of the “Giving Pledge” with the suspicion that he or she might not have coughed up unless Bill and Warren — like the two portly gentlemen in the Scrooge story — had turned up on behalf of the poor.

The motivation behind the move is intriguing. Capitalism is perpetually under siege, and particularly so in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and the BP blowout, the two latest alleged examples of the unbridled “greed.” But far from defending this remarkable wealth-generating system, which enables individuals to indulge their charitable urges on an unprecedented scale, the Giving Pledge seems to confirm that there is something wrong with it. More than that, it supports the subversive notion that private wealth is somehow really collective property, to be marshalled by the High Minded.

[...]

Mr. Gates has also become an advocate for corporate arm twisting both to make more products for “the poor” (under pain of government sanction), as well as becoming directly involved in promoting such grand UN schemes as the Millennium Development Goals. He has called for a “Creative Capitalism,” which muddles bottom-line objectives with political ones. This potential morass is also called “Philanthrocapitalism,” which again implies that capitalism and philanthropy need to be negotiated together.

One of the more bizarre analogies for the Giving Pledge is that it is like the promise taken by alcoholics, as if a talent for wealth creation was some kind of disease. According to The Economist, no less, the Giving Pledge letters “are intended to create a moral obligation, which will be reinforced by peer pressure from others who take the pledge — a bit like members of Alcoholics Anonymous who promise to stay off the booze.” But then maybe that parallel is less surprising when you realize it was Economist New York bureau chief Matthew Bishop who co-wrote the book Philanthrocapitalism.

[...]

While Messrs. Gates and Buffett should be free to give away as much as they like, and pressure their peers to their big hearts’ content (although I hope somebody has been bold enough to tell them to mind their own philanthropy), their activities become dangerous when they start directing public policy: Philanthrostatism. The best thing great capitalist entrepreneurs can do for society is to create jobs, serve consumers and make profits.

Previously we gave many examples of Gates paying journalists to write their stories about the activities of the Gates Foundation (sometimes book authors are paid too, as long as they advance the same plot). This is a subject that we covered a lot at the beginning of the year and now this appears in the news:

Gates Foundation quadruples Crosscut grant

[...]

This month, the Gates Foundation posted a $400,000 grant to Seattle news and opinion blog Crosscut, which late last year received $100,000 from the world’s largest foundation.

They are funding the press, which leads to bias (by selection or omission). Crosscut may also raise suspicions about other publications like the Seattle Times, which is widely criticised for just praising Microsoft and the Gates Foundation on a regular basis (not even throwing soft balls at any of them). Microsoft takes them out to dinners, maybe pays/compensates them too (in one way or another). Kristi Heim continues to advertise the Gates Foundation on a weekly basis [1, 2] and former Microsoft employees receive promotional coverage from this publication. More Microsoft PR (not even technology) from Sharon Pian Chan of the Seattle Times continues to indicate that something is amiss in the Seattle press. Maybe it’s that money which Gates even quadruples to support “opinion blogs”. Whose opinions are they and what priorities will there be when Gates pays half a million dollars to just one blog? Crosscut does not get many visitors at all and it contains a lot of Gates promotion. No wonder Gates gives it money. It’s like PR. It’s business. A few years ago it was reported that Gates gave hundreds of millions to newspapers. It can easily affect coverage.

“It’s a natural extension to Microsoft’s mindset of artificial scarcity and centralised control.”As we pointed out last week, Microsoft hopes to turn US schoolteachers into its state-sponsored PR agents. Gates plays a role in it too. It wouldn’t be too cynical to suggest that Gates’ push for reform in US education [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] is part of Microsoft’s attempt to use PR to grab children’s education around the world. It’s a natural extension to Microsoft’s mindset of artificial scarcity and centralised control.

Here is the latest article which shows how Gates is working to change schools. People should be reminded that state officials are actually elected to manage such tasks; Gates is merely intervening.

School reform advocates are rightly excited about a persuasive new study showing that New York City’s small, specialized high schools are outperforming larger, more traditional schools, significantly narrowing the graduation-rate gap that currently exists between white and minority students across the city.

[...]

The study, done by MDRC, a nonpartisan research group and paid for by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, focused on about 21,000 students. Nearly half attended the small schools focused on in the study, and the rest attended schools that were mainly larger and older.

Gates engages in more lobbying as he goes on trips, this time trying to turn education into his own establishment, treating these schools like private property. An example we repeatedly mention is Memphis. We covered the subject in:

The short story is that Memphis is all about advertising and PR. Those advertisers try to spin off these ‘models’ which are essentially experiments to later be expanded to other places and become the ‘norm’ for schools. It’s all managed and funded by Gates, who sincerely believes that he knows better than anyone what’s good for education. This is a threat to people’s democracy and also the verge of tyranny by the state’s rich list.

“Wanted: Ad firm to tout Memphis City Schools Gates Foundation Grant,” says the headline of this new article. That’s right, they are advertising again. It’s all PR and we’ve seen it before.

PR effort seeks to recruit top teachers, attract private funds

Just about the time the leaves begin changing color this fall, Memphis City Schools itself expects to roll out a more colorful and nuanced image.

The district plans to spend about $200,000 on professionally designed TV ads, social-media campaigns and print advertising as it pushes to recruit high-quality teachers, retain the ones it has and pump up a community fund drive scheduled to raise $21.3 million by the end of the year — a task the district took on when it received a $90 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

So Gates is generously donating in terms of brainwash and imposing one’s views on the public, appealing to psyche. The funding given to blogs ensures that people won’t notice; it leads to self-glorification and shallow coverage.

“Bill Gates touts charter schools, accountability,” reports AP.

Billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates said Tuesday that charter schools can revolutionize education, but that the charter school movement also must hold itself accountable for low-performing schools.

What is this all about? Let’s find out. According to this press release, Gates is playing politics again. He was made the keynote speaker in the National Alliance for Public Charter School.

Here is a transcript and some of the press coverage which helped push Gates’ agenda in schools:

Gates’ power was probably less harmful when he was still inside Microsoft; at least he was only confined to bossing people in software and not bossing everyone’s children. Does this whole gig make him the unelected minister of education?

“With goal of newer, better teaching, charter schools have spread across Texas,” reports Dallas News. Guess who’s being it?

The forces include strong local political support, backing from philanthropic giants like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, ambitious charter school management groups, private investors, fed-up urban parents – and even President Barack Obama.

On we move from the area of schools and into public libraries, where Gates has been combating GNU/Linux by making a ‘donation’ (but it needs to run Windows and Office). We wrote about the subject in posts such as:

Here are some self-funded, self-serving ‘surveys’ in the news:

The library was one of a handful in Louisiana to take part in a national survey last year conducted by the University of Washington Information School in cooperation with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

More here. GNU/Linux is not an option, according to the Houston Herald. It includes software and it’s Windows only, based on the descriptions.

Here is a new example of a library being used to indoctrinate members of the public for the use of Microsoft Office.

Library calendar: Learn Microsoft Word

10 a.m. Woodruff Library, Beginning Microsoft Word. Learn the basics of using MS Word 2007 to type and save documents on your computer.

This is not good. State-backed promotion of Microsoft products is advocacy of the same monopoly abuser whose shoddy products were found to be violating competition rules. What kind of lesson does that give to children and impoverished adults?

More Windows in libraries can be found in the past week’s news. It’s funny that the Gates Foundation is almost always mentioned.

Donations are not donations when the donating party has something to gain. Then it becomes just an investment with RoI. One good example of this is the “Green Revolution”, which received some criticism in this very recent article that names the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

MB: Do you think that liberal foundations and/or individual liberal philanthropists have influenced your own work, and if so how?

MD: No.

MB: In Africa there is often quite a lot of overlap between the activities of environmental groups (i.e., Big International NGOs) and major mining corporations: how do you interpret the nature of such relationships? Here I am referring to groups like Richard Leakey’s WildLifeDirect, and the mining industry’s support of conservation ventures in Namibia and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

MD: Corrupt.

MB: Major foundations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have taken a lead role in promoting what they refer to the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa. Could you please comment on the potential impact of this new Green Revolution for Africa?

MD: If they learn from the disastrous blunders of the original green revolution, it just might succeed.

It’s worth saying something about these NGOs. Microsoft uses them for lobbying and in last week’s news from Microsoft Jordan we found this:

Under the Patronage of Hala Bseiso Lattouf, the Minister of Social Development, Microsoft Jordan organized the ‘NGO Connection Day’ in cooperation with the Ministry of Social Development on Thursday June 17th at the Sheraton Hotel, with the attendance of 250 active NGOs and civil society organizations.

Microsoft Jordan is just trying to “connect” with NGOs in ‘NGO Connection Day’. What’s in it for Microsoft? Well, that’s just too obvious.

“Microsoft Jordan is just trying to “connect” with NGOs in ‘NGO Connection Day’.”Last but not least, something ought to be said about Gates’ huge investments in health-related industries (“CSU Cancer Researcher Awarded NIH and Gates Foundation Grants”). The foundation has massive (and ever-increasing) investments in vaccine, which is an important thing for human health all across the globe. But one mustn’t forget that many companies are getting extremely rich in the process. A lot of swine flu vaccines have just been burned after hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars were spent on them. The companies which made them lost not a penny; it is those who bought the vaccines from them who had their money burned in a big pile and recent reports from most reputable papers revealed that scientists had senationalised and exaggerated the threat in order to help makers of the vaccination increase sales. This is good for shareholders of big pharmaceutical companies, including the Gates Foundation (being an investor, which is the side it does not advertise).

One problem which is occasionally brought up by biomedical researchers is that the Gates Foundation promotes a sort of monopoly in various areas; In other words, trying to drive the health agenda, just as they do in schools and libraries. Here is a gem from last week’s news:

William H. Gates Sr. was the first of two keynote speakers at this year’s annual meeting of the American Health Lawyers Association, held June 27-30 in Seattle. Gates, otherwise known as Bill Gates’ dad, had a long career as a lawyer himself and now works on directing his son’s vast fortune toward global health initiatives as co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

More money, more power. Veterinary investments are spotted in last week’s news too:

Here is another new example. On top of it, the Gates Foundation is sending people to potentially influence agenda:

Guardian Activate summit is back with an extra-special array of speakers primed to tackle the challenge of changing the world through the internet

[...]

4.36pm: Now: Where next for the web? “Future technologies and their impact on society and humanity” with Joe Cerrell, European director of The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Jan Chipchase, executive creative director of global insights of Frog Design, Desiree Miloshevic, board trustee at Internet Society, and Clay Shirky, professor of Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU. Quite a cast.

In Africa too one can find the involvement. It’s too easy to forget that Gates has huge investments (for-profit) in the pharmaceutical industry, so there is justifiable scepticism when donations are being made (see the start of this post).

GAVI connections aside, Bill Gates is said to (possibly) be a bigger funder of WHO than the US government. What does that say about the WHO‘s direction? It’s like Gates participates in influence games (lobbying).

However, a careful examination of the list of voluntary contributions and the donors shows there are several organizations like the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (GAVI) — which has contributed over $85 million — and the Programme for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH) that has given over $9 million to WHO. The Gates Foundation happens to be one of the biggest donors for both GAVI and PATH.

This gives the Gates Foundation enormous influence over the direction taken in health. It would probably be innocent had Gates not profited from decisions made by the WHO. █

“The chief of malaria for the World Health Organization has complained that the growing dominance of malaria research by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation risks stifling a diversity of views among scientists and wiping out the world health agency’s policy-making function.

“In a memorandum, the malaria chief, Dr. Arata Kochi, complained to his boss, Dr. Margaret Chan, the director general of the W.H.O., that the foundation’s money, while crucial, could have “far-reaching, largely unintended consequences.”

“Many of the world’s leading malaria scientists are now “locked up in a ‘cartel’ with their own research funding being linked to those of others within the group,” Dr. Kochi wrote. Because “each has a vested interest to safeguard the work of the others,” he wrote, getting independent reviews of research proposals “is becoming increasingly difficult.”

“Also, he argued, the foundation’s determination to have its favored research used to guide the health organization’s recommendations “could have implicitly dangerous consequences on the policy-making process in world health.””

–New York Times, 2008

07.05.10

IRC Proceedings: July 5th, 2010

Posted in IRC Logs at 6:28 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME Gedit

Read the log

Enter the IRC channel now

Linux is Winning the Smartphones Competition

Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, Google at 5:07 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz


Summary: Apple continues to fall behind the Linux-based Android, based on some of these latest news items

• Google: Apple Is Making Our Job Easy

Probably most notable of his quotes was the following:

“We don’t have a plan to beat Apple, that’s not how we operate. We’re trying to do something different than Apple and the good news is that Apple is making that very easy.”

The statement, made in reference to the 2.2 version of Android being rolled out shortly after the launch of iPhone 4, opens quite a few doors about the inner workings of Google. For one, as Schmidt is quick to point out, the business models are drastically different between the two companies.

• Apple’s app store, filled with “App farms” being used to steal. [Examples]

As the story of of iTunes accounts being hacked continues to develop, we’ve come across a number of what we would call “App Farms” in iTunes being used to scam users out of their money.

Links 05/7/2010: Compiz 0.9.0, Akademy 2010

Posted in News Roundup at 4:47 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Lin-dependence day!

    On Friday I was honored to sit in front of a group from the Techrepublic community and talk open source. The driving force of the debate was open source vs. proprietary software. The ever-present subtext of that debate is Linux vs. Windows. The audience was pleasantly surprised when the debate never turned sour. Why is that? So many asked. The answer, although one-sided, is simple.

  • The Advantages of Using Linux

    Every now and then, I receive emails from people who are asking me to explain the benefits or advantages of using Linux. I just answered them with a link or two to articles that could give a good explanation regarding the subject matter. But since I realized that it would be better if my response were based on my own experience, I finally decided to write a simple list that I could use to answer those who want to know the benefits of using Linux.

  • 10 Misconceptions about Linux

    Linux is not an OS, it is actually a kernel which is the middleware between your Apps and Hardware! The Better the Kernel, the better the system responds! and better error handling!

  • The Real reason Why Ubuntu Linux Doesn’t Have Malware – Part 1

    I created this video to give a few extra reasons why Linux doesn’t have viruses besides the common ones that get thrown around, like “linux is not popular enough” or “linux distributions each use a different kernel that is recompiled with every release”.

  • Five tips for a more efficient Linux desktop

    For me, the Linux desktop is all about being efficient. Yes, I do enjoy the eye candy as well. But having an incredibly efficient desktop just makes for much faster, more reliable work. And much to the surprise of most users, Linux should be hailed as the king of desktop efficiency. There are many ways to have an efficient desktop in Linux, but I have narrowed the list down to these five tips. Even if you employ only a couple of these techniques, your desktop experience will become far more efficient.

  • My experience with GNU/Linux professionally and personally

    I am writing this out of my close association with GNU/Linux for quite sometime.I have had been using it everywhere to do my day to day work.

    First I have started or introduced to the UNIX system way back in 1996 during my Diploma classes.One day I was sitting in front of a blank and black terminal in the classroom ;so my instructor came to me and said ” why are you sitting idle”…I replied back with a pretty confusing face that ” I am not able to understand what to do with this(the black and blank terminal)..with small cursor blinking on it”. My teacher/instructor smile at me(rightfully) and said ” Bhaskar it is challenging you to play with it and waiting for your intervention”..that spark me!! From that day onward I fall in love with that fellow called “UNIX”.Yes,it was SCO UNIX ..those days it was used in almost all the academia.Oh yes before that incident happen I was given a book or two about UNIX operating system and I went through them ..but little infer.

    [...]

    Basically corporate houses buy or run something which is quite stable and proven track record and should have paid support.The reason behind this is that business data are absolutely crucial to the business and which will fetch revenue with that.

    I had have the exposure of handling production box running RHEL(Enterprise version of REDHAT), SLES(SUSE Enterprise version),CentOS(derived from RHEL source) and to my surprise! Gentoo for one of my job assignment.And in the very same place Debian for hosting server.

  • Desktop

    • 3G woes: maybe NetworkManager isn’t that bad?

      I won’t talk here about the awful user interfaces (supplied by the carriers and you must use them) which make your eyes hurt, brain explode and usability die (compared with them NetworkManager is a breeze). My problem here is with making them both work together on the same computer, which on Linux is natural: you add the connections in NM (with a wizard) and just select whatever you want from a menu.

  • Ballnux

    • LG to Launch Android-Powered Tablet

      Yet another electronics manufacturer has announced plans to launch a tablet computer powered by Google’s Android operating system: LG. According to The Wall Street Journal, the device will launch in the fourth quarter of this year, though no other details were immediately available.

  • Applications

    • [compiz] Compiz 0.9.0 is Released!

      This is the first unstable release of the Compiz 0.9 series. This release represents a complete rewrite of the 0.8 series from C to C++, brings a whole new developer API, splits rendering into plugins, switches the buildsystem from automake to cmake and brings minor functionality improvements. This release represents the first developer and tester preview of what will eventually make the 0.10.x stable series. Please note that as such, it is not yet ready for general use as there are a number of known issues, regressions and incomplete functionality.

    • Compiz in your browser – unlock Firefox 3.6 hidden features

      If you’re running lucid, you should have the latest version 3.6 of Firefox from Mozilla.

      Here are some hidden features disabled by default, similar to Compiz expo and shift-switcher.

    • Ailurus – A Useful Ubuntu Tweak Alternative For Beginners

      Ailurus is cross-Linux-distribution GPL software, which aims at making Linux easier to use for beginners. Rather than a Ubuntu Tweak alternative, Ailurus is the kind of app you can use along Ubuntu Tweak. Ailurus is available for Ubuntu, Fedora and Mint while Ubuntu Tweak is a dedicated Ubuntu only application.

    • Wuala – Linux friendly secure DropBox alternative

      Linux users are already spoilt for choice when it comes to free online cloud storage. UbuntuOne and Dropbox both offer 2GB for nothing whilst newly announced project SparkleShare aims to better both of these.

    • Control Applications With Simon Speech Recognitions

      Awesome way to control applications, installed operating system, sound recognition text typing without using mouse or keyboard. working on multi platforms, user interface KDE, Qt.

      Also including Simon add ons download center support many applications Media centers, Web browser, text editor, Multimedia applications, and utilities application such as Gnome Screenshot tool.

    • Terminator 0.94 released!
    • Lightspark Flash Player Continues To Advance

      Back in May we reported on the Lightspark Flash Player that was developed by a free software developer using Adobe’s released SWF/Flash documentation and has hit a point where its ActionScript 3.0 support is nearly complete, has a JIT engine that leverages LLVM, supports OpenGL rendering, and boasts various other features as an open-source Flash Player alternative to Adobe’s binary plug-in. Today a new release candidate of Lightspark 0.4.2 is available.

    • Instructionals

    • Games

      • LettersFall 2.0

        A new game has been brought to our attention called LettersFall which is a cross between between Scabble(R) and Tetris(R). This game offers the following items to the Linux community.

      • MegaGlest 3.3.5 Pre-release special!

        A new version of MegaGlest will be released sometime today! Once it is head over here to download it! A short changelog can be found here.

        MegaGlest is a relatively recent fork of the quite well known FOSS Game Glest, which ceased development some time back. Now that Megaglest has taken up the development, things have advanced quite quickly (in contrast to the other promising Glest fork GAE) and Glest now finally has the long deserved cross platform multiplayer and a proper master-server with a games lobby! Furthermore Megaglest includes all the factions known from the Megapack before, bumping the total number up to 5.

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

      • Impression of First Day at Akademy 2010

        After many years of successful meetings in great locations, Tampere has a lot to live up to as this year’s Akademy host city. On the basis of the first day at least, it has not disappointed. After the opening keynote by Valtteri Halla a series of other talks followed and we have had plenty of discussions in the open spaces between the conference rooms. Read on for an impression of the first day of the biggest and coolest Akademy ever!

      • start your Akademy engines!
      • Akademy Ready for Take-off!

        In Tampere, Finland, the pre-Akademy party kicked off the conference last night. Hundreds of KDE contributors were there, meeting old and new friends and enjoying the party. Rowdy Brazilians and Dutch cheered on their teams as their countries battled each other in the World Cup on the big screen. Others spent time reliving their childhood on the classic arcade machine.

      • akademy videos

        Not only does he help Akademy organizing teams year after year on the march towards success (and this year’s Akademy has been a roaring success this far!), but he’s worked to get videos up for the keynote presentations in a timely fashion. His poor little netbook churned all night long to encode four videos: the opening, the first keynote, my keynote and the Telepathy presentation. More videos are coming as they get encoded and you can find them on the conference program page, starting right now with the four aforementioned videos.

      • My secret about the KDE multimedia meeting 2010

        As 6 people are female who completed the questionnaire there must be 18 male people who completed it as well (one was missing ;-). Of the 25 people 11 were already in Switzerland and for 14 it was the first time. The average age was 29 years. The group distribution shows 8 people from amarok, 10 from the kdeedu team, 1 from the games team and the remaining 5 ticked off “multimedia general (other)”. Now to the rating questions where I always indicate the average rating (scale: 0 = not good, 1= could be better, 2 = good and 3 = very good).

        1. Accommodation: Bedrooms: 2.32
        2. Accommodation: Group and meeting rooms: 2.417
        3. Location (house) in general: 2.6
        4. Location (area, geographically): 2.8
        5. Food (Breakfast, lunch & dinner): 2.917
        6. Transport/travelling to the meeting: 2.375
        7. Infrastructure: Power: 2.28
        8. Infrastructure: Network (cable): 2.318
        9. Infrastructure: Network (wireless): 1.76
        10. Information about the meeting beforehand: 2.36
        11. Organization staff friendliness: 2.96
        12. Organization staff competence: 3

      • Akademy 2010 Slides on the Plasma Netbook project [PDF]

    • GNOME Desktop

      • Support GNOME by shopping at Amazon

        The GNOME foundation provide Amazon referral links for your browser. That is, every time you search for a product using the referral link and end up buying something GNOME get a paid a referral fee based on the amount you spend. The best bit is that it costs you absolutely nothing extra but helps keep GNOME in servers, ballpoint pens and developers.

  • Distributions

    • 100 % free Linux distributions

      On this, July 4, 2010, the day the United States celebrates the signing of the Declaration of Independence, I thought I would take a moment to celebrate that same day with a toast to those Linux distributions that shirk all non-free software. This means EVERYTHING on these distributions is protected under, at least, the GPL.

      There aren’t tons of these distributions and some of them are threatened, daily, to disappear from lack of support. So it is my honor to hopefully introduce the Ghacks audience to these distributions.

    • Liquorix Squeezes the Most Out of Your Linux Desktop

      Switching to Linux has many reasons – Security, Stability, Performance, and of course, Cost. Be whatever the reasons, performance becomes the eventual priority for desktop as the viruses, malwares and breakdowns don’t come in the linux-users way.

      How to get the most out of a Linux desktop? Well, there are so many tricks, tweaks and hacks such as using a just right, well customized kernel, removing unnecessary services, apps, packages, paralleling boot process, using a lightweight window manager and desktop environment….and a dozen others. A long time user often dabbles to do these things of which the first, and perhaps the most important is hacking the kernel fitting impeccably to his/her hardware and working requirements.

    • PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • PCLinuxOS Magazine July 2010: Issue 42

        All Magazine Issues

        * Welcome From The Chief Editor

        1. KDE 4: The KDE Netbook Interface
        2. World Population Day: July 11, 2010
        3. Reclaim Your Background: The Widget Dashboard
        4. Xfce 4.6.2: Xfce Settings Manager, Part 2
        5. Screenshot Showcase
        6. Double Take
        7. Mark’s Gimp Tip
        8. ms_meme’s Nook: Deep In The Heart Of Linux
        9. OpenOffice: Writer
        10. Xfce 4.6.2: Customize Your Xfce Panels
        11. How Teenagers View PCLinuxOS
        12. Xfce 4.6.2: Panel Plug-ins
        13. Alternate OS: Haiku, Part 1
        14. Game Zone: Osmos
        15. Create A Basic RPM Package For PCLinuxOS
        16. Create A PCLinuxOS Packaging Environment In Phoenix
        17. ms_meme’s Nook: That Ol’ Linux Call
        18. Forum Foibles: ByteS From The Bunkhouse
        19. Command Line Interface Intro: Part 10
        20. Getting Started With folding@home
        21. Computer Languages A to Z: Netlogo
        22. Configuring and Using Epson Stylus NX415
        23. KarlM: The Loss Of A Friend, Supporter

      • Debranding Firefox in PCLinuxOS

        I’m not a huge fan of third-party branding. One of my (minor, when put into perspective) gripes about PCLinuxOS is that they sorta go nuts with it. One of the apps that’s the target of their branding is Firefox. If you are equally bugged by this, debranding the default profile used as the template for new profiles isn’t that hard.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Jim Whitehurst is CEO and Chief Plumber at Red Hat

        That’s certainly borne out by the recent top500 supercomputer listings, where 91 per cent of the world’s fastest supercomputers run some form of GNU/Linux (Windows runs on 1%), the fact that the open source Apache Web server well over half of the Web – as it has for the last 10 years – and the near-parity in Europe of Firefox’s market share with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

      • Fedora

        • Fedora Board Meeting, 2 Jul 2010

          Our new Fedora Project Leader has been named: Jared Smith. The announcement stated that he is gone but not when he’d return: Right now, Jared has limited email access until next week. He’ll be around next week and a lot more when he returns from his LATAM travels (more on them below).

          Jared will be making a blog post when he returns and it will be listed on Fedora Planet. He will be traveling together with Paul Frields to the Red Hat Raleigh, NC office for orientation, and they will be meeting up with Max Spevack while there. Jared will also be introduced to various folks around the Red Hat Raleigh office.

        • Announcing a new Fedora for the XO-1 release

          This build brings us more inline with the work being done for the XO-1.5, as well it includes several changes incorporated from the Paraguay builds.

    • Debian Family

      • Lenny-)Squeeze upgrades, apt vs aptitude with the Gnome desktop

        Here is a short update on my my Debian Lenny-)Squeeze upgrade testing. Here is a summary of the difference for Gnome when it is upgraded by apt-get and aptitude. I’m not reporting the status for KDE, because the upgrade crashes when aptitude try because of missing conflicts (#584861 and #585716).

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Five of 2010’s Linux-Powered e-Book Readers

      Spring Design Alex

      Although powered by Google’s Android OS, I’m still including this dual-screen e-book reader in this list. After all, the original Android was based on Linux. So what do I mean by “dual-screen”? Well, some e-book reader manufacturers like Spring Design have recognized the advantages of a brightly-colored touch screen and the superior reading qualities of a gray-scale e-ink screen.

      Hence, Spring Design decided to put together these two screens into one device. The 3.5-inch touchscreen LCD screen is for browsing, while the 6-inch e-ink display is for reading.

    • Android

      • Everything You Need To Know About The Fragmented Mobile Developer Ecosystem

        - Android stands out as the platform most popular among mobile developers. Survey results suggest nearly 60 percent of all mobile developers recently developed on Android, assuming an equal number of respondents with experience across each of eight major platforms. Second in terms of developer mindshare is iOS (iPhone), outranking Symbian and Java ME, which were in pole position in 2008.

      • HTC Finally Releases Kernel Source for the EVO 4G

        Just before a small community of distraught developers gear up to sue HTC in an effort to get that kernel source they’re required to release for the HTC EVO 4G, they’ve done it. It’s been a month since the device has launched, and – compared to how long it took HTC to offer up the goods for the HTC Hero – I’d say that EVO owners and developers are lucky to be getting the source so soon.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Ben Franklin Day at The Saratogian: A ‘Declaration of Independence’ from newsroom software (with video)

    Most of the news and photographs on the pages, and the layout of those pages themselves, were prepared for publication without using the usual newsroom software for writing, editing, toning, cropping and paginating.

    Instead, all this work was done using free software available to anyone on the Internet. And yes, it was hard work. The proprietary software is designed to be efficient, reliable and relative fast for the task of producing a daily newspaper. The free substitutes, not so much.

    [...]

    But between us, producing today’s paper wasn’t easy for the newsroom. News Editor Paul Tackett has been working days and nights, on top of his usual job, to set up most of the day’s pages in a layout program called Scribus.

  • Newspaper tries free software for a day

    The Saratogian tried an experiment for Independence Day – run free software for a day, to produce the July 4 2010 issue of their (web and print) newspaper. They called it the Ben Franklin Edition *. The free software experiment is part of the Ben Franklin Project of the Journal Register Company, which owns The Saratogian.

  • The Charge for Freedom

    In the open source republic, the hacker is your representative. He codes on your behalf, and should his idea find favor, the project leader approves the idea, and the idea becomes part of the code base. Should your ideas and the hacker’s ideas differ, you are free to contact someone else on the dev team. If nothing is done to your liking, your are free to secede from the union and fork the code. In the real world, information is free for the taking, and where law forbids the exchange of ideas we see rather inventive means of circumvention come to fruition. In most free nations around the world, people were supposed to be at the forefront of government. In the USA, politicians were once called public servants. The open source community is much the same. While many do make money off of open source software, the motivation to create open source software and to open source already existing projects was initially the want to help others, make a better product, and lower development costs by allowing anyone to contribute. Only one of those three motivations has anything to do with monetary cost.

  • Open source developer sees 100 percent growth

    Open source software developer Exist Global foresees a 100 percent revenue growth this year to $4 million on back of a vibrant US market and local companies’ willingness to pay for high-valued software.

    The company believes this year is the start of sustained profitable operations from a slowdown in the US market after it was adversely affected by the global financial crisis.

    “As far as Exist is concerned, I think the worst is behind us. We’re receiving a lot of requests, indicating that the second half is going to be healthy. We’re beginning to focus on hiring again,” said Winston Damarillo, Exist Global founder, in an interview at a company celebration for its first half performance.

  • Meet the staff: Community editor Lee Schlesinger

    Today’s a legal holiday in the US, but we like to post an entry in the blog every weekday to keep you from getting bored. I can’t promise to relieve the boredom today, because today’s entry is about me.

  • Events

    • Linux.conf.au requests 2012 bid proposals

      The organisation behind Australia’s flagship annual Linux conference has requested formal proposals from parties interested in hosting the event in their city in 2012.

  • Mozilla

    • Field Guide to Firefox 1.1 for Maemo

      Over the last several weeks of the beta, members of the mobile team have written blog posts about most of the new features and improvements you’ll find in the browser. Here, with quick summaries, are links to all of them – enjoy!

    • Firefox Mobile – The fox in your pocket! – Windows Mobile shunned?

      With the popularity of Android phones, it seems strange that it was not released there first. There is a massive Android user base already, who are apparently hungry for a well known browser that is familiar to the one they use on the desktop. This is shown in the success Opera Mobile has enjoyed and one look at the comments in the marketplace suggest that it is widely favored over the default browser that is packaged with the users phone. Speaking as an HTC Desire user, I certainly prefer Opera to the native browser and even though I cannot set it as default, I would much rather use that than the default offering.

  • Oracle

    • OpenOffice.org to use GStreamer for Multimedia

      GSteamer and its libraries are installed by default on many distributions, like Ubuntu and its derivatives, and is contained in the repository of many others. It has become very stable in recent versions and supports most multimedia codecs. If already installed, users need not take any further action to enjoy the benefits of GStreamer in OpenOffice.org, one of which is much better performance. Distribution developers can disable this support by choice if desired and cause OpenOffice.org to revert to using Java.

  • Education

    • ICT to face crisis in UK Schools

      We are going to have to face a very uncomfortable fact in the coming weeks and months. This new Coalition Government is out of love with ICT in schools.

      I am certainly not the only pundit who has noticed the resounding silence surrounding matters ICT amongst the noisy plethora of other announcements concerning educational reform.

      All we know so far is that virtually the very first act of this government was to abolish Becta, an act they had uniquely signalled months in advance of coming to power and carried out with a ferocity resembling a pogrom.

      Something about it, taken in combination with stories from ex-Becta employees who (subsequently) complained about apparatchik style cronyism within the organisation makes me think that ICT has been linked deeply with the previous administration..and not in a good way.

  • Business

    • Open Core and OSI

      Is Mark suggesting that OSI intended to facilitate less freedom for the code and end users than the GPL offers, that this was an OSI goal, that “software freedom for the software user” isn’t and never was an OSI goal? Does freedom mean only the right to fork the code? If so, I’d like OSI to say so clearly and on the record. If so, it might provide insight into why OSI is struggling and provide indisputable proof that they were foundationally wrong. I hope they’ll weigh in on this debate and plant their flag, because if that is what OSI stands for, maybe it’s time to let them float out into outer space without the community, thus making it clear there really is no connection between the real FOSS community and OSI any more.

      If that is not what OSI stands for, I’d like to hear them say so. I hope it isn’t. But the community wants to know where they stand, and for what.

      For myself, I believe that OSI, in order to be relevant, needs to reinvent itself and restructure to represent the entire community with its license list and its definition. Enough with the old divisions and the debates. The community needs to face the world more unitedly now, as a broad spectrum, including those who had the foresight to realize that VC guys and proprietary types would be coming along someday and would try to close down the freedom of the code and the freedoms of those using it just to make a buck.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Welcome to Open Source Law

      Since, as Larry Lessig famously pointed out, “code is law” (and vice versa), it’s natural to try to apply open source methodologies in the legal world. Indeed, a site called Openlaw existed ten years ago:

      Openlaw is an experiment in crafting legal argument in an open forum. With your assistance, we will develop arguments, draft pleadings, and edit briefs in public, online. Non-lawyers and lawyers alike are invited to join the process by adding thoughts to the “brainstorm” outlines, drafting and commenting on drafts in progress, and suggesting reference sources.

      Building on the model of open source software, we are working from the hypothesis that an open development process best harnesses the distributed resources of the Internet community. By using the Internet, we hope to enable the public interest to speak as loudly as the interests of corporations. Openlaw is therefore a large project built through the coordinated effort of many small (and not so small) contributions.

      Despite this long pedigree, open source law never really took off – until now.

  • Open Access/Content

    • WWW: World Wide Wikipedia

      The good news is that she is starting from a solid base: Wikipedia runs on GNU/Linux, Apache, Squid and MySQL. The bad news is that – unbelievably – Wikipedia is essentially run out of Florida (plus that troublesome caching site in Amsterdam). For such a globalised project – just think of all the languages supported – to be running like this is, frankly, bonkers – and makes outages like today’s almost inevitable.

Leftovers

  • Science

    • ‘Never-before-seen material’ can store vast amounts of energy

      Using super-high pressures similar to those found deep in the Earth or on a giant planet, researchers from Washington State University (WSU) have created a compact, never-before-seen material capable of storing vast amounts of energy. Described by one of the researchers as “the most condensed form of energy storage outside of nuclear energy,” the material holds potential for creating a new class of energetic materials or fuels, an energy storage device, super-oxidizing materials for destroying chemical and biological agents, and high temperature superconductors.

    • Planck telescope reveals ancient cosmic light

      The picture is the first full-sky image from Europe’s Planck telescope which was sent into space last year to survey the “oldest light” in the cosmos.

    • Perennial grains could be biggest agricultural innovation in eons

      The paper, “Increased Food and Ecosystem Security via Perennial Grains,” points out that perennials have longer growing seasons and longer, denser roots than annuals. Those longer roots, which can reach down 10 to 12 feet, allow the crops to reach and hold more water and nutrients, reduce erosion, and condition the soil. Because the plants grow for a greater length of time, they also sequester more carbon from the atmosphere.

    • ‘Digital Embryo’ Gains Wings: Now Possible to Film Development of Fruit Fly and of Zebrafish’s Eyes and Brain

      In a study published in Nature Methods, they describe how they were able to capture fruit fly development on film, and were the first to clearly record how a zebrafish’s eyes and midbrain are formed. The improved technique will also help to shed light on processes and organisms, which have so far been under-studied because they could not be followed under a microscope.

  • Security/Aggression

    • Hidden cameras in parts of Birmingham ‘will be removed’

      Hidden cameras in areas of Birmingham with large Muslim populations will be removed and any counter terrorism involvement stopped, police say.

    • New ID badge is really personal CCTV camera

      A SCOTTISH company has created a new personal CCTV system which could offer safety protection for frontline public service workers.

    • In the UK, Big Brother is listening

      The USSR, as Russia once was, used to epitomise the police state.

      After the G20 civil rights violations, Canada could almost make the claim.

      But in fact Britain is the country which has undeniably become the poster child for Big Brother among allegedly democratic countries.

    • Cyberwar

      The cyber-attacks on Estonia in 2007 and on Georgia in 2008 (the latter strangely happened to coincide with the advance of Russian troops across the Caucasus) are widely assumed to have been directed by the Kremlin, but they could be traced only to Russian cyber-criminals. Many of the computers used in the attack belonged to innocent Americans whose PCs had been hijacked. Companies suspect China of organising mini-raids to ransack Western know-how: but it could just have easily been Western criminals, computer-hackers showing off or disillusioned former employees. One reason why Western governments have until recently been reticent about cyber-espionage is surely because they are dab hands at it, too.

    • We were permanently banned from the Miami-Dade Metrorail for taking photos

      The truth is, we could have left whenever we wanted but the goal was to make some sense of the contradictory policies in place regarding photography at the Metrorail stations.

      But instead of getting answers, we were told we would never be allowed on the train again. For the rest of our lives. We were told we would be arrested for trespassing If we dared set foot on any Metrorail property for as long as we live.

  • Environment

    • Study: Oil Means More Arsenic In Seawater

      Besides the oil already spilling into the Gulf of Mexico at the rate of up to 60,000 barrels daily, a group of British scientists says one can expect to see elevated levels of arsenic as well.

      The research, published in the journal Water Research, showed that oil prevents naturally-occurring arsenic from being filtered out of the water by the sediment on the ocean floor. Oil coats the individual sediment particles and blocks the arsenic making contact with the minerals that would ordinarily bind to it.

  • Copyrights

    • RIAA Warns 1 Million Copyright Infringers a Year

      In less than two years the RIAA has sent copyright infringement notices to 1.8 million Internet subscribers and 269,609 to colleges and universities. Despite this staggering average of more than a million infringement notices every year from the recording industry alone, the effect on file-sharing levels seems unnoticeable.

    • The Pirate Ship Sets Sail

      Today the Pirate Party can announce the launch of our new community blog, PirateShip.org.uk.

      The Pirate Ship is what is known as a “blog aggregator”, which takes posts from the blogs of party members and presents them all together in one website, allowing you to keep up to date on the latest political issues and debates without ever having to leave the page.

    • New copyright lawsuit involves Creative Commons

      GateHouse sued a company that sells reprints of articles — including articles from the Register Star — on fancy plaques to the people who are featured in those articles. Since GateHouse has its own reprint business, it views the defendant’s work as a competitive threat.

    • File-Sharing Sites Unfazed By Takedowns, Bounce Right Back

      During the last few weeks many file-sharing sites have been taken down by threats, legal action and police raids. From the mighty Pirate Bay to lesser known torrent sites across Europe and streaming giants around the world, the theme isn’t capitulation after a setback, but getting back online as quickly as possible.

    • The Public Domain and the WIPO Development Agenda

      The following guest post is from Séverine Dusollier, who is a Professor in Law at the University of Namur and a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on the Public Domain. She recently completed a Scoping Study on Copyright and Related Rights and the Public Domain commissioned as part of the WIPO Development Agenda (particularly its recommendations 16 and 20). We asked her to write about her findings…

    • An (Analogue) Artist’s Reply to Just Criticism

      There’s a new meme in town these days: “rights of the artists”. The copyright industries have worked out that cries for more copyright and more money don’t go down too well when they come from fat-cat monopolists sitting in their plush offices, and so have now redefined their fight in terms of struggling artists (who rarely get to see much benefit from constantly extended copyright).

      Here’s a nice example courtesy of the Copyright Alliance – an organisation that very much pushes that line:

      Songwriter, Jason Robert Brown, recently posted on his blog a story about his experience dealing with copyright infringement. Knowing for a long time that many websites exist for the sole purpose of “trading” sheet music, Jason decided to log on himself and politely ask many of the users to stop “trading” his work. While many quickly wrote back apologizing and then removing his work, one girl in particular gave Jason a hard time.

    • ACTA

      • ACTA Consensus on Transparency Breaks Down

        The 9th round of ACTA talks concluded last week in Lucerne, Switzerland. I briefly noted the official statement last week, but a subsequent news report makes it clear that the most important development to come out of the meeting is the breakdown of a consensus on transparency. Following the New Zealand meeting in April, there was consensus achieved on the need to release a draft version of the text. It is now clear that the overwhelming majority of countries favoured continuing this approach by releasing updated versions at the conclusion of subsequent meetings. That did not happen after the Lucerne meeting, however, with both the Swiss and European Commission delegations indicating that they favoured releasing the text but that one delegation did not. It is a safe bet that the U.S. is once again the key holdout on the transparency issue.

      • INTA, ICC Oppose De Minimis Provision in ACTA

Clip of the Day

CLUG Talk – 12 August 2008 – The Process Model of the Transputer (2008)


Microsoft Has an Internet Problem, Relies on Lies

Posted in Deception, Google, Microsoft, Search at 2:15 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Screenshot of search

Summary: Despite wasteful marketing, Microsoft is unable to expand on the Internet (unless one relies on Microsoft-sponsored sources like comScore)

MICROSOFT has been losing over $10 billion on the Web, according to some conservatives estimates. Microsoft can only tolerate these losses because of cash cows, but they too are suffering and Microsoft has growing debt. According to one report, Microsoft’s co-called Web portal/community is just a load of spam.

SOFTWARE FLOGGER Microsoft has admitted that its Spaces service was too full of spam to be considered in its review of Windows Live.

Spokesman Tony East said that the Vole did not make many noticeable changes to the service during the revamp and this was because Spaces has a spam problem.

Microsoft has been experimenting with ways of purging spam from Spaces and Hotmail, he said.

What a bunch of hypocrites. As we explained before (and as comScore finally admitted last month), Microsoft is spamming sites with fake search engine queries that make it seem like people are using Bong [sic], the world’s first ‘search’ engine that has brainwash requirements as part of the algorithm.

“Another ‘analyst’/metering firm which is paid by Microsoft is Net Applications.”For those who don’t know, comScore is paid by Microsoft [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10] and it usually shows the opposite of what everyone else is showing, especially companies that are not paid by Microsoft. Another ‘analyst’/metering firm which is paid by Microsoft is Net Applications. We’ll come to it in a moment.

First, let’s consider this new timeline that sheds light on Microsoft’s enablement of tyranny [1, 2] using its so-called ‘search’ engine.

14 June 2005: Microsoft agrees to censor its blog writing tool, called Spaces, on MSN China.

[...]

15 February 2006: Yahoo, Microsoft, Cisco and Google are criticised in a US congressional hearing for giving in to pressure from China to censor their web.

And it was only months ago that Microsoft was accused in the US Senate of “enabling tyranny”. It happened when Google left China and Microsoft continued to support oppressors. Microsoft gets no respect on the Web and one shouldn’t be shocked by it. People generally distrust Microsoft. Who would turn to Microsoft the monopoly abuser searching for answers? Not many people as it turns out, despite marketing. Microsoft is spamming Web sites to give the illusion that people use Microsoft for search, but not even the Microsoft-sponsored Net Applications can report growth:

June was not a big month for Bing, and according to the latest figures from Web analytics firm Net Applications, it’s barely any further ahead than when Microsoft rolled out.

It’s the same Microsoft-sponsored firm which many sites treat as an authority in the area of operating systems market share. They don’t question the source, not even when it comes to browser market share:

They don’t really gain Web browser market share. A firm that Microsoft sponsored claims it, but it’s contradicted by other firms that Microsoft does not pay. Nonetheless, these claims which offer no access to the raw data or even the methods got some of Microsoft’s boosters excited. Microsoft booster Marius Oiaga shows that Microsoft is still spreading gifts to promote Bong [sic], having recently called off the notorious bribes programme.

According to the news, Microsoft’s hijack of Yahoo! got it an alliance that extents to ads.

Microsoft has posted some FAQ’s and their respective answers in an update on its Search Alliance with Yahoo.

The Yahoo! management “is nuts,” according to BNET:

Yahoo (YHOO) plans to spend $3 billion on a three-year stock buy-back. I have one question: Is the management team nuts, or are they and major investors just so greedy that a short-term uptick in share price is worth undermining the company’s operations and strategy?

Here is the press release and some resultant news coverage:

Watch what Yahoo! does to the Linux-based Android:

Yahoo! wants to compete against Google on phones that run Android. It may seem like a sign of autonomy, but actually it’s a route to Microsoft datacentres (there is a search button in the picture of that third article). This whole addon is too close to Microsoft, so it’s better off avoided. It’s really a shame that Google monogamy is what one is left to promote, but as soon as Microsoft took control of Yahoo! it was obvious that a third option was doomed. The “not Microsoft” option here is Google (or Wolfram|Alpha) and there is no Free software option available for search. Not quite yet anyway. █

Mobile phone searching

Cash Cows Watch: Windows and Office Are Suffering

Posted in Google, Microsoft, Office Suites, OpenOffice, Security, Vista, Vista 7, Vista 8, Windows at 1:23 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Cows

Summary: A roundup of one week’s news about Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office

THE reality behind Vista 7 continues to expose itself and Windows in general has grown somewhat weak, unless one judges it based on mockups. “Vista” was mentioned in last week’s news (headlines) only once, in relation to security issues. Insecurity and Windows are almost synonymous in the context of computing. New from IDG: “Death of Windows XP SP2 Support a Security Risk, Says Report”

There was not so much in the news headlines about “Windows 7″ either. Instead, Microsoft boosters started touting something which does not even exist — something which may actually harm adoption of Vista 7, according to IDG:

The Web is abuzz following the leak of an alleged Windows 8 presentation outlining Microsoft’s vision for the next iteration of the flagship desktop operating system. As media pundits speculate on the potential features and capabilities of Windows 8, the news also has the potential to make some IT administrators and business customers currently considering a migration to Windows 7 to hold off.

The Microsoft boosters from IDG were actually critical of it:

Also from IDG:

‘Don’t Get Excited’ About Windows 8, Says Analyst

[...]

Leaked Windows 8 slides, which may not be genuine, include a development timeline without dates. (Credit: Windows Kitchen)

We are citing and comparing IDG articles only for the sake of reference. We hardly recommend IDG as a news source.

The thing is, IDG also had its share of good words about something that does not quite exist (without verifiable evidence at least):

Let’s get back to the malarkey about “Windows 8″. Some say it’s accidental [1, 2], but it probably is not. Microsoft has already been caught faking “leaks” (pushing it voluntarily and pretending it was in error), just like Apple. It’s a marketing strategy.

Getting back to reality, Microsoft boosters are still floating articles about Vista 7 SP1. It will potentially be more disruptive than constructive:

Windows 7 SP1 Beta and Microsoft Security Essentials Can Fail to Play Nice Together

Major upgrades to Windows client and server platforms introduce extensive changes both on the surface and under-the-hood, down to the very core of the operating systems. It’s no wonder then, that the installation of new service packs can be prevented by programs designed with the specific purpose of safeguarding the platforms’ integrity. Early adopters deploying the Beta of the first Service Pack for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 can experience installation problems if they are running security software on their computers. According to Microsoft, the issues can affect Service Pack 1 (SP1) Beta when testers attempt to have it integrated on top of Windows 7 RTM and Windows Server 2008 R2 RTM on computers where Microsoft Security Essentials or Microsoft Forefront Client Security are already installed.

No matter one’s personal opinion on Vista 7, it is being dumped by HP, at least for tablets/Slate. Now it’s more official:

Hewlett-Packard completed its acquisition of Palm this week and gave a hint that it could be ditching Microsoft’s Windows 7 Home Premium operating system for Palm’s webOS platform in the upcoming HP Slate tablet PC.

“HP Reveals Plans for WebOS Tablet,” says IDG:

HP has officially completed the acquisition of Palm, making it the proud owner of Palm’s coveted intellectual property including WebOS. It is hardly a surprise that before the ink was even dry on finalizing the purchase, HP announced its intent to build an array of mobile devices around the WebOS platform–including the predicted WebOS tablet.

Microsoft Nick confirms this too. HP dumps Vista 7 and moves to Linux (for this form factor at least).

Dealing separately with security problems in Windows, most Windows users are susceptible to 0-day attacks at the moment:

The number of malicious attacks exploiting an unpatched vulnerability in older versions of Windows has mushroomed over the past week, prompting Microsoft to warn customers to deploy countermeasures until an update is released.

This is also covered in:

This workaround is not a solution and amateur users will not be able to apply the changes. “Trojan Writers Target UK Banks With Botnets,” says this new IDG report (they say “PCs” instead of “Windows PCs”)

The company identifies two pieces of malware — the previously undetected Silon.var2 and the longer-established Agent.DBJP – as the two bank Trojans being distributed by Zeus-based botnets using UK-infected PCs.

Silon.var2 now affects 1 in every 500 UK-based PCs connected to the Trusteer Flashlight system, 40 times the detection level for the US, with Agent.DBJP affecting 1 in every 5,000 UK-based PCs, again far higher than for the US.

Windows does not offer applications much protection as an underlying platform:

Applications in Windows have many privileges that enable them to mess up the entire system rather than a confined sandbox. It’s an architectural issue. Even the newly-released Office 2010 (c/f [1, 2, 3] for perspective) has security problems already (will Microsoft blame Microsoft for not bothering with “Windows defences”?)

Researchers at Vupen Security say they have uncovered a security vulnerability in Microsoft Office 2010. However, their discovery has been met with criticism from Microsoft, which complains that it has not received technical details of the bug.

As IBM acquires BigFix [1, 2] it also turns out that Microsoft Office could use some of that. According to this news, it’s buggy. Here are the details:

You’ve seen it before: That strange, cutesy “J” that occasionally appears in email and seems contextually like it’s meant to be a smiling emoticon. You may even be sending these little “J”s without even knowing it. Tech blogger Chris Pirillo explains:

[F]or some inexplicable reason [In Microsoft Office applications], some brilliant engineer thought it wise to correct “:)” as a smiley rendered in a specific font face when composing rich text documents (and/or HTML email). This is why people think you’re crazy for inserting random “J” characters in your emails — they don’t have the same fonts installed on their machine!

Wonderful. And this is what people pay a fortune for? For those who pay Microsoft for ActiveSync patents to merely use its protocols there is also trouble in store. Here is another new problem which hypePhone 4 suffers from:

Bug in iOS4 Exchange ActiveSync hammers servers

[...]

Bugs in the Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) implementation in iOS4 were resulting in significant artificial loads on Exchange servers that they are connected to for push email. As outlined by the Microsoft Exchange Team blog, another symptom of the problem involves email, calendar or contact entries not synching properly.

Got to love proprietary software. Apple is just trying to step in line with Exchange/Office, which really ought to be replaced.

There are missing bits in Office 2010, Mary Jo Foley alleges (based on readers’ feedback), which maybe explains the poor reviews of Office 2010 (2/5 in Amazon). It’s just another Office 2007 with a Web extension. It’s still a resource hog that does not comply with international standards [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7].

Microsoft is still pretending that Free software does not exist (while quietly recruiting and advertising jobs that attack OpenOffice.org [1, 2, 3]). Here is a pathetic new attempt to fight competition from OpenOffice.org/Google and another similar attempt to fight competition from Apache. There is also an element of FUD there, sometimes promoted by Microsoft boosters like Lance Whitney and others:

Microsoft is misdirecting the perception of competition, sometimes with former employees. Microsoft Nick says that “Google Docs Has Microsoft a Bit Worried,” but what about Free software such as OpenOffice.org? Google Docs is proprietary. █

Patent Aggression Against Linux: Microsoft, Apple, and Nobody Else

Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, IBM, Microsoft, Patents, Protocol, Samba, Servers at 12:11 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Team of two

Summary: A look at some of the latest patent news and an explanation of why Microsoft and Apple (and Microsoft’s patent trolls) are by far the biggest problem

Well, we don’t write so much about the Bilski case anymore. It’s because we have done enough of that and the analyses are quite repetitive in the sense that few raise new points. To give just a small number of noteworthy posts that we missed, Brian Proffitt writes about the impact on software patentability in the US, Brad Feld is upset after spending time and money to abolish software patents in the US, IDG claims that SCOTUS leaves software patentability intact in the US, Datamation has a new cartoon about it, and Mike Masnick says that the IEEE misleads with its damned press release in the US. The headline from The Register reads: “Yes, software can be patented, US Supremes say” (false).

But they didn’t say that. They merely avoided addressing the subject.

A few days ago we wrote about the impact of biotech patents and the impact of SCOTUS on them. They are said to have received a “boost”. [via Slashdot]

Myriad Genetics Inc., Genomic Health Inc. and the rest of the burgeoning industry for personalized medicine stand to gain from yesterday’s landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision on patenting business methods.

[...]

The decision from the Supreme Court is unlikely to end the debate over diagnostic patents.

A couple of days ago Slashdot showed that Microsoft had patented things that should not be patented.

theodp writes “This week’s USPTO patent application disclosures included a trifecta of scary health-related ‘inventions’ from Microsoft. For starters, Microsoft envisions seeing Kids’ Personal Health Records Fed Into Video Games, where they can be used to ‘regulate and/or prescribe an individual’s behavior while playing electronic games.’ Next up is Centralized Healthcare Data Management, which describes how employees’ health habits can be ‘monitored, tracked or otherwise discovered’ so employers can ‘incentivize a user for an act or penalize for an omission to act.’ Finally, there’s Wearing Health on Your Sleeve, which describes a sort of high-tech Scarlet Letter designed to tip off ‘doctors, potential dates, etc.’ about your unhealthy behavior by converting information — ‘number of visits to the gym, workout activities, frequency of workouts, heart rate readings, blood pressure statistics, food consumption, vitamin intake, etc.’ — into a visual form so that others can see the data ‘on mechanisms such as a mood ring, watch, badge, on a website etc.’”

A few days ago we explained why Likewise is a form of patent taxman for Microsoft. Their new release got some more coverage and a Linux proponent pointed out: “This reminds me of all the alternatives to Exchange currently available on Linux, buy any of those for 10-50 users and you’ll discover quickly that buying the MS’ original is cheaper.”

Basically, clones of Microsoft protocols-reliant products that are sold by former Microsoft employees (e.g. Likewise [1, 2, 3, 4], Centrify [1, 2, 3]) are better off avoided and replaced by protocols that Microsoft does not control or by Samba, which the European Commission gave a special status after antitrust violations by Microsoft. The following new article states:

The Likewise Open core is licensed under Gnu Public License (GPL) version 2 and Lesser GPL version 2.

It’s “open core”, which is proprietary+marketing spin. It’s not GPLv3 and one should not be misled because they mix that with Microsoft’s software patents. One should just go with Samba.

When it comes to patents and GNU/Linux, Microsoft is still by far the worst aggressor. Microsoft boosters seem to be taking pride in these patents which Microsoft is stockpiling and using to attack Linux, sometimes via patent trolls [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. Latest raves from Microsoft bloggers:

Here is some more coverage (not from Microsoft boosters):

This patent won’t expire for quite some time.

Microsoft received the patent this week and TechFlash reports that this kind of patent is good for 14 years, so Microsoft has until 2024 to do something with this design.

Some dual-display tablets run Android or GNU/Linux.

Given that .NET is allegedly a patent violation, Microsoft would not be smart to go around suing people/companies, but that’s just what is does, most recently against Salesforce. Here again is the mentioning of .NET patent violation:

The world’s biggest maker of Web-based software, Salesforce.com, has not specified what damages it is seeking, but claims that Microsoft is infringing five Salesforce patents in programs, including in the Windows Server operating system and the widely used .Net platform.

Based on other reports as well as previous posts of ours [1, 2], Salesforce is equipped with David Boies, the “Microsoft Nemesis”.

Is Microsoft playing with fire? It sure alienates many people, except Monty and Müller on the face of it. The former is paid by Microsoft and the latter is just keeping his head deep in the sand (insisting that IBM is the bigger threat). Earlier today he also mentioned Apple, which is a patent violator (risking bans) that had the nerve to sue Android (including Linux). Here is a new summary of this case:

In this great hullabaloo of rivals accusing each other of infringement of patents, one is only left confused seeing the who’s who in the arena of smartphones making a claim of the same victimization. A patent is a set of exclusive rights granted by the government to the inventor in exchange for a public disclosure of the invention. The big question is, will this war really see the light of a consensus and settlement?

Earlier this year in March, Apple filed a lawsuit against HTC for infringing 20 of its patents related to the iPhone’s user interface, underlying architecture and hardware. The lawsuit was filed with the U.S. International Trade Commission(ITC) and concurrently in the US District Court in Delaware. Very truly it’s said that “competition is healthy, but the rivals should try and yearn to develop their own technology and not steal the existing”. This lawsuit; it’s said, is the next high profile litigation in the mobile phone business after Nokia and Apple attacking each other in past few months.

Apple’s hypePhone is having some trouble right now. Apple cannot quite compete without suing competitors, apparently. As one new essay puts it:

Ideas Are a Commodity, It’s Execution Intelligence That Matters

First of all, ideas are commodities. Look at any industry, any product or service offering, and what you really see is improvement on the existing standard versus uniqueness in the offering. These improvements can be continuous or disruptive, but in either category, to the customer they are nothing more than incremental improvement around the financial return, usability, quality, or experience of your competitor. This explains why management teams are so important; if new offerings are commodities it’s execution by the management team – what I like to call execution intelligence – that makes the difference in the market.

Apple also contributes towards MPEG-LA’s war on free/libre video. For background, see:

Here is a new article on the subject:

Video Prison: Why Patents Might Threaten Free Online Video

[...]

On June 20, 2009, nearly 150,000 people witnessed the death of 26-year-old Neda Agha-Soltan, but unlike the Iranians who passed her by in the street, they weren’t bystanders to the post-election turmoil in Tehran that claimed her life. They were merely the first of over 600,000 who have since viewed a now-symbolic YouTube video that helped propel the opposition political movement forward in the following days of protest. The democratizing power of the Web lies in video like this one–not just because of its content, but because anyone with an Internet connection can contribute to a global dialogue.

But imagine if the person who shot this video had been unable to post it anonymously or if YouTube viewers had to pay to watch it. If online videos were subject to patent licensing fees, users could be charged per-view to capture those fees. Beyond the ethical dilemma profiteering from a tragic death, video licensing could reduce the democratic nature of free and open Internet content to monetizable media. The funny cat videos would be gone forever (perhaps not the greatest loss), but so too would the movement-inspiring Nedas of the future remain unknown.

TechDirt says that Britannica has also gone sour:

It Appears That The Encyclopaedia Britannica Entry On Shaking Down GPS Providers With A Bogus Patent Needs Updating

The Encyclopaedia Britannica has not exactly been having a good decade. In the minds of much of the public (though, certainly not all), the usefulness of Britannica has long been surpassed by Wikipedia. A couple years ago, we gave Britannica’s president a chance to explain his views on where Britannica is going, but it still seems like an uphill battle. Among the more ridiculous things that Britannica has tried to do is to also turn itself into a bit of a patent troll. Back in 2007, it sued a bunch of GPS companies for patent infringement. Scratching your head over why Britannica holds patents on GPS technology? The answer is even more convoluted than you can imagine.

Here is another potential aggressor to watch out for. “Patent Calls Inc. buys Dallas competitor for $16M,” says this report. There is still a difference between a patent holder and a patent aggressor. Microsoft and Apple are both and they are specifically targeting Linux with their lawsuits. Not many companies do that. In fact, no real companies do that, except Microsoft and Apple (patent trolls like Acacia aside, although Acacia too has Microsoft connections). █

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