01.11.10
Posted in News Roundup at 6:30 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Best Buy (NYSE: BBY) has never been a favorite company among Linux fans, and that feeling was not improved by the Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) ExpertZone training scandal that erupted last September. A whole new crop of reasons to hurl insults at the chain came up in recent weeks, however, following news of one blogger’s experience.
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The TechCrunch story above also points out a very notable statistic: it reported that there are more than 10,000 Android applications available. With, the story added, more likely on the way given the expected popularity of Google’s Nexus One phone, which had pretty much stolen the show even before CES started.
Meanwhile, Intel announced its AppUp center, a new application store for Moblin- and Windows 7-based applications: the fruits of Intel’s Atom Developer SDK program.
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I’m happy to announce that the nominees have been selected and the polls for the 2009 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards are now open. Congratulations to everyone that was nominated.
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2: Open source helps newspapers salvage their future
Let’s face it, newspapers (and magazines) are in serious jeopardy of going the way of the Dodo. Most newspapers can’t handle economic downturns and continue to grow. So this headline would be sure to please. How? Newspapers shift their websites to LAMP servers and their desktops to a Linux-based operating system. After that would come a deluge of print servers and more. It would be a win-win situation. Not only would open source gain a boost, but newspapers would live to write another headline.
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This means that, depending on your chosen binary distribution, the available packages may not be optimised for your particular hardware architecture and individual packages may have dependencies which you do not want nor will you use. The end result is a Linux distribution which does not run optimally for your particular situation.
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Linux Basement Live:
WARNING: This episode has some language not appropriate for the kidlings or sensitive ears.
Chad is joined by Threethirty, Lord_d, Pegwole, Claudio
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Desktop
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I really think the future is mobile and Microsoft understands that well and is positioned to support that with mobile devices. Ubuntu and Linux in general is mobile oriented too. Motorola, Google and a host of other vendors are or have developed mobile devices using Linux and Apple Mac while cool is really a desktop OS and although the OS is inexpensive at $29 a copy it is very proprietary after that point. Their real mistake in my opinion is not opening up their platform like Microsoft did with Windows, but that’s because they are desktop or laptop oriented.
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Kernel Space
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While the Nouveau driver is now beginning to be trimmed down a bit as non-KMS support is being dropped, this free software NVIDIA driver will be gaining some new code in the form of power management support. Power management for NVIDIA hardware in the Nouveau driver stack is still early on, but a patch is being prepared and a discussion has been initiated how to handle the power management controls for this driver. A discussion surrounding power management controls has also opened up to the larger Linux GPU driver development community at large.
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Applications
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As Kaseya gears up to launch the Kaseya 2 managed services framework in late January 2010, the company also is preparing Kaseya Mobile — a suite of applications for smart phones. After that, watch for Kaseya to introduce remote management capabilities for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Novell SUSE Linux, and other Linux distributions. Here are the details.
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Instructionals
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Games
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Hacker Evolution: Untold which is available for MacOS and Windows for quite some time now goes Beta on GNU/Linux and beta testers are needed !
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K Desktop Environment
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A Happy New Year to all of you! We hope you all had a nice holiday season, ate yummy meals and enjoyed some quality time with your family and friends. While doing exactly the same as everybody, the Amarok developers did also sneak out in the middle of the night to sit at their computers and add a bugfix here, a usability improvement there, and polish all around to make sure you will truly enjoy our new release: Amarok 2.2.2!
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now that the KDE Software Compilation 4.4 is branched, it’s time to think about the next iteration. Next to bug fixing that is.
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GNOME Desktop
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Most of you probably know “Fences”, a program that organizes your cluttered desktop by letting you create and put boxes called “Fences” on your desktop and then you can create multiple fences and put your icons in them. For more info on Fences check out Jacob’s post on Fences. Now i really liked fences when i was using windows once upon a time and i was a little disappointed when i couldn’t find any Linux alternative to Fences BUT, thanks a youtuber named “gotbletu“, this problem has been solved because he found a screenlet called “Folder view” and that’s the same thing as Fences but for Linux. Keep in mind that Fences is still way better than Folder view but i not saying that Folder view is horrible either, as a matter a fact it’s pretty good. Lets begin
Since this is a screenlet you need to install a program called screenlets first which is a widget program, so just get that from Ubuntu software center.
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The plasma desktop effect of KDE is mouth-watering. It not only looks beautiful, but also has a good amount of usability. But, the interface is available(by default) only on the KDE desktop environment.
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Overall, it appears that openSolaris is suitable for someone who’s doing the basics on a UNIX or UNIX-like system. You’ve got Firefox, Pidgin, OpenOffice.org. But there is the weird file structure and the small repository. So I feel that it’s perhaps worth checking out, but I can’t really recommend it above Linux or even BSD. I’d say, if you need it for work (and a lot of businesses use Solaris), definitely get openSolaris so you can get familiar with the platform. Otherwise, stick to Linux or BSD and you’ll have a lot more support for a wider array of programs and standard POSIX directories.
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The NEW PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the January 2010 issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine.
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I wanted to find out and it’s not the first time I’ve attempted something like this. Starting Monday 11th at midday (London time), I’ll be using Ubuntu 9.10 for an entire 48 hours, and will only be able to use open-source applications.
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It’s been a month since I have installed Arch Linux on my workstation and I thought I would talk about this Linux distribution a bit. Arch Linux is pretty much all the rage these days in the world of Linux distributions. If we are to believe the famous Distrowatch stats that were recently published and compared with the data of 2008, Arch Linux is the fastest growing Linux distribution these days. It gained quite many users, probably at the expense of distributions like Gentoo, yet it is not usually considered to be an “user-friendly” distribution. I will briefly outline what have been, and what is, my experience with Arch, and I believe I am going to stick with this particular flavor for a very long time.
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During my time with SliTaz, I had the chance to exchange e-mails with one of the developers, Christophe Lincoln, and he had some interesting things to say about the project. He mentioned that SliTaz is already entering freeze and the development team will be doing testing and fixing bugs from now through to their next release in March. He also mentioned that SliTaz is being used in some organizations and the project is getting a lot of useful feedback. From what I’ve seen so far, I think their next version will be well worth trying out. It’s already stable and I’ve encountered no show-stopping issues.
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New Releases
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The Frugalware Developer Team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Frugalware 1.2pre2, the second technical preview of the upcoming 1.2 stable release.
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Release candidate of Pardus 2009.1 is ready ! Like always you can download this release from Pardus FTP servers…
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Debian Family
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I received an interesting email from Debian developer Raphael Hertzog who has happily allowed me to blog about the ideas we were talking about. His email centers around the funding of infrastructure projects in the Debian distribution and ways to think about funding that avoid socio-political problems.
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PPA is means Personal Package Archive. It provides a way to easily install application which can not be found in the Ubuntu official repository on Ubuntu ( since the Ubuntu official repo takes a conservative approach to updates and number of applications it includes in its official repository with focus on stability over latest and greatest packages.) PPA is one of the coolest thing about Ubuntu. It creates an avenue for developers, packagers and even users to create their own personal repositories and include their packages which can easily be added and installed on Ubuntu.
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Ubuntu Tweak 0.5.0 has now been released – just over a week after the launch of the online user-interactive database – UTCOM – that the application draws its data from.
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As I was wandering past Marvell’s exhibit at CES this weekend, I spotted an incredibly tiny PC called the EBOX connected to a big screen LCD. The display showed that the computer was running Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala and that it could handle 1080p HD video playback.
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Phones
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Despite the fact that the ELSE phone and OS were both at pre-production status, and clearly need work before any sort of launch, the unique ELSE Intuition UI was intuitive and innovative enough to hold our attention. Both the phone and the UI were designed with one-handed operation in mind. As you can see from our hands-on video (below), the UI is tailored to be used with your right-thumb, and your right-thumb only. Navigation buttons line the right side of the device as well, putting them within easy reach of your largest digit.
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Android
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We’ve had the battle of the apps and now it’s the battle of the handset. But after all the hype, it has not been the greatest start for Google and the Nexus One phone – maybe we should be looking forward to the Nexus Two and all that might bring with it?
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Hewlett Packard is working on numerous tablet devices that will come in a variety of sizes, shapes and operating systems, including Windows 7, Google’s Android, and possibly the open-source operating system Linux.
The company has so many different tablet-related projects in the works that a variety of coming publishing partners were surprised to see a Windows 7 version of the Hewlett-Packard slate announced at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show.
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Sub-notebooks
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Thursday evening I broke my install on my Eee PC 1000HE in such a way that I needed to recover the data from my /home partition and reinstall the OS. I thought that since I’m waiting for EB4 I may as well just install another distribution and play.
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Bottom line: This release is what Karmic could have and should have been.
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One of the greatest wonders of technology is how it’s made the world a small place. If you want a surefire way to cut traveling costs in your business, then you definitely need to take a look at Dimdim.
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Digium continues to build stronger partnerships in the unified communications market. The latest evidence: From Polycom to Skype, a long list of companies will evangelize Digium’s open source IP PBX during the Asterisk World conference (January 20-22, Miami Beach, Fla.). And yes, Digium will dial up channel partners during the event. Here’s the scoop.
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Licensing
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The FreeType library is released under a dual license: you can choose either the FTL (FreeType License) or the GPL, version 2. That means that a software stack that uses FreeType has to be license-compatible with one or the other (or both). In cases where the rest of the software stack also allows choices, this can be slightly complex. You end up with a combinatorial explosion of licenses — in theory, if not in practice.
But why is a choice necessary, anyway?
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Programming
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Standards/Consortia
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So there we are. With the multiyear HD DVD Blu-ray battle still a recent memory, we have a new standards face off in video, just as we do in eBooks, and just as it looks like we may in on-line print, where a new consortium led by the News Corporation and others is launching a standards-based “digital newsstand.” All of these devices, of course, are targeted at you and I, and each has the potential to not only extend the woes of the music/video/print vendors behind these standards battles, but to waste your money and mine as well.
Does that strike you as a shame? Me to.
So if you’ve still got a Betamax in the back of your closet, you might want to finally throw it out. After all, you may be needing the storage space soon for yet another wave of consumer electronic equipment that has been rendered obsolete by a needless standards war.
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This is embarrassing, but it’s 2010 and I still have an AOL e-mail address. I wonder if I hold some kind of record. I opened my AOL account in 1997. My first e-mail address was a combination of a nickname and the year I was born. Back then everyone had goofy screen names like Tarheels80 and SwimFan, so mine seemed appropriate. But as I started using e-mail more and more for freelance work, it seemed wrong. In 1998 I changed to a more respectable use of my initials and last name, still with AOL. It’s the e-mail address I have today.
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Arthur Firstenberg is suing his neighbour for $530,000 for refusing to switch off her iPhone, claiming that the electromagnetic fields generated are destroying his health.
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Security
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The Central Intelligence Agency should be asking some painful questions this week about its performance: How could a suicide bomber have flown to Detroit despite a strong warning to a CIA station that he might be a terrorist? How could a Jordanian double agent have penetrated a CIA base in Afghanistan and killed seven agency employees?
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Bruce Schneier is holding a TSA logo-redesign contest, inspired by Patrick “Ask the Pilot” Smith’s suggestion, “a revised eagle, its talons clutching a box cutter and a toothpaste tube. It says ‘Transportation Security Administration’ around the top. Below are the three simple words of the TSA mission statement: ‘Tedium, Weakness, Farce’”.
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Environment
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An unprecedented extreme in the northern hemisphere atmospheric circulation has driven a strong direct connecting current between the Gulf Stream and the West Greenland current. The unprecedented negativity of the “Arctic Oscillation” and the strong connection of the Gulf Stream with the Greenland current are exceptional events. More exceptional weather events are predicted with anthropogenic climate change, but this could be a natural variation of weather and currents.
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Finance
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Titled “Support grows for tackling nation’s debt,” the article discusses a proposal to create a government commission to examine America’s growing debt. The new commission, according to the article, would be charged with exploring “how to rein in skyrocketing spending on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security,” but the article failed to mention other significant sources of government spending, like the $663 billion military budget.
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We want to give a hat tip to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) for outing the Fiscal Times as a propaganda outlet masquerading as a news service that was created and funded by Wall Street billionaire Peter G. Peterson, a former member of President Nixon’s administration who has long used his wealth to promote cuts in Social Security, Medicare and other government entitlement programs. The Post initially failed to reveal to readers the origins and funding of the Fiscal Times, and only did so six days later, in a small correction run on January 5. That “correction,” however, reiterated the assertion that the Fiscal Times is “independent” and merely noted that the story should have disclosed that one of the sources quoted in the story was funded by the same funder as the writers of the story.
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All eyes are on Wall Street this week as the big banks get ready to report their earnings and bonuses. Rebounding banks are preparing to pay out bonuses that rival those of the pre-crisis boom years.
During the first nine months of 2009, five of the largest banks that received federal aid — Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley — together set aside about $90 billion for compensation.
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What’s with the apologies? Goldman Sachs’s Lloyd Blankfein caught his fellow titans by surprise in November, admitting that “we participated in things that were clearly wrong and have reason to regret.” That came less than two weeks after he infuriated pretty much everyone else by declaring that Goldman was “doing God’s work.”
He was not the only banker indulging in the contrition thing. (In March, Bank of America’s Ken Lewis, who presided over the bungled acquisition of Merrill Lynch, issued his own apology and was still pushed out.) Now the former Time Warner chief executive Gerald Levin, who is not even a banker, has plunged into the zeitgeist.
Mr. Levin issued a belated — by a decade — mea culpa for buying AOL and urged others to follow his lead. “I presided over the worst deal of the century, apparently,” Mr. Levin said. “I guess it’s time for those who are involved in companies to stand up and say: You know what, I’m solely responsible for it.”
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Last month, the Securities and Exchange Commission adopted new rules requiring public companies to disclose information about their board leadership structure, their risk oversight processes and certain information about compensation structure and how it relates to the company’s risks. The goal, according to the SEC, is to provide additional transparency regarding what goes on in the boardroom so that investors can make more informed decisions.
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The former human resources chief at Brocade was sentenced Wednesday to spend two months in prison and pay a fine of $1.25 million for her part in a stock options backdating scandal that dates to the early part of last decade.
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Internet/Web Abuse/DRM
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The first controversy involves the portrayal of Michele Obama in a line of lesser celebrities — Oprah Winfrey, Tyra Banks, and Carrie Underwood — with the headline, “Fur-free and Fabulous.” Michele Obama did not appear physically in the line to be photographed (she was photo-shopped into the lineup), but the ad is based on the truthful statement that not only in the image, but also more generally, she does not wear furs. Although public opinion seems to vary about whether it is ethical or tasteful for PETA to use her image without her consent, nobody seems to dispute that the First Amendment would protect PETA’s right to use the photo without her consent, even though it effectively aligns her with PETA’s policy positions and, indeed, with PETA itself.
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Tech writing superstar David Pogue writes about his experiment with DRM-free ebook publishing. He concludes that even though his DRM-free book was pirated all over the net, the sales were as high as he expected them to be, based on his previous books’ sales. Pogue goes on to talk about what he’s learned here — that DRM-free isn’t necessarily bad for sales — and invites other publishers to try it out.
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Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights
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Google has apologized to a Chinese authors’ group over its scanning of books by local writers into an online search system, moving to defuse copyright concerns around the project in China.
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Walt Disney & Co. and other movie studios won dismissal of RealNetworks Inc.’s claims that they violated antitrust laws by preventing competitors from selling products that make copies of DVDs.
U.S. District Judge Marilyn Patel in San Francisco threw out anti-competition claims yesterday by Seattle-based RealNetworks, a maker of software for playing music and video games that in 2008 was blocked from selling a DVD-copying product after Patel ruled that it violated laws protecting copyrighted works.
Dwayne Bailey, Founder and Managing Director of Translate.org.za 04 (2004)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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01.10.10
Posted in News Roundup at 9:54 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Since I’m planning to buy several Linux-inspired clothes, I was searching the web for places or sites that offer printed t-shirts that look cool and have a bit of sense of humor. I was surprised to see a lot of them so I would like to show to you those that I really like.
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I maintain some XP machines here for the time being. They make work for me. I need to keep four separate images because XP does not come with drivers needed for many common systems. No kidding. I needed to add USB mice to the images… GNU/Linux has worked smoothly with USB mice for 5 years or more. Wait! XP is from 2001. It’s obsolete and M$ replaced it with Vista, the ultimate in bloatware. People are waking up to this abuse. They are seeing GNU/Linux as an alternative. Folks who see it for the first time are amazed that things can be done three times faster using the same hardware. They wonder why they put up with this stuff so long. I wonder, too.
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I know going in for an interview can be taxing, stressful and downright difficult. I also know that requirements for jobs are usually way out of line for any human. You know the list, be certified in everything and have 20 years experience in all programing languages and be 21 years old. Let’s face it, most organizations looking for skilled administrators are asking too much. But, even though that is the case, what can you do to best demonstrate your yourself and give yourself a chance at the job.
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This is a sign that OEMs are looking at backup plans for what to do when the monopoly crumbles. If the market for that other OS dries up, they have GNU/Linux to lean on. They may have to advertise it a bit, but they can. If the market for x86 dries up in preference to ARM for power/price, HP and others need an alternative. If they will not supply ARM and GNU/Linux, others will. The market is beginning to finish the process of curing the anti-competitive acts of the monopoly. It is about time.
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Applications
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I am proud to announce that OpenShot Video Editor 1.0 has just been released! This release is jam-packed full of new features, bug fixes, and some shiny new graphics! We hope you enjoy it!
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Instructionals
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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Nepomuk is not new, but until this version, I hadn’t really touched it, now it is finally well integrated, works, and what important, uses resources moderately compared to its past (YMMV).
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Plasmoids are the widgets that are present in the plasma desktop in KDE SC 4.x. One little know feature of plasmoids is that they can be set such that different plasmoids appear in different workspaces. In this article we shall show you how to do this.
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Okay, this one is actually incredibly easy, but still, it was fun when I found out.
Windows 7 is by no means my favourite OS, but in my opinion it has some very “desktop themes”, packs of wallpapers which after install will rotate on your desktop. In Windows, it’s as simple as clicking “Download”, after which the pack will unzip itzelf and show up somewhere in youre Appearance settings.
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Even better, if staff choose to migrate to GNU/Linux, I can have it cloned around the building in an hour or so. All the teachers use one of two models of PC.
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Debian Family
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I previously discussed some of the new social networking aspects coming in Ubuntu 10.04. These mainly focus on the brand new Me Menu which is a personalised menu that holds and controls all your social networking and assists with broadcasting to microblogging services. Some related changes are the new changes to the indicator applet and attached messaging menu.
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Ubuntu Privacy Remix is a modified Live-CD based on Ubuntu Linux. UPR is not intended for permanent installation on hard disk. The goal of Ubuntu Privacy Remix is to provide an isolated, working environment where private data can be dealt with safely. The system installed on the computer running UPR remains untouched.
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Nokia
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“If he had wanted to debunk those rumors that it might buy Palm, Nokia’s new mobile phones head Rick Simonson could have picked a more outright denial,” Robert Andrews reports for paidContent.
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Simonson adds that Nokia’s revival also will depend on its global scale and reach. “Through an open system we are encouraging innovation,” he says. “We are helping more people–I mean, developers who produce applications for our system–make money. They stand to make more money with us because, our OS is used not just by Nokia, but several other handset makers since it an open system. Next, their apps will be used across the world, as our reach is unmatched and therefore, we present them with the biggest audience to sell their products. An open system enables us to work faster at beating competition in the pockets we are not doing too well, by doing things differently.”
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Android
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The Android phone OS is gaining momentum as a large number of phones running the operating system have been announced at this year’s CES in Las Vegas. Assistant Editor Ginny Mies takes a look at the Samsung Galaxy Spica, LG’s GT540, and the innovative Motorola Backflip.
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Dell Inc. showed off a small slate computer that it could bring to market this year, exploring yet another type of device designed for computing on the go.
So-called slate and tablet PCs are a hot topic at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week, ahead of a highly anticipated device from Apple Inc. that is widely expected to be unveiled in late January.
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Wipro Technologies, the global IT services business of Wipro Limited (NYSE:WIT), today announced its entry into the Open Handset AllianceTM, extending its device development and service Integration expertise around AndroidTM – an open mobile phone software stack.
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Sub-notebooks
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Google has promised to release an operating system called Chrome OS that replaces Windows with a simpler Linux-based system that launches the company’s Chrome browser. The company has been seeking a netbook manufacturer to build a Chrome OS-powered consumer laptop. In theory, it would be cheaper and more reliable than Windows, less vulnerable to malware attacks, and would remove a lot of the configuration and maintenance work that drives many Windows users crazy.
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Topics for this podcast:
*Google and the meaning of open
*Nexus One smartphone and impact
*JetBrains sets mind, strategy on open source
*Linux in 2010 and beyond
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Every software development firm today should ask which open source foundation to support or, if necessary, to found. The benefits are clear: Done right, the firm can expect cost savings, increased profits per sale, a higher number of sales, and a larger addressable market. The question then becomes one of investment: How much to invest and what return to expect. At present, we lack economic models and decision processes to answer these questions.
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Mozilla
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I have many things to say about Jetpack. I like its power, I dislike its syntax. I _really_ dislike its syntax. I think it totally misses its main goal, making extension authoring dead simple instead of recreating another programming elite. I also think the integration of XHTML elements inside a XUL-based UI raises strong UI homogeneity issues (because they don’t flex, align or pack like XUL elements) and could severely harm the UI coolness factor of the whole user interface.
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Following a long discussion about Firefox Themes vs the new Persona technology, Mike Connor from the Firefox team explains on his blog why Firefox plans to migrate developers from the current theme and extension systems to personas and jetpacks. Since we are a Firefox extension, you might wonder How will this affect Firebug?
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CMS
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Yesterday I shared my 2009 retrospective on Drupal along with some predictions for 2010. Today, I want to reflect on Acquia’s 2009, as for obvious reasons, Acquia has been a big part of my life in 2009.
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To deliver on the vision outlined in our roadmap, we had to raise more money — no small thing given the downturn in the economy. Instead of reserving cash, Tom and I went out and raised an additional $8 million dollars in Series B funding, bringing our total funding to date to $15 million USD.
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Python
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A few weeks back I blogged about my new program Acire: a simple little tool that provides a library of Python examples called snippets that outline how to do specific taks. With each snippet you can browse the code, run it and otherwise learn how it works in order to help you get to grips with writing your own programs as quickly and easily as possible.
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You have to have a pretty special product to get two Engadget posts discussing your wares during the maelstrom of CES, but this Adam thing just won’t leave us alone with its Pixel Qi display, Tegra 2 innards and bona fide potential to blow the bloody doors off the homogeneous tablet market.
[...]
Speaking of the Qi, we consider it a glorious and definite step forward for displays. It looks gorgeous in both modes, and when the backlight is off you’re basically getting a monochromatic version of your normal display (check the gallery to see what we mean) which is both perfectly usable and the friendliest thing you can do to your battery. You can see the 1080p demo video below, with both modes showing you what you might expect from the screen while it was being washed by pretty strong Las Vegas sunlight. There’s also a patented 3 megapixel swivel camera (not pictured on this dev unit), which has other protected intellectual properties that we were not yet informed of, though augmented reality and educational uses were hinted at.
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Cisco Systems Inc. is king of the “oughts,” at least when it comes to acquisitions of venture-backed companies.
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Small business owners may have more of a need than most to be able to access their chosen suite of productivity tools from more than one computer or platform. As a business or startup owner you may have occasion to bring your work home with you, or require frequent access to your to-do lists, notes and documents on the go.
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Security
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Hernando Calvo Ospina, who works for Le Monde Diplomatique and has written on revolutionary movements in Cuba and Colombia , figured on the US authorities’ “no-fly list”.
Air France said the April 18 flight was forced to divert to the French Caribbean island of Martinique before continuing its journey and that it might ask the US Transportation Security Administration for compensation.
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The mother of a 10-year-old girl suspended for bringing peppermint oil to her Commack, N.Y., school Monday says she is considering legal action if school officials don’t apologize and revoke her daughter’s suspension.
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Two former guards with the security company Blackwater have been charged in the US with the murder of Afghan civilians in a case likely to reinforce accusations that the firm ran a rogue militia that showed a reckless disregard for human life.
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Environment
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The vision of hi-tech British farming outlined this week by the UK government’s chief scientific adviser, Sir John Beddington, has been dismissed as unnecessary and potentially damaging by environmental groups and organic farmers.
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Anti-whaling activists today accused Japanese whalers of ramming and sinking one of their boats as international tension over Japan’s annual “scientific” culls in Antarctic waters grew.
Japanese fisheries officials said the Ady Gil, a high-speed boat belonging to the Sea Shepherd conservation group, had been hit accidentally as it attempted to confront the Shonan Maru No 2, a whaling vessel.
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Finance
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I challenge anyone to change my mind and to make me believe that they earn this ROE because they are the brightest of the brightest… The brightest of the brightest have failed miserably through out history. Never in human kind bright minds managed to keep such an impressive track record and if they are so good, again I doubt it, maybe we should dismantle Goldman anyway because these brilliant minds could be doing much more productive activities for makind.
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The world’s biggest investment banks are expected to pay out more than $65bn (£40bn) in salaries and bonuses in the next two weeks, reinforcing the view that it is business as usual on Wall Street and in the City barely a year since the taxpayer bailout of the banking system.
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Censorship/Civil Rights
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Authorities in Iran intensified their campaign to blame the country’s political turmoil on foreigners today by banning contact with more than 60 international organisations.
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Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights
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In a sign that Google’s negotiations with the Associated Press over a new licensing contract may have reached a standstill, new AP articles are no longer being hosted in Google (NSDQ: GOOG) News; Search Engine Land‘s Danny Sullivan, who first reported the development, says that new AP articles haven’t been hosted on the site since Dec. 24. Google isn’t providing an explanation. The company’s full statement: “We have a licensing agreement with the Associated Press that permits us to host its content on Google properties such as Google News. Some of that content is still available today. At the moment we’re not adding new hosted content from the AP.”
Dwayne Bailey, Founder and Managing Director of Translate.org.za 03 (2004)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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01.09.10
Posted in News Roundup at 11:24 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Kernel Space
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All in all, simply working with a virtual machine 80% of the time is a lot nicer than working with a physical machine 100% of the time, and has really allowed me to not exhaust my patience when working with kernel code.
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Applications
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Tools such as grep, find and awk have often come to the rescue of gleeful Bash-mongers searching for files buried beneath gigabytes of other items. But when a typical Linux distro takes up a couple of gigs of disk space, it’s not hard to imagine that finding your files will only become trickier over time.
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Having to contend with intermittent electricity in my house today means this is likely the only post of the day. So, instead of pushing out something half-baked I thought i’d go the whole-hog and not really say anything at all…
…and just post some new pictures showing of the awesome progress the Gloobus-Preview & CoverGloobus development teams are making with undoubtedly two of the coolest applications around. Clicking on the pictures should take you supersized, but don’t roast me if they don’t!
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Early in the year, we plan to bring out ‘Snow Mallard’, our new platform for CrossOver 9. This is going to be an exciting release for us for a variety of reasons.
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The Wine development release 1.1.36 is now available.
What’s new in this release:
* Completion of the 16-bit separation.
* Improved Shader Model 4 support.
* A ton of memory leak fixes.
* Improved debugging support for MinGW.
* A number of MSHTML fixes.
* Various bug fixes.
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The significant thing about Chrome is that it sets a new way of thinking. It does not mean Chrome will dominate the world. Open standards mean that other companies could provide similar services. It’s the 80% scenario. 80% of what we do could be web based and probably will be in the future. It is near 100% for 80% of the population. It does not then make much sense to have everyone running a desktop OS just in case they might happen to want a specialist application that is dependent on that technology. Some people will still need this, but not the majority.
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Google has made available for download the second update of 2010 for its open source browser. On January 6, the Mountain View-based search giant has kicked up a notch the Dev channel version of Google Chrome. Early adopters can now grab Google Chrome Build 4.0.288.1 through the developer channel, a release which is available for all supported platforms. Technically, Google Chrome Beta Build 4.0.249.49 was the first release of the open source browser this year.
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Having trouble sorting out hundreds of e-Books? No troubles for me, because I don’t have much e-Books. But some people do have huge collection of books. If the collection is too big, its really not friendlier to find a book by file name. We need something like Book Shelf to keep them in order, that is what e-Book Collection Managers are, but they are a lot flexible than our real life Book Shelves.
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Instructionals
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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Perhaps you know how mount ISO image by commend line. However, If you are lazy – like me – to use Konsole, Silicon is a good choice for this task. I tried Furius ISO before, but I don’t like it because it lacks KDE4′s integration.
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Besides the quick search and filtering tools at the bottom of the main window, digiKam offers more advanced search features accessible via the left sidebar. Here, you’ll find a variety of search options, including the Calendar, Tags, Timeline, Searches, Fuzzy Searches, and Map Searches. The Map Searches option was covered previously, so let’s take a look at what else digiKam has to offer.
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Mandriva team wishes you happy new year 2010 and is proud to propose the first alpha release for 2010 Spring. Together with these isos, you will find also technical specifications for this coming release.
Many improvements and new functionnalities are planned for this new version: your desktop will be smart and connected! Smart desktop is still one of the focus of main version, you can have a look on the coming roadmap. But you will find also easy home encryption so that your personal data are secured even whereever you are. Also planned a big work on our tools to manage softwares installation and update to give more useful information and help user in choosing the best of open source softwares.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat, the world leading provider of open source solutions, recently released Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation (RHEV) that gives businesses unprecedented technology prowess to unlock capital and enhance operational efficiency. RHEV is built on open source and comes at a much lower cost than proprietary virtualisation products.
RHEV is the first open source virtualisation solution that features Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor, the software that allows multiple virtual operating systems to run on a host machine or system.
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Still, some companies manage to make money. Red Hat makes money.
Most people credit Red Hat’s success to its relationship with IBM and the fact it’s selling a Linux. But I suspect there is more to it than that.
Marc Fleury built JBOSS around committers, and many cashed out when Red Hat came in during 2006. It has taken Red Hat a long time to build back a proper support infrastructure, but now that work seems to be finally done and, while the company doesn’t break out its numbers, JBOSS seems to be a profit contributor rather than a cash sink.
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Debian Family
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One may argue that Linux is not supposed to be “one size fits all.” It was never meant to be an all-in-one solution. Linux is not Windows! It can be just about whatever you want it to be, as much or as little as you desire.
This is an eye-of-the-beholder thing. To a newbie who has known only Windows or Mac, Ubuntu and other similar Linux distributions make Linux look beautiful! Simple, graphical, versatile, powerful, infinitely configurable. It’s “one-size fits all” is simply what they have come to expect from an operating system because that’s all they know.
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A host of video services on the web enable you to watch your favorite TV programs and movies anytime you wish, and Boxee is an open platform striving to weave them all into one neat interface. To get the Boxee experience onto a TV, D-Link has launched a set-top box dedicated to the open video platform, along with a special remote.
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Phones
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Nokia N900
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Nokia N900 is full of little gems thanks to it’s open source nature and a growing developer community . Although much of the applications are available in the Untested Maemo Repository but still it never stops us from playing with them .
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Palm
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The number of applications available for webOS is much smaller than for the iPhone or Google’s Android OS. To close this gap, Palm will also open up its application distribution channel to developers and Web sites, giving them access to detailed information about applications and statistics, such as the number of downloads. This will allow them to build their own application directories and application ranking mechanisms, Mitic said.
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Palm is extending the market range of its smartphones to France through a partnership with mobile service provider SFR, which will begin offering the Palm Prē and Pixi to its existing 20 million mobile customers – and, hopefully, more – in the second quarter of this year.
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Palm has – finally – opened up its application development program for webOS to one and all. It will also open its app database to anyone who wants to build a store, extend its SDK’s powers with a plug-in kit for C and C++ coders, and prime the development pump with $1m in incentives.
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Palm revealed new versions of its Pre and Pixi handsets during its press briefing today at CES. The company also expanded its development platform and demonstrated new features of its webOS software.
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AT&T will offer mobile devices using nearly every operating system as it adds more Android devices, including Dell’s, and Palm webOS devices to its smartphone lineup. Observers think AT&T is preparing to lose its exclusive U.S. contract for Apple, Inc.’s iPhone. AT&T also plans to encourage development of applications for its devices.
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AT&T has announced it will soon begin selling Android and Palm smartphones in the U.S., The company announced it will offer five new devices based on Google’s open-source operating system and two devices that use Palm’s webOS.
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Android
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Vizzeco (nee Koolu) a company that I work for, even invested their resources in porting Android to the Openmoko “FreeRunner” phone in an attempt to have the best of both worlds. Vizzeco wanted Android and the “openness” of being able to change Android to meet our (and our VAR’s) needs while maintaining application compatibility. Unfortunately while the FreeRunner served as a good platform for prototyping mobile phone operating systems, there were limitations to its manufacturing capacity which limited the usefulness to Vizzecos’ business.
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Although it’s the last major US carrier to launch Android phones, AT&T seems to be betting heavily on Google’s open source mobile platform.
According to Eldar Murtazin (who is, most of the time, right), AT&T has ordered 400,000 Motorola Backflip handsets, and it might even order more – which means that the carrier is hoping to sell them like hot cakes.
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The Backflip will try to surpass or at least equal the success of Cliq (Dext) and Droid with its own good looks and innovative features. The two previously released Android smatphones have really revitalized Motorola’s struggling handset business and they hope that Backflip will ride the momentum.
[...]
Motorola hasn’t announced the price and availability of the Backflip just yet. But there are reports that it would cost the same as Cliq and it will be available to consumers this first quarter of 2010.
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Sub-notebooks
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For all the hype about the rumored Apple Tablet, the ‘will they or won’t they’ about Microsoft’s Courier tablet, and a host of actual tablet announcements such as Lenovo’s IdeaPad U1 and theDell’s still unnamed slate, everyone seems to have forgotten one tiny, little fact: tablets have been around forever and have never, ever lived up to their buzz.
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Sounds like the UMPC To Me
Yet for all the hype, we’ve seen a device with similar functionality before, one that didn’t go over terribly well. Consider this: In July 2006, more than three years ago, I wrote a review of a device for InformationWeek that sounds surprisingly similar to what we can expect from tablet PCs. The product was the Samsung Q1, a precursor to the Netbook market, known as a UMPC or Ultra Mobile PC.
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Powering the litl is a 1.8-GHz Atom Z540 processor, with 1GB of 533-Mhz DDR2 RAM. The bright, two-toned chassis is sturdy, belying its dainty appearance. Its 12.1-inch screen is driven by Intel integrated graphics, and offers a 1280 x 800 resolution. It also weighs just over 3 pounds, making it very portable.
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Mary Lou Jepsen and her team at start-up Pixel Qi have their display-screen technology in several products being shown at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) and plan to put a DIY (do it yourself) screen kit on the market early this year.
Jepsen, formerly the head of Intel’s display division and chief technology officer at One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), has focused on lowering the battery drain by LCD screens and making them useful as e-readers in addition to normal computer use.
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Back in early October a tweet by someone I follow alerted me to the fact that the deadline for submissions to the 26th Chaos Communication Congress (26C3) was less than 48 hours away. In a lunch break I whipped up a quick proposal for a lecture called “After the Hype – The current state of One Laptop per Child and Sugar Labs”. A couple of weeks later I learned that my submission had been accepted.
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Symbian Foundation, responsible for development of the Symbian mobile OS, is readying its Symbian^3 and Symbian^4 versions of the platform, with version 3 likely to be feature-complete next month, a Symbian blogger said this week.
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Open-source software has freely available source code that is open for development by a broad community of developers.
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WSO2 is offering a Business Activity Monitor for its open source SOA offering, providing real-time visibility into processes, transactions and workflows.
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Yahoo has helped the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay to set up a Hadoop cluster lab in Mumbai by donating a cluster of servers running the open-source Hadoop software.
Apache Hadoop is an open-source distributed-computing project of the Apache Software Foundation that Yahoo supports.
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It’s no secret that Google is a big proponent of open source technology and the open web (to a degree), and it’s no secret that Chris Messina is too, either. It’s thus not terribly surprising that the man is joining the Mountain View Internet giant as its new Open Web Advocate.
Messina announced the news on his blog, and referred to his move as a very happy birthday present (he’s turning 29 today).
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Lucid Imagination, a commercial company dedicated to supporting open source Apache Lucene and Apache Solr search technologies, today announced the immediate availability of its LucidWorks Certified Distribution for Solr 1.4.
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FluidApp is what’s called a Single Site Browser and is a great way to pull key websites you use throughout the day out of your primary browser and onto your Mac dashboard as standalone applications. It’s super easy for anyone to use. The service has a thriving community of users – I have 10 Fluid browsers running on my computer right now and wouldn’t want to work without them. In fact, I’m writing this blog post from Movable Type inside a Fluid Browser.
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ESB can be downloaded for free under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL); Sun offers commercial support for the distribution, which also contains the latest version of Sun’s open development environment NetBeans (6.7.1) and the GlassFish application server (2.1.1) .
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OrangeHRM, The world’s leading Open Source HR Management solutions provider hit a new milestone. The company said today that it went past 300,000 downloads of its application.
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Here comes the first wave of products with “meaningful use” in their names. Open-source health IT company Mirth Corp., has an interoperability program called the Mirth Meaningful Use Exchange (Mirth MUx), and says the system now is being deployed at Redwood MedNet, a health information exchange in Northern California.
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In fact, new developers are joining the Asterisk community at a rate of nearly 60 percent annually, and the open source adoption rate in some countries is approaching 80 percent.
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WANdisco, a leading provider of infrastructure software for replication, scalability and high availability, today announced that Hyrum Wright has joined the company to lead its open source team.
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Open source enables companies to continuously improve their product utilizing partners and customers that use it the most.
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Mozilla
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Open source has dramatically reshaped the software development landscape. Yet is it enough to help propel the Web itself forward for the next decade?
That’s what Mozilla believes. After having been synonymous with open source for over a decade, thanks to its efforts behind the popular Firefox Web browser, Mozilla is now creating a new effort to help shaping the Internet’s development using the same sorts of techniques that have made open source a success.
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Mozilla is expected to push out an update for Web surfers who have already downloaded the first release candidate into their Nokia N900 or N810 devices. You can also download the RC2 directly from the mobile browser.
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The Mozilla developers have announced the availability of the first release candidate (RC1) for what will become version 3.6 of their open source Firefox web browser, code-named Namoroka. As with the previous development releases, Firefox 3.6 RC1 is based on version 1.9.2 of Mozilla’s Gecko web rendering platform. The RC1 release includes over 70 bug fixes made since the preceding beta, with three known issues affecting all platforms concerning tracing and web worker performance, crashes in FIPS mode and problems with Hotmail scroll arrows. A known issue also exists for Linux where some distributions will have trouble playing system sounds and another exists for Mac OS X where there is a problem opening local files with a space in the name.
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Intelestream, Inc., the leader in open source CRM consulting and developers of intelecrm™, the award winning online small business CRM solution, today announced the company has extended the fully functional free trial of intelecrm from 30 days to 60 days. Customers must mention promo code 60extCRM to qualify for the extended trial.
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Databases
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Ever since Oracle announced the acquisition of Sun Microsystems along with MySQL, all hell broke loose in the open source community. With EU questioning the deal, there is a war (of words) erupting inside the community with one side asking EU to block the deal or, at the very least, change the license to another open source license from GPL and the other side urging EU to allow the transaction to go through. Even though I have no love for Oracle, I think it is time to let the deal go through at least for the sake of Sun employees who are sitting there with their future unknown. At the same time, I am not unduly worried about the future of MySQL because I have complete confidence in the open source license of MySQL. Let me try to explain my position here in this post.
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CMS
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Movable Type was released as open source in December 2007. The clarity around this effort and the its community momentum has largely languished from what we see. The current MT 5 release messaging highlights the open source version as an option for developers. It does not seem to be positioned the same way other commercial open source options are. This is probably one of the reasons why ex-Movable Type product manager lead an effort to fork Movable Type Open Source into what is now know as Open Melody (news, site). The first release of Open Melody is due in Q1 of this year.
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In a world of widely available, top quality, open source and commercial content management systems, there’s no upside to using a bespoke system. All the advantages lie with the agency, not the client…which of course is why they try to sell them to you!
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Flemish commercial television channel VT4 is using Drupal on http://www.vt4.be. VT4 is part of ProSiebenSat.1 Media, the second-largest broadcasting group in Europe. Cool!
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Lodz, January 6th 2010 — The Midgard Project has released the seventh maintenance release of Midgard 8.09 Ragnaroek LTS. Ragnaroek LTS is a Long Term Support version of the free software content management framework.
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BSD
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I’m glad to see BSD Mag go free. Hopefully, more people will read BSD Mag now and become interested the BSD branch of operating systems. However, on the other hand, if there’s little income (ads etc), how can this be maintained?
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Openness
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WHEN a defendant’s DNA appears to match DNA found at a crime scene, the probability that this is an unfortunate coincidence can be central to whether the suspect is found guilty. The assumptions used to calculate the likelihood of such a fluke – the “random match probability” – are now being questioned by a group of 41 scientists and lawyers based in the US and the UK.
[...]
Without external scrutiny of the databases, doubts will remain, Mueller argues. “All of this… can be resolved by letting scientists have access to the data to do what they need to do.”
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In an unusual move, the International Society for Computational Biology announced this week that it has licensed the GenoCAD synthetic biology software from Virginia Tech in an effort to help ensure the long-term availability of the software under an open-source license.
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Programming
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Sharples: The big selling point of Java has been always choice. Because it’s an open specification driven by an open process (the JCP) and because there’s a very active Open Source Java ecosystem – there’s choice at every level. If you are a developer – there’s a choice of technology frameworks – there is no single vendor dictating how you should build your applications and what technologies and APIs you should use. But at the end of the day – it’s all Java and very familiar to a large number of developers — as a result there’s a huge developer base to tap into and a huge ecosystem of tools and applications designed to work with Java EE.
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The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, in cooperation with the firm named below, today announced a voluntary recall of the following products. Consumers should stop using recalled products immediately unless otherwise instructed.
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As I mentioned in an earlier post, I attended the first few days of the American Astronomical Society meeting this week. I went as a member of the press, as I have for the past few years. The press room is a fun place; lots of old friends, banter across the table, and, of course, the press releases.
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The health-care bill has no master plan for curbing costs. Is that a bad thing?
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Crime
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The former director and CEO of BetOnSports.com, a large offshore sports-wagering business, has been sentenced to 33 months in prison for his role in running the illegal gambling operation.
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The bodies of slain activists are piling up in Honduras. While it’s being kept quiet in most Honduran and international media, the rage is building among a dedicated network of friends spreading the word quickly with the tragic announcement of each compañero/a.
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Iraq has filed a lawsuit against private security firm Blackwater in a US court and will file another in Iraq, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said on Monday, amid fury over an American court dropping charges against five Blackwater guards.
“The US justice department has protested against this decision,” Maliki said, referring to the ruling last week to dismiss criminal charges against the guards, who were accused of killing 14 Iraqi civilians in an unprovoked attack in September 2007.
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The real hazard for Iraqis these days is cancer. Cancer is spreading like wildfire in Iraq. Thousands of infants are being born with deformities. Doctors say they are struggling to cope with the rise of cancer and birth defects, especially in cities subjected to heavy American and British bombardment.
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Security
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One of George W. Bush’s worst policies, the Military Commissions Act, has been reinforced by the Supreme Court as not just Constitutional (which it is, of course, not) but also allows for the administration to declare you a “suspected enemy combatant” and at that time, you cease to exist as a “person”. Per the Supreme Court, a suspected enemy combatant, even if they are an American citizen, does not have any rights: human, inherent, natural, or any legal standing whatsoever. Even if you are a normal American citizen walking down the street, if President Obama (or any other president after him) declares you a suspected enemy combatant, you will simply cease to exist as a legal entity in the United States at that time.
From then on, the federal government can arrest, torture, or do whatever they feel necessary with you. You or your family have no legal recourse – after all, in the eyes of the national government, you don’t exist. Obama’s promise to end torture still applies – after all, if they’re torturing “suspected enemy combatants”, legally speaking, they’re not torturing people.
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In the wake of the September 11 attacks, we had a post detailing why greater surveillance wouldn’t have helped prevent the attacks. The data was all there, it just wasn’t put together. And yet, in the time since then, the government has, in fact, continually focused on gathering more surveillance (warrantless wiretaps, anyone?), rather than on making better use of the data that is there. Back in 2002, in another post, we discussed how collecting more surveillance data in data retention schemes also made it harder to find the useful data and harder to connect the dots on the data that you had.
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Even were I to live within walking distance of the Queen’s Sandringham estate, it would never occur to me to spend any part of Christmas Day standing outside its church to take photographs of attendant members of the Royal Family. Yet, odd as such behaviour might seem – it’s not as if the media don’t produce film and pictures from the same event, saving everyone else the trouble – it is about as harmless as anything can be.
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Environment
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The first carbon tax to reduce the greenhouse gases from imports comes not between two nations, but between two states. Minnesota has passed a measure to stop carbon at its border with North Dakota.
To encourage the switch to clean renewable energy Minnesota plans to add a carbon fee of between $4 and $34 per ton of carbon dioxide emissions to the cost of coal-fired electricity, to begin in 2012, to discourage the use of coal power; the greatest source of greenhouse gas emissions.
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Four protesters held for 20 days in a Copenhagen prison have been released today after embarrassing the Danish state by impersonating world leaders at last month’s UN climate summit.
The four, from Greenpeace groups in Germany, Switzerland, Norway and Spain, have had to promise that they will return to Copenhagen for a trial later this year. They will be accompanied by a further five protesters who took part in the action, the details of which were passed to police by Greenpeace this week as part of the conditions of release. The nine have been charged with impersonating police officers, trespass, and falsifying documents.
They admit hiring limousines and evening dress and joining 120 world leaders at a state banquet in the Danish parliament.
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Finance
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The chairman of the House oversight committee turned the spotlight Friday once again on the government’s much-maligned bailout of American International Group, saying he would ask Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner to testify about whether company executives were told to withhold key details about how they were spending taxpayer money.
Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said he will hold a hearing later this month to examine the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s role in advising AIG to limit its disclosures about billions of dollars it paid to other firms during the height of the financial crisis. Geithner was head of the New York Fed at the time.
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Instead, with much greater force, enthusiasm, and recklessness, the financial system hurtled deeper into the Weimar chambers of commerce. Worse, most steps simply apply greater doses of precisely what caused the problems with debt overload and excessive monetary expansion. Worse doubly, most reforms grant even more power to those responsible for the breakdowns and fraud perpetration. The Untied States is being recognized internationally as a rogue nation moving headlong toward communism, run by powerful syndicates, whose most prominent foreign policy is explained by military hardware.
There is no shred of the capitalist structural makeup remotely evident outside of Asia. We see cronyism systems in the West, but worse, we see syndicate systems with alleged cords of criminality. The discredit of the central bank franchise system is barely noticed by the mainstream, which applauds the printing press monetary operators without recognition of the repeat of Weimar chapters. Just today, the New York Times formally posed the question of how the US Federal Reserve can prevent the next asset bubble when it missed the last one.
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China’s leaders do not. Determined to reverse the drain of top talent that accompanied its opening to the outside world over the past three decades, they are using their now ample financial resources — and a dollop of national pride — to entice scientists and scholars home.
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The United States is in a tough spot. As we dig ourselves out from a serious financial crisis and a deep recession, our very efforts to recover are exacerbating much more fundamental problems that our country has let fester for too long. Beyond our short-term worries, and behind many of today’s political debates, lurks the deeper challenge of coming to terms with America’s place in the global economic order.
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Censorship/Civil Rights
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The open-source whistleblower site, Wikileaks, which according to The National has “produced more scoops in its short life than the Washington Post has in the past 30 years,” has temporarily and voluntarily suspended its own service.
The staff of Wikileaks is making a direct plea on the Website for financial assistance, with a slogan proclaiming: “We protect the World – will you protect us?”
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Internet/Web Abuse/DRM
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Still, it’s not just the groups supporting the FCC on net neutrality that are taking inconsistent positions here. Remember how Comcast — which this latest ruling supports — has in the past used the argument that the FCC does have this mandate over them to try to avoid regulatory oversight in California. So neither side looks very good here. In fact, in a recent interview concerning the proposed Comcast/NBC merger, Comcast’s spokesperson highlighted that people shouldn’t be afraid of NBC getting preferential treatment because “existing law already prohibits any discrimination.” What existing law? Uh, the same one Comcast just convinced the court doesn’t exist. In other words, the law doesn’t exist when Comcast doesn’t like it, but if anyone says Comcast might violate neutrality, it insists the law suddenly does exist.
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FCC chairman Julius Genachowski has stated that the FCC acted based on the Four Freedoms outlined by the previous FCC administration in 2005. These principles, while not formal rules, have been used to govern net neutrality on a case-by-case basis:
1. Consumers are entitled to access the lawful Internet content of their choice.
2. Consumers are entitled to run applications and use services of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement.
3. Consumers are entitled to connect their choice of legal devices that do not harm the network.
4. Consumers are entitled to competition among network providers, application and service providers, and content providers.
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Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights
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Korea FTA and the ‘acquis communautaire’
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The Trade Commissioner-designate De Gucht will be grilled before the European Parliament INTA committee, Tuesday 12 January 9-12h. While the Council told me that ACTA was not about legislation the new.
[...]
The Korean FTA is a good example. What else than legislation is included in the IP chapter? De Gucht seems to be unaware of the problem that the trade portfolio is abused for “policy laundry”, and an international legislative process.
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A former adviser to Michael Jackson sued Fox News on Thursday for copyright infringement, claiming the cable channel aired portions of an interview with the singer’s ex-wife without proper payment or permission.
Dwayne Bailey, Founder and Managing Director of Translate.org.za 02 (2004)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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01.08.10
Posted in News Roundup at 9:53 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Linux is still a strong player in the little laptop market. MSI has announced that Novell’s new mashup of Moblin and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop will be available as an option on the upcoming 10-inch MSI U135 netbook. Smartbooks have finally arrived and are making a big splash at CES. HP has an Android-based smartbook with a 10-inch resistive touchscreen, and Lenovo announced its slim Skylight with a Web-oriented Linux OS. Both products ship with the 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon ARM processor.
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I use my Lenovo T400 Thinkpad as a work laptop but also as an experimental machine on which I put and delete various Linux distributions and software. At various times I’ve had Ubuntu, Fedora, and openSUSE on the computer, though most often Ubuntu, and that’s what is there now.
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What are the ten characteristics of a Linux Guru?
1. Knowledgeable in all major Linux distributions.
2. Configures Samba, DNS, Sendmail and Apache with no Googling.
3. Helps others solve their problems with Linux.
4. Blogs or writes about personal experiences with Linux.
5. Donates time and resources to at least one Linux project.
6. Uses Linux on a variety of computing hardware.
7. Hacks Linux-based devices for fun and/or profit.
8. Finds innovative ways to use Linux at work.
9. Is a Linux Evangelist.
10. Has a collection of very early (Kernel 1.x or older) Linux CDs.
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Linux
91% (210 votes)
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Kernel Space
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Linux 2.6.33 will have new and improved drivers for Wi-Fi chips by Intel, Ralink and Realtek. Several drivers for old Wi-Fi hardware have been moved to the staging area and will probably soon be discarded. New additions include various LAN chip drivers and several improvements to the network stack.
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It retails at USD99 (GBP62) and includes a CD containing example programs and installation software for both Windows and Linux operating systems.
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Graphics Stack
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Version 1.7.4 of the X.Org Server has been released this morning. This point release continues to bring new bug-fixes to the X Server 1.7 series branch since its release last year. All major development work continues to be focused on X Server 1.8, which is expected for release in March.
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There’s just one month left until the Free and Open-source Software Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM) takes place once again in Brussels, Belgium. Like in past years, there will be an X.Org development room where various talks about X will be held, but this year it has turned into a one-day affair. Even with having half the time as past years to talk about X, the schedule is not even full at this point.
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Applications
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Even though in the world of Twitter there are a lot of fantastic, feature-full programs for the Twitter power user, that’s not exactly what I, a simple Twitter user, is looking for.
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Opera is aiming for broader adoption on Linux set-top boxes with some new features in its Web Widgets system, which has been enhanced on Linux to support interaction from TV remote control devices. The Linux SDK also supports hardware accelerated rendering and DirectFB.
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Atom Developers’ Program — a way for developers to adapt old applications to take advantage of the netbook explosion. Consumers will be given beta to first storefront of AppUp Center, one-stop shop for users to find netbook apps for Windows and Linux.
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Intel is taking the same approach with netbooks, most of which are powered by its Atom processors. AppUp, which was launched here at CES 2010, has a number of different applications, and more will be added every day. The AppUp software will now be installed on every Atom-equipped netbook, and for those who already have an Eee PC or Wind, you can download the software for Windows or Linux.
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Instructionals
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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Today, KDE has released the first release candidate of the next version of the KDE Software Compilation (KDE SC). KDE SC 4.4 Release Candidate 1 provides a testing base for identifying bugs in the upcoming KDE Software Compilation 4.4, with its components the KDE Plasma Workspaces, the Applications powered by KDE, and the KDE Development Platform.
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So, I needed an application that could load a couple of pictures, showing two pictures side-by-side for visual comparison and at the same time presenting the more important meta-data attributes such as focal length, exposure time, ISO and aperture.
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I’m Mathias, a new contributor to KDE Games. During the last year I spent some time to code on Granatier, a new game which will be released with KDE SC 4.4 and I would like to give a short introduction.
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GNOME Desktop
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Contributors to the WebKitGTK+ project recently gathered for a hackfest to improve the open source HTML renderer’s integration with the GTK+ toolkit. They added some cache control APIs, improved support for HTML5 video, form persistence, and other features.
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some guys over at TechCrunch UK (or something like that) made a review of 8 linux distributions which ships KDE as their default graphical desktop.
the first one? Slackware…
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New Releases
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The Elive team announced today another unstable release of their Elive Live CD Linux distribution, now at version 1.9.56. Being powered by Debian, the Enlightenment E17 desktop environment and Linux kernel 2.6.30, the new development version of Elive brings support for 3G phones, the latest version of Adobe’s Flash Player and installer fixes. Without any further ado, let’s take a closer look at the changes brought by Elive 1.9.56:
· Updated Linux kernel packages to version 2.6.30;
· Added 300 new operators in order to support more 3G phones;
· Automatic connection of a 3G phone, at boot;
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Red Hat Family
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The project chair has appointed Red Hat employee Colin Walters to the board. John Poelstra begins the year with open feedback to the board’s work.
With Red Hat developer Colin Walters, the last open position on the Fedora board has been filled. John Poelstra, who was appointed to the board by chair Paul Frields in June of 2009, nevertheless regretted in his blog the less than enthusiastic participation of the board. Halfway through his term, he writes, he wanted to evaluate its accomplishments. The two big themes were the Fedora trademark (as we reported) and the question of Fedora’s mission, vision and target audience. Poelstra opened the discussion on the board mailing list in October 2009 after the issues apparently emerged in a board meeting shortly before.
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Debian Family
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Social media and social networking are huge now-a-days, with Twitter, Facebook and the like being hugely successful at keeping friends and family in touch. Now only that, but social networks are huge for charities, with many causes being supported and heavily promoted via social networking. Corporations and business use social networking too to promote their products and services to users in a manner which is so relevant that they tend not to annoy as is generally the case with more corporate advertising.
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To that end, Wind River has duly launched VxWorks 6.8. VxWorks is Wind River’s home-grown real-time operating system. It stands beside Wind River Linux 3.0, the company’s real-time Linux variant, and the new commercialized variant of the Android Linux-for-handsets that Wind River announced a month ago.
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At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Sony has introduced its new dash “personal application viewer” featuring built in Wi-Fi, stereo speakers, a USB port and a 7-inch touch screen. According to Engadget, the Dash runs the Chumby OS, an open source Linux-based operating system.
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Sony says the Linux-based wireless device will have access to over 1,000 applications including YouTube and other social apps – it also seems the company is intending to open app development up, too.
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EMC subsidiary Iomega is readying a WiFi-enabled, Linux-based network-attached storage (NAS) device that costs $100. The Iomega iConnect Wireless Data Station has no storage of its own, but acts as a wireless hub that shares data stored on devices hooked up to its four USB 2.0 ports.
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As such, Skiff showed us a total of four different devices accessing its content: a color e-reader prototype as well as Skiff apps running on a Palm Pre, Viliv MID, and of course the Linux-based black and white e-reader launching sometime this year.
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Texas Instruments (TI) announced an e-book reader development platform for Linux and Android, based on its OMAP3621 system-on-chip. The eBook Development Platform is equipped with an E Ink electrophoretic EPD display, TI’s new TPS6518x EPD power management IC, plus an integrated WiLink chip (WiFi, Bluetooth, and FM) and 3G support.
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The GENIVI alliance, of which Visteon is a part, aims to provide a standard Linux automotive infotainment platform, so developers can easily build for multiple cars. Visteon showed off a GENIVI system running off an Intel ARM processor, and powering four different LCDs, an instrument cluster, navigation, and two rear seat monitors, simultaneously.
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Korenix Unveils JetBox 3300 series Compact Embedded Linux Computers with DIO, Isolated Serial Ports and -40~80oC wide operating temp. for Front-End Controller Applications in Severe Industrial Environments!
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By contrast, the Picowatt lets individuals set up a home energy monitoring themselves. The smart plugs, which fit over existing outlets, are essentially mini Wi-Fi routers running Linux, each capable of gathering data and controlling devices. People can view data, such as historical energy usage, from a Wi-Fi-enabled PC or through a Facebook application that can be operated from a smart phone.
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The Rochester, New York start-up says the smart plug, about the size of an Apple AirPort, will be available in April of this year for $79 and will be sold directly to consumers. The smart plugs fit over existing outlets, act as tiny Wi-Fi routers running Linux.
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Phones
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While the Edelweiss didn’t find a “suitor” and just faded into the night without any success, the Monolith has some promise. Especially now that it is being exhibited at CES under the name “Else Emblaze”, or “Else Intuition”. It was built by Sharp and has a Linux-based touchscreen OS licensed by Access, and offers quite a few respectable features, not to mention adding in the uniqueness factor.
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The Maemo 5 OS experience to me is no longer a minimalist thing, but is rather a clear canvas to paint your entire digital lifestyle.
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Android
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The new Nexus One is a sleek, awesome handset, but the most important ingredient in touchscreen smartphones is software. The screen is just a canvas that software paints on, and Android 2.1 is a work of art.
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Lenovo unveiled a Qualcomm Snapdragon-based Android smartphone aimed for a 1H 2010 release in China, says eWEEK. Meanwhile, Dell officially announced a version of the Mini 3 Android smartphone aimed at AT&T’s U.S. network, and showed off a MID-like Android “slate” prototype.
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Sub-notebooks
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The way the company both hits the $99 price point and makes a little profit at the same time is to a) ship with free, open-source Linux and b) offer minimum specs but actually build the laptops with whatever the cheapest components are at any given time.
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Over the last 12 months, netbook and mobile Linux has made massive advances in features and install base. This is primarily thanks to two netbook distributions – Moblin and Canonical’s Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR).
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All laptop users have something in common: we want our device’s batteries to last longer. Whether it’s for the daily commute or a long flight, an extra 30 minutes of power means an extra 30 minutes of entertainment.
If you’re running a Linux-based distribution on your netbook, there’s a lot you can do to squeeze every last negatively charged ion from your power source. Here we’re going to cover the best techniques that we’ve discovered.
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In terms of overall performance, I am intensely happy with Ubuntu on this machine. I was worried about the Atom CPUs being sluggish, but I’ve had no problems whatsoever. Having 2 gigabytes of memory probably helps, but this netbook can even run Windows XP in VirtualBox without flinching. That’s a lot more than I can say for the circa-2004 Pentium IV Inspiron laptop that my Latitude is replacing.
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In its laptop incarnation, the device behaves as a conventional PC running Windows 7, the particular flavor of which (Home, Professional, or Ultimate) was not specified. But the entire viewiing screen can be completely detached from the keyboard base – smoothly, by hand, no tools required! – and restarted in a Linux-quick 3 seconds. It is then an independent touch-screen tablet operating on the Skylight OS, with the laptop base as a wi-fi hotspot.
This is certainly a spectacular way to bring new meaning to the term “dual boot,” but I’d like to suggest it’s a whole lot more than that. Lenovo is an independent manufacturer now, but it was not long ago that it was simply the PC hardware arm of IBM, presumably fully ordained as an OEM for Microsoft Windows.
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The Linux user interface looks a bit like Google Android thanks to the widgets that pop up on your desktop. But the Freescale tablet is designed to be used with a stylus, not a fingertip.
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No self-respecting geek enjoys dealing with closed-standard Word documents or Exchange servers. What kind of bizarro world is this where engineers are not only going crazy over Microsoft’s latest proprietary API, but actively denouncing its open-standard competitor?
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VMWare appears to be positioning itself to provide the virtualized or cloud-based alternative to Oracle, Microsoft and IBM. This is a very interesting approach, and it will be interesting to see it play out over time. With Oracle and IBM taking a more systems-centric approach, meaning they are both providing the storage, computing and software stacks in the form of a system, this leaves Oracle’s traditional hardware partners out in the cold (HP, Dell, EMC, Netapp, etc.) along with budding potential partner Cisco. VMWare may envision themselves providing the Linux-based alternative to Microsoft in this game of strategic positioning.
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EtherPad is a collaborative in-browser text editor. AppJet launched the product in the fall of 2008 with both commercial and free (limited to eight concurrent editors) versions, and it quickly gained popularity in the first half of 2009. When Google unveiled its own real-time collaboration system Wave in June, comparisons were inevitable. Many users found EtherPad’s interface simpler to use and easier to understand, however, so it was no great surprise when Google announced that it had purchased AppJet and EtherPad on December 4. The AppJet engineers would work on Wave, ostensibly making it as easy to use as EtherPad itself.
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It’s my pleasure to introduce to you the single greatest Launchpad planning achievement for 2010: the roadmap.
For the last few months we’ve been working on bridging the gap between the Ubuntu distribution and the upstreams that it’s made from: making it easier for patches, translations, and bug reports to flow between Ubuntu users, Ubuntu developers, and upstream developers.
We’ve been asking users what they want and trying really hard to listen to them. And, of course, since we’re Free Software now, all of our discussion, development and planning is out in the open.
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Fog Computing
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I have a feeling that the desktop operating system as we know it is on its last leg. The reason I make such a bold statement is that cloud computing will replace our fat, bloated, virus-riddled, failure-prone desktop with something far more agile and elegant: A lightweight browser-based system. This sounds like good news to me. I’ve waited for a server-centric world for several years now and the time is almost upon us. In this brave new cloud world, you’ll have access to all of your documents, music, data, pictures and applications regardless of the device in your hands.
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An open-source Web-based operating system called eyeOS is getting a big boost from IBM. The computer giant has begun selling high-end mainframe servers with eyeOS pre-installed, hoping the operating system will entice customers who are hesitant about using cloud computing.
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Mozilla
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This add-on allows you to edit text from any “textarea” on a Web page in an external editor. Once it’s installed, you can configure the extension to use whatever your favorite editor happens to be. In my case Vim (GVIM, in this case), but you could also use Gedit, Kate, or any other editor that you prefer.
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Want to help the Mozilla Project produce the best Firefox possible, but have no developer skills at all? Can you point? Click? Read instructions? Then you’re ready to suit up as a Firefox Test Pilot. Crashes not required.
If you’ve ever felt like you want to give back to the Firefox project, or if you feel like Firefox needs improvement, the Test Pilot project is the the easiest way to provide useful feedback to Mozilla and put those browsing hours to work.
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For the last few years, Firefox has been the alternative browser of choice. But could it be running out of steam, wonders Simon Brew…
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2009 wraps up another year of terrific Firefox growth! Roughly keeping pace with previous years, Firefox grew 40% worldwide. Two regions in particular continued adopting Firefox at a breakneck pace — South America (64%) and Asia (73%).
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Databases
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As you can see, he believes the GPL is sufficient, that the community can develop powerful programs with the license, and that there is an important difference between the GPL plus exceptions and changing to an Apache license, which is what Monty has been suggesting. So if you see further FUD from Monty about the GPL or how rms allegedly agrees that the GPL is insufficient, here is your rebuttal.
I trust Monty will remove or rewrite the misrepresentation on the Save MySQL page, so people are not misled into signing this petition due to the false belief that Mr. Stallman supports the campaign.
Some of you may have signed that petition thinking Mr. Stallman wanted you to do so. A lot of people would sign a petition if they thought Mr. Stallman wanted them to. If so, you may wish to let Monty know you have changed your mind and wish to remove your name. You may also wish to let the EU Commission know about the change.
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This tweet from former MySQL AB CEO Mårten Mickos caught my eye. It shows a trend of increased demand for MySQL and PostgresSQL expertise while job postings on job websites for those with Oracle and Ingres expertise declined.
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The new year has barely started, but it’s already become apparent that at least one dire prediction about 2010 isn’t going to come to pass.
IPv4 address space will not be exhausted in 2010 as the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) had once forecast. But that doesn’t mean that network managers or even consumer electronics vendors should sit on the sidelines. This week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the American Registry for Internet Names (ARIN) is advocating that vendors start making the move to IPv6 now.
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Security
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A TSA agent was arrested on January 3rd in Terminal One at LAX, a source told NBCLA. He had just gotten off duty and was behaving erratically, saying, “I am god, I’m in charge.”
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If you’re wondering who the strange looking fella’ to the right is; he is the new face of/logo for the Identity and Passport Service’s latest ID card marketing campaign.
The fact that he appears to be a fingerprint leaves Big Brother Watch in the strange position of not being sure whether to laugh or cry.
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Yet another domino in the RSA encryption scheme has fallen with the announcement Thursday that cryptographers have broken 768-bit keys using the widely used public-key algorithm.
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Heartland Payment Systems will pay up to US$60 million to issuers of Visa credit and debit cards for losses they incurred from a 2008 data breach at the large payment processor.
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Environment
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This year will be one of the top five warmest years globally since records began 150 years ago, according to figures compiled by the Met Office.
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Finance
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The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, during its $180 billion bailout of American International Group, Inc., instructed AIG to omit details of its purchase of certain toxic assets from a December 24, 2008, Securities and Exchange Commission filing, according to e-mails between the company and the Fed released Thursday.
Using bailout money provided by the Fed, AIG paid a number of banks 100 percent of the face value of credit-default swaps, contracts tied to subprime home loans, at a time when other institutions were negotiating deep discounts for the paper. The names of the banks were also omitted from the SEC filing.
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The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, then led by Timothy Geithner, told American International Group Inc. to withhold details from the public about the bailed-out insurer’s payments to banks during the depths of the financial crisis, e-mails between the company and its regulator show.
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The problem with such a game is that non-cash “earnings” aren’t money and while they look good on the balance sheet if they don’t materialize later on you’re sunk! My call at the time was that they wouldn’t materialize and WaMu would indeed be sunk, and it was.
This is a bit different, in that nobody is (yet) claiming that Goldman doesn’t have the money. What’s being alleged here is that they have effectively pilfered the public Treasury and then paid that out as bonuses, rather than doing with it as Treasury intended and their shareholders were entitled to, which is to use the capital to rebuild the firm’s foundation and strengthen it against future potential losses.
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PR/AstroTurf
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Glaxo says they won’t have control over the content of the film and won’t even be pushing to make sure Alli gets mentioned.
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Censorship/Civil Rights
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The body responsible for the .uk internet addresses disconnected over 1,200 websites without any oversight from a court. The much-publicised action last month was based only on police assertions about criminal activity on the sites.
Two Nominet executives have told technology law podcast OUT-LAW Radio that it severed the connection between 1,219 domain names and the sites that lay behind them without the kind of court order that web hosting companies would usually demand.
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Yeah. Like that will work. Trying to suppress information online doesn’t work, no matter what law you put in place. I’m reminded of the convicted German murderer, who is demanding that information on his conviction be removed from Wikipedia under a similar type of law. All that did was call a lot more attention to the story.
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Last year, we wrote about the rather troubling situation in Chicago, involving prosecutors who were given information from the famed Medill Innocence Project (which consist of journalism students who examine potential wrongful conviction cases) indicating a wrongful conviction. Rather than use the new evidence, the prosecutors began a campaign against the Innocence Project subpoenaing a ton of information that has no bearing on the case whatsoever, but seem designed to intimidate the journalism students.
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Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights
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Generally speaking, the subject of a photograph does not have copyrights therein. These accrue to the photographer, unless there is a contract to the contrary.
Actress Vanessa Hudgens has apparently been shocked to find full frontal, nude images of herself on the Internet, specifically on the site of moejackson.com, but as tends to happen with such things, the images are already available more widely.
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That a U.S. senator must ask a federal agency to share information regarding a proposed and “classified” international anti-counterfeiting accord the government has already disclosed is alarming. Especially when the info has been given to Hollywood, the recording industry, software makers and even some digital-rights groups.
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During the last two decades, the Swedish band Rednex have sold more than 10 million records, with number one hits in eight countries including Germany and the UK. Today the band, known by most people for the single “Cotton Eye Joe,” released their first single in 18 months. They chose to share it via The Pirate Bay.
[...]
The Pirate Bay is currently promoting the new Rednex single on its frontpage, which guarantees exposure to millions of downloaders. Rednex believes that new forms of distribution will eventually make the record labels redundant.
“We think that this is undoubtedly the future method of releasing music. Within 12 years all the record companies will be extinct and the copy-free system will rule, no matter what anyone tries to do about it. It is inevitable and we are simply adapting to the coming reality. We admire the file-sharing communities and the unrestricted spread of information, as this will ultimately lead to great all-round benefits,” they add.
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According to TorrentFreak, last summer’s Star Trek movie was the “most pirated movie of 2009.” So it seems that Paramount Pictures was prescient when it gave testimony before the FCC that used Star Trek as an illustrative example of how “Internet piracy” is poised to devastate Hollywood and (though the nexus here is less than clear) undermine residential broadband in America.
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Buskers at SkyTrain stations in Vancouver are about to get an Olympic-sized price hike as TransLink negotiates a deal with the Society of Composers, Music Publishers and Authors of Canada – the Canadian body that collects licensing fees on copyrighted music.
The arrangement, set to be finalized by Feb. 1, will cost the transit service $880 per station per year and the hefty price hike will almost certainly result in higher licensing fees for buskers. Right now, TransLink buskers pay an annual licence fee of $75.
Dwayne Bailey, Founder and Managing Director of Translate.org.za (2004)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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Posted in News Roundup at 12:18 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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1. Windows – 58.70%
2. Linux – 19.45%
3. Macintosh – 18.32%
4. iPhone – 1.70%
5. SunOS – 0.75%
6. (not set) – 0.43%
7. Android – 0.20%
8. iPod – 0.20%
9. SymbianOS – 0.07%
10. BlackBerry – 0.06%
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Linux has its own advantages. It sure is geeky, it is powerful and now you can even do your bit to help the deteriorating environment. The folks at lesswatts.org have devised a number of ways to save power with Linux. The results have been obtained from continued stress-testing on all mobile, desktop and server machines and have been favorable so far. The kernel used for these tests are the 2.6.22 version but they are hoping that the power-saver features will go into the kernel 2.6.23.
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In some respects, it is a little surprising that, given the intense business interest in free and open source software, Australia’s national Linux conference only took up the topic as a separate mini-conference last year.
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Server
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The first thing that jumps out at you is that they’re almost all based on open-source software. For example, the operating systems behind Twitter, LinkedIn, and MySpace are all Linux. Facebook uses F5 Big-IP, which is a family of Linux-based appliances that also perform network management.
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If asked to name significant Linux organizations, Fujitsu Ltd. might not be a company that comes immediately to mind. But to underestimate the value Fujitsu brings to the Linux ecosystem would be erroneous: the world’s fourth-largest IT services provider and Japan’s top IT company has a big stake in Linux, and some big-name Linux customers.
Just how big? Currently, Fujitsu is the number-two server vendor contributor to Linux kernel development, behind IBM. Their Linux deployments include the replacement of existing mainframes at the Japan Ministry of Justice and the Tokyo Stock Exchange–systems that are recognized as being among the strongest Linux deployments in the world in terms of size and reliability.
So how did Fujitsu, a company with a strong history selling mainframes with proprietary operating systems, become such a leader in the Linux ecosystem? Like many other vendors, it was the customer who guided the way.
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Kernel Space
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In this podcast comprookie attempts to describe, the relationship between Pulseaudio and Alsa.
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Graphics Stack
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Nouveau is now used by default as the driver for NVIDIA cards, when proprietary driver is not in use [2].
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Instructionals
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KDE
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The challenge here for KDE is: what do we have that can also be spread out across the spectrum?
Not everything will move very much. I don’t see Digikam making the leap to smart phones, for instance, nor should it try to in my opinion. That’s not the point of Digikam, and trying to do so would probably ruin it.
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As we move from 2009 to 2010, KDE’s source code is in a sort of odd limbo itself. The majority of our code is in a subversion revision control installation hosted on svn.kde.org, but more and more of the code we produce is ending up on gitorious.org. The idea is to eventually have everything moved over, with the exception of translations (and documentation?) which will stay in svn for the sake of the translation teams workflow.
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This one should be really short, because it’s more of an open ended question and some food for thought than a long exploration of a tangly topic. That question is: are we doing enough to ensure that projects that start to wobble a bit don’t fall off the rails, crash and burn on us?
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Creating your own OS can be quite a daunting task that requires a lot of computer knowledge. I found a site that may interest you, Custom NimbleX2 is an open-source project that allows even newbies in computing to create their own Linux OS.
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Debian Family
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One of my actions from the recent Ubuntu UK team meeting was to organise a evening out on the Real Ale Train.
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To enjoy Spotify on an Ubuntu PC, first install the Wine software. Left-click on the Applications menu and then Add/Remove. Select All available applications in the Show menu and type wine in the box to the right.
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The manual is first expected to appear on the 10th of February, with the Alpha release of Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx. The Final release will be ready on the 29th of April. The manual will be released and revised every six months and will be available as a pdf file.
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The second Alpha release of Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx is due for release next Thursday (14th January) but what can you expect to find inside it?
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Sony’s Dash, unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show on Wednesday, typifies the increasing number of hybrid products being made possible on small screens with internet connectivity.
Its mother is the digital photo frame (DPF) and its father could be a bedside alarm clock, but it has an elder brother in the Chumby , which seems to have had a big influence on the Dash.
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In addition to embedded database expertise, Trident Infosol offers services for popular embedded development tools and operating systems, such as Linux.
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Q: What does the choice of ARM over x86 mean in practical terms?
A: Well, it affects the software selection, most obviously. Most Linux distributions’ support for the ARM chipset is minimal: Ubuntu, for example, only supports two flavors of ARM chips, and the known issues list is grim reading. Which is likely why Qualcomm (who’s been hiring for this), Lenovo or both seem to have created their own flavor of Linux, with “widgets” and a task oriented interface.
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Android
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We are already aware that Android is likely to enter our home as the back-end software running our appliances but it would be more interesting to see the development of Android on MIPS as it would let Android drives more “home entertainment” appliances.
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Google open source guru Chris DiBona has acknowledged that the company’s freewheeling approach to building a mobile operating system can cause a few headaches for developers, with unfamiliar versions of its Android OS appearing on new phones with little warning. But, he says, that’s not developers’ main concern – nor Google’s.
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I’m trying to figure out just what “principle” that might be, because there doesn’t seem to be any legal principle. It’s hard to argue that there’s any moral principle either, since “nexus” is a word that’s been around since well before Philip K. Dick used it. In fact, the only matter of principle I can think of is the one where someone demands money for something where they clearly have no right to it and have done nothing to deserve it. Like demanding a big company pay up because it has a product named sorta similar to something your dad wrote decades ago.
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Last night, during his keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer showed off a prototype for a new HP Slate computer running on Windows 7. It was supposed to be an Apple-stealing moment and it was Microsoft’s moment, which is probably why Hewlett-Packard has not yet publicly mentioned that it is working on another tablet/slate computer that is running on Android. You know, Google’s mobile operating system.
HP did announce an Android-powered netbook yesterday, but that has a keyboard. A source who has seen a prototype of HP’s Android Slate says it looks just like the Windows-powered one Ballmer held last night (see image below), maybe a little smaller. “It is almost identical in every respect to the one he showed off except for the OS,” says my source.
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Unfortunately, by simply shoehorning the Windows 7 interface (albeit a great desktop/notebook UI) into an interesting and relatively novel form factor, the announcement of HP’s slate was just a big yawn.
[...]
On the other hand, the use of Ubuntu opens up these slates to a wide variety of free educational software with a growing body of touch- and stylus-enabled software. Add to that (or, more correctly, subtract from that) the licensing cost of Windows 7 and suddenly these tablets get cheaper, more robust in terms of software offerings, and easier for digital natives to use given a more appropriate interface for the device and suddenly a somewhat disappointing device becomes far more compelling.
I’m convinced, as are most other tech bloggers, that the tablet form factor is here to stay. This is a good thing. However, what we really need are interfaces that exploit the tablet rather than highlight its compromises. Moblin and NBR are mighty fine places to start.
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Even Google’s involvement with its own open-source Android operating system could inhibit free development around it going forward. For Google, one of the big benefits that all Android phones bring is steering users into the company’s lucrative search-and-ad ecosystem. With the release of today’s Nexus One Android-based phone — which takes the company’s commercial stake in Android handsets to two (Droid being the first) — could Android itself be increasingly influenced by Google’s proprietary interests? Just as Microsoft leverages Windows for the benefit of its own applications, Google could do the same with Android. The Open Android Alliance is already developing versions of Android devoid of Google applications due to these types of concerns.
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Dell today announced it has chosen AT&T as its exclusive U.S. carrier for its upcoming lineup of Android-based smartphones, known as the Mini 3. Dell has already chosen China Mobile, Vodafone and Claro Brazil as partners outside the U.S.
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One of the cooler software announcements to already come out of CES 2010 is from Chevy and OnStar regarding the upcoming 2011 Chevy Volt, their all electric vehicle. The new Android-based application gives Volt owners added control over their vehicles with options like monitoring charging status, unlocking doors, and more. There have been rumors for some time that these types of applications would be coming but now those rumors have been confirmed with their unveiling at CES 2010.
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It appears Android-equipped devices are enjoying a coming out party at this week’s Consumer Electronics Show. Major hardware manufacturers, including Dell, HTC, MIPS Technologies and Motorola, have announced plans to launch consumer products, including smartphones and TV set top boxes, which feature the Android mobile operating system.
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Palm
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Palm announced today that it will jump from Sprint to Verizon when it releases two new phones on January 25.
Speaking to reporters at the Consumer Elelctronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada, Palm Chairman and chief executive Jon Rubinstein said the new phones – the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus – “will be available exclusively on the Verizon wireless network.”
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Palm’s CES 2010 press conference didn’t offer nearly as much fanfare as last year’s event, where the company unveiled the Palm Pre. But Palm did announce new phones, a software update, and new partnerships, proving that this once-struggling handset company is not just a one-trick pony.
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Verizon Wireless will start selling improved versions of Palm’s Pre and Pixi smartphones later this month under an exclusive arrangement with the handset maker.
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This morning Palm announced a slew of product updates, including two new handsets, updates to the webOS platform, and a carrier relationship with Verizon. This afternoon I got some hands-on time with the Palm Pre Plus and Pixi Plus and tested the new video capture app.
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It’s speedier, thanks to the double RAM that’s been added, and noticeably easier flipping between apps and programs. The screen is responsive, but no more responsive than it was before. All in all, it’s the same Pre experience you’ve had before, just faster. Oh, and guess you’ll have to fork out for a TouchStone now.
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2009 was a year of intense renovation. Many of the projects we began in 2009 will launch in the first half of 2010. Our goal with these projects is to make the Second Life user experience more intuitive, more accessible, more reliable and more connected to the social web. We must reduce dramatically the “Time to Delight” (i.e., the time it takes to get to that wonderful “AH HA!!” moment in Second Life) from several hours to several minutes. This will benefit both user acquisition and retention. We’ve also been working on improving the support we give to the ecosystem of content creators, merchants, landowners and solution providers since they/you are the lifeblood of Second Life. Finally, we’ve been working on platform projects to improve stability, reliability and quality of the Second Life experience which is top-of-mind for all Residents.
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The idea of Grendel is to provide an internal (behind-the-firewall) REST-based web service to keep a user’s data encrypted and ensure its integrity when the user isn’t using it. Grendel uses OpenPGP to store data, with the user’s password encrypting an OpenPGP keyset. That model makes it easy for a web site to store data safely and only decrypt it when the user is logged into the site. Since only the user has their password, once they log out, their data is safe, even if the web site’s database is compromised or stolen. Of course this isn’t an infallible protection — there is no such thing — and in particular it doesn’t protect against web site developers acting in bad faith. It does, though, protect against an attacker getting access to all the secrets stored by users in one step.
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Boxee
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Media center software maker Boxee announced the public launch of its Boxee Beta software, today, after only a month in private beta.
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In addition to releasing the first full beta of the application, the company is announcing several new content partnerships. New partners include TV.com, Blip. tv, gaming powerhouse IGN, and the upcoming film The Wolfman.
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Now that the Boxee Box by D-Link is officially official, and the NVIDIA Tegra 2 chipset is the same, Boxee can finally confirm that yes, they’ve used the low-power 1080p-capable Tegra T20 chip in their upcoming media streamer. According to a new post on the Boxee blog, the dual-core ARM Cortex A9 CPU means the Boxee Box is capable of Adobe Flash 10.1 decoding, HD streaming and local 1080p playback.
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Databases
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When I co-signed the letter objecting to Oracle’s planned purchase of MySQL 1 (along with the rest of Sun), some free software supporters were surprised that I approved of the practice of selling license exceptions which the MySQL developers have used. They expected me to condemn the practice outright. This article explains what I think of the practice, and why.
Selling exceptions means that the copyright holder of the code releases it to the public under a free software license, then lets customers pay for permission to use the same code under different terms, for instance allowing its inclusion in proprietary applications.
We must distinguish the practice of selling exceptions from something crucially different: proprietary extensions or proprietary versions of a free program. These two activities, even if practiced simultaneously by one company, are different issues. In selling exceptions, the same code that the exception applies to is available to the general public as free software. An extension or a modified version that is only available under a proprietary license is proprietary software, pure and simple, and no better than any other proprietary software. This article is concerned with cases that involve strictly and only the sale of exceptions.
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In fact, PostgreSQL as a project is pretty healthy, and shows how vulnerable projects like MySQL are to the winds of change. PostgreSQL could die tomorrow, if a huge group of its contributors dropped out for one reason or another and the remainder of the community didn’t take up the slack. But that’s exceedingly unlikely. The existing model for PostgreSQL development ensures that no single entity can control it, it can’t be purchased and if someone decides to fork the project, the odds are that the remaining community would be strong enough to continue without a serious glitch.
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BSD
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FreeNAS 0.7 is based on FreeBSD 7.2 and includes a lot of file sharing protocols. This way it can talk to all major operating systems: GNU/Linux, the BSDs, Windows, and Mac OS X. FreeNAS also supports several types of media streaming protocols and can act like an iTunes server. In addition, it supports iSCSI and different levels of software RAID. All of this can be managed from the web interface so users don’t have to know the FreeBSD commands under the hood.
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Openness
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The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, will on Thursday launch a website hosting hundreds of sets of data – including previously unreleased information – about the capital, as part of a new scheme intended to encourage people to create “mashups” of data to boost the city’s transparency and accountability.
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What had changed? His contact told him that Google was placing a new emphasis on getting the social web right, in a way that is good for the web. That month Google publicly launched a campaign that had run informally inside the company for two years, called the Data Liberation Front. It works across departments to enable users to remove their data from Google services, a key part of the vision of an Open Distributed Web that Messina has been working toward.
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SINCE its economic reform began in 1978, China has gone from being a poor developing country to the second-largest economy in the world. China has also emerged from isolation to become a political superpower. Its meteoric rise has been one of the most important global changes of recent years: the rise of China was the most-read news story of the decade, surpassing even 9/11 and the Iraq war.
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Security
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Home Secretary Alan Johnson has confirmed that the National Identity Register contains National Insurance numbers and answers to ‘shared secrets’.
In a revelation that is likely to intensify the arguments over the privacy implications of the database, Johnson claimed the NI numbers have been included to “aid identity verification checks for identity cards and, in time, passports”.
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The vetting and barring scheme – requiring millions of adults to be given criminal records checks before being allowed to work with children – risks giving schools “false confidence”, according to Sir Roger Singleton.
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Anti-terrors laws are still being used by a Lancashire council to snoop on residents.
In the past year “static surveillance” including video was used five times by Preston Council to spy on families suspected of housing benefit fraud and to gain evidence of the “illegal dumping of waste” at a city supermarket.
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Environment
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A new, comprehensive analysis of mountaintop mining shows that it radically alters the hydrology of its surroundings, ruining streams and the people and ecosystems they support.
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Climate sceptics are failing to understand the most basic meteorology – that weather is not the same as climate, and single events are not the same as trends
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Finance
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc was sued on Thursday by an Illinois pension fund seeking to recover billions of dollars of bonuses and other compensation being awarded for 2009, saying the payouts harm shareholders.
In a lawsuit filed in New York state supreme court in Manhattan on behalf of shareholders, the Central Laborers’ Pension Fund said Goldman had by September 25 set aside nearly $17 billion for compensation and might pay out more than $22 billion for the year. It said this “highlights the complete breakdown” of corporate oversight.
The lawsuit contends that Goldman’s revenue for the year was artificially inflated by government bailouts of the banking industry and the insurer American International Group Inc, as well as a change in Goldman’s fiscal year.
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In what is the most ridiculous move yet in this ongoing saga, the CFO of AIG is resigning over pay. That dumb thing thinks she is not paid enough? For presiding over the GS fiasco? For being the turkey of the industry? the laughing stock of a generation?
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Censorship/Civil Rights
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Authorities in the northwestern Chinese province of Qinghai have handed a six-year jail sentence to a Tibetan filmmaker who returned from exile to make a documentary about his homeland, Tibetan sources say.
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People who post intimate details about their lives on the internet undermine everybody else’s right to privacy, claims an academic.
Dr Kieron O’Hara has called for people to be more aware of the impact on society of what they publish online.
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Internet/Web Abuse/DRM
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Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski came to our office today to talk about broadband (check it out), and during both the event itself and the conversations I had with people before and after, it became clear to me how optimistic many of us should be about the New FCC.
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Jelli has raised $2 million from a group of angel investors for its service, which lets users dictate what songs they want to hear on traditional radio stations. With Jelli, radio listeners can vote online on what songs they want to listen to; participants can also earn virtual points which gives them more control over the selection process.
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Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights
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U2 frontman and humanitarian Bono had a page-long op-ed in this past Sunday’s New York Times, where he describes what he calls “10 ideas that might make the next 10 years more interesting, healthy or civil. Some are trivial, some fundamental. They have little in common with one another except that I am seized by each, and moved by its potential to change our world.” So let’s look at some issues that made the list…. a twist on cap and trade, fighting the rotavirus, new cancer research, the rise of Africa and… limiting the scourge of file sharing.
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Copyright holders would have to tell ISPs how much financial damage they suffer from alleged digital copyright infringements, under an amendment proposed to the Digital Economy Bill.
The amendment, proposed by Lord Lucas, says that “copyright infringement reports” – which record labels and movie studios would send to to ISPs, detailing instances of alleged abuse by a customer – must also “set out the value of the infringement on the basis described in the initial obligations”.
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The Mexican government says it has notified Starbucks Corp. that Mexico is owed intellectual property rights for a line of coffee mugs showing pre-Hispanic images.
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La Quadrature du Net has submitted its response to the European Commission’s consultation regarding “Online Creative Content”. La Quadrature calls on the Commission to reconsider the EU’s coercive and repressive copyright policies, while encouraging it to match words to deeds by fostering the rights of the public in the digital creative ecosystem.
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The University says it doesn’t matter if the University’s name or logo isn’t on the clothing at all. Even a shirt that says “Go Cats!” needs a license. Even worse, they’re not just looking to stop people from selling such clothing, they’re happily putting them in jail for it.
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An anonymous reader sent over yet another example of copyright being abused for monopolist reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with “promoting the progress,” and actually represent a serious healthcare issue. I had no idea, but apparently the various “codes” used by doctors to classify every visit are actually covered by a copyright held by the American Medical Association, which refuses to allow any free or open distribution of the codes (known as Current Procedural Terminology (CPT)). That’s because the AMA makes about $70 million per year “licensing” the codes.
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Apparently Nicolas Sarkozy will get “the last word” on whether or not to adopt this policy, which means that it’s pretty likely. Sarkozy — who has a long history of copyright infringement by his own party — seems to believe that stronger copyright means defending French culture, when it really just means handouts to a few failing businesses who haven’t wanted to adapt.
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Google and other net firms could be taxed under plans being considered by the French government.
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A key ingredient of Eat’n Park’s case is the lawsuit’s Exhibit A, which shows a circle with two round eyes, a dot for a nose and a perky smile.
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The thing is, I’ve spent a lot of time learning how to make art. I have spent no time learning how to negotiate the licensing of music. These are very different skills! It’s bizarre that in order to share my art, I need to have the latter skill set, or hire someone who does. The lack of that skill set results in my work being kept secret.
It’s really backward. I would love to talk to artists directly, and negotiate something that’s mutually beneficial. Right? My work calls attention to their work. I’m a big fan of their work. I want to support their art and their livelihood. I want everyone to know about and support their work. It’s such a natural alliance, but it’s perverted by this system we have now.
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And if this is true, why are they lying to legislators, in an attempt to get these laws enacted?
Greed.
Enric Teller assembles chairs for CitizenSpace (2009)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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Send this to a friend
01.07.10
Posted in News Roundup at 9:01 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Audio
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Open Source SOA, a methodology for developing applications using accessible, discrete, reusable components.
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On the first show of the decade, the Linux Outlaws bring you a KDE 4.3 review, VLC releasing a video editor, Year 2010 bugs, lots of discussion of Google and Microsoft and much more as usual…
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Desktop
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It is surprising that HP is keeping itself away from GNU Linux. Considering the amount of R&D, expertise, and talent that HP has, it makes more sense for HP to create their own customized version of GNU Linux.
Debian based Ubuntu would be a good start. Software is not a big issue any more. Most of the Free and Open Source software is more popular that ‘bounded’ or ‘locked’ software. Look at Firefox, Thunderbird, Chrome, OpenOffice, GIMP, VLC and many more.
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Finally, partitioning lets you try out other operating systems–like Linux, for example. Generally, two operating systems can’t coexist on the same volume without stepping on one another’s toes, so you won’t be able to dual-boot Linux or ease into Windows 7 if you’re on a single-volume system.
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That’s the big news so far from CES on pre-installed desktop Linux. I’m sure there’s more news coming though. Tune in tomorrow to see what else develops.
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Operating System
Windows 74.57% 61.83% 61.82% ↓ 64.68%
Linux 10.81% 21.17% 21.95% ↑ 17.59%
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DeviceVM has unveiled SplashTop 2.0. SplashTop 2.0 introduces a completely redesigned application dock, the ability to customize the desktop (e.g. different wallpapers), instant search, and visual navigation of favorite sites and history. SplashTop 2.0 will initially appear on a new Lenovo netbook, but it will make its way to other vendors as well, including ASUS.
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As well as the touchscreen capability, the 5102 will also have facial recognition software, Linux based QuickWeb which allows near instant access to Internet and files and will house Intel’s new Atom processor – the Pineview.
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Server
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When it comes to the Internet, Linux is a big win.
Mail and web servers, databases, computational clusters and supercomputers all belong to the domain of free software. When it comes to embedded devices, Linux is also king of the roost.
[...]
Now, meet ClearOS, a free and open source Linux distribution which does just that. ClearFoundation released the stable version of ClearOS 5.1 just before Christmas and it is available for download.
It might sound like a new kid on the block, but actually ClearOS has a long history going back to the turn of the century. It was previously known as ClarkConnect, a very popular distribution for setting up a Linux server quickly and conveniently. ClearOS is now built on CentOS, which is in turn built from the source code of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. As such, ClearOS has a solid and reliable foundation.
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Apache gained approximately 3M hostnames compared to the December 2009 survey, bringing their total to 111.3M.
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Graphics Stack
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AMD’s Alex Deucher has just committed initial support for Embedded DisplayPort (eDP) connectors/monitors to the xf86-video-ati DDX display driver. Traditional DisplayPort monitors are already supported by this open-source ATI driver, but now Embedded DisplayPort connectors should begin to work as well. Here is the Git commit that provides the initial support.
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Applications
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On the way to GNOME 2.30 and Moblin 2.2, the Clutter project has released a new developers snapshot version of its 3D toolkit with many improved details.
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Right now I’m pretty much only using it for podcasts, and I’ve followed the lead of Fab and Dan of Linux Outlaws in using gPodder.
GPodder is fast, cross-platform (Linux, FreeBSD, even Windows), supports both iPods and “regular” MP3 players, and provides a most excellent way to “catch,” listen to and load up podcasts on your favorite audio device.
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Written in the Java Programming Langauge, Art of Illusion is a cross platform, open source 3D rendering and modeling studio that aims at giving a new meaning to 3D modeling.
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One of the big advantages of The GIMP is the fact that it can be easily extended with new functionality.
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Instructionals
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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So tonight, release-team-hero Dirk has branched off KDE SC 4.4 from trunk. Let quickly explain what this means. Trunk/ is a directory in KDE’s SVN repository, the central place holding where all the code from different contributors spread across our planet comes together. In a big team like KDE, we need some coordination to be actually able to release our software packages once in a while. Since the release of KDE 4.0.0, a typical KDE release cycle takes 6 months. Roughly 4 months of development, followed by about 2 months of stabilization and testing towards a release. In the stabilization period, which starts with the feature and string freeze, only bugfixes and code improvements are allowed. This is also the period where we release regular test releases, in our case a beta1, right after the feature freeze, and a second beta (happened shortly before christmas). The next test release is coming soon, which is -rc1.
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Back a few mere months ago, we wrote about how to make Firefox 3.x look at home in KDE Software Compilation 4.X. To date, this has been the most-viewed article on The Blue Mint. The reason is clear: People like Firefox. Be it the extensions, familiarity, general responsiveness (that gets better with each release), or the cross-platform compatibility, Firefox is here to stay. And it remains the flagship web browser of choice within the GNU/Linux playing field.
[...]
To install, simply download the theme, open Dolphin (or Konqueror) and drag the downloaded file into the Firefox Add-ons window. Take a look at the screen shots to see what you think.
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All kinds of apps that I have some idea about, but only from “the other side of the fence,” things I’ve only read about in the gtk+ world. On the other hand . . . as long as my existing gtk+ apps are integrated visually into KDE (thanks to QtCurve) and “just work,” maybe I don’t need to duplicate my entire Xfce environment?
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With the fact that everything run in RAM and the low number of packages in the online wok, I doubt you’d want to install SliTaz as your main desktop OS, but I don’t think that’s what it’s for. I’ve used distros similar in design philosophy (such as Damn Small Linux) to do things like system recovery, partitioning and virus scanning, and that’s just the place SliTaz would shine as well. Grabbing some additional packages and rolling a new USB flavor could easily add some power to any tech toolkit.
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Red Hat Family
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Whitehurst sees more and more open source firms being acquired by major companies because of the quality of the code produced in open source projects. But he thinks it is better for both the project’s developers and the community if an open source company remains independent. Red Hat is such a company, he said, and issued a departing jab at Oracle. “I like the strategic clarity of being pure open source. I do worry about the mindset you have to have as part of a large company,” he said.
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As European regulators drag their feet in deciding whether to approve the merger of Oracle and Sun, rivals – including Red Hat – are continuing to feast on the remains of Sun’s business.
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All of us who help support people of any kind, regardless of experience level, should have a somewhat regular checkpoint of introspection, where we honestly think about our own effectiveness at listening and empathy. Then we can adjust our dealings with those we support to maximize the constructiveness of our interactions, and thereby have a direct, positive effect on the culture of free software.
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Debian Family
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For those of you who have read the recent Slashdot article announcing Ubuntu’s new membership programme, this is clearly a mistake.
Ubuntu has had the concept of membership for many years, helping us to identify those who have made a significant and sustained contribution. This is nothing new and nothing is changing.
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It’s certainly a clever beast. The four-bladed “quadricopter” uses an onboard Linux-based computer to process information from its cameras, accelerometers and gyroscope to ensure level flight, while direction and speed are controlled by tilting an iPhone, iPod Touch or any other device with a camera, screen and wi-fi connectivity.
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Embedded Linux TrainingFor the third year running, the UK Embedded Masterclass will be running a half-day workshop that offers an “Introduction to Embedded Linux”.
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“VxWorks and Wind River Linux are complementary offers, allowing Wind River to serve customers who need Linux or VxWorks,” Brown said. “These can be used separately, and there certainly are vertical sub-markets better suited by one or the other. In addition, we can offer them together as a single solution.”
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This blog post starts with a strange question: What would you have if you stuffed a wall wart with a 32-bit Linux computer complete with wired and wireless Ethernet, Bluetooth, one USB port, and an optional hard drive? The simple answer is you’d have a “Plug Computer.”
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In addition to remote access, it’s also possible to duplicate the contents of one drive to another (complete with a one-touch QuikTransfer button on the front panel) and share up to two printers. It also offers UPnP DLNA media streaming, simple photo slideshows and Iomega throw in some backup apps too.
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With the Ease, TomTom has trimmed the fat from its more elaborate GPS devices to offer a small and simple navigator. Its 3.5-inch LCD touch screen presents users with two oversized buttons: “Plan route,” and “Browse Map.” Enough said.
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But Google, who announced their Nexus One iPhone killer yesterday, is sitting pretty as its Android version of Linux appeared on numerous products. Oddly, they don’t make much money on Android, but what they do get is a developer network that has an increasing number of platforms to purvey their products on.
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Phones
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Lenovo CEO Yang Yuanqing introduced the handset by saying he believed the “Lephone is the best device in this category.” The handset is a looker, with an 800×400 pixel screen and a proprietary Linux-based OS.
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Dell’s smartphone further strengthens Linux’s position in the smartphone segment. Dell already has deals with major mobile operators around the globe including the world’s largest, China Mobile. Dell has similar deals with Claro in Brazil.
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AT&T followed up the announcement that it will soon offer five Android-based smartphones with another piece of news: the carrier will offer two Palm webOS phones “soon.”
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Android
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At long last, AT&T customers can experience some of the Android madness. At the AT&T Developer Summit at CES in Las Vegas, the carrier announced that five Android-based smartphones are debuting on the network in the first half of 2010.
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AT&T is embracing the Google Android and Palm WebOS operating systems–adding a total of seven new handsets in 2010 built on the new mobile operating systems. With speculation that its iPhone exclusivity will soon end, AT&T is expanding its portfolio, but AT&T is at a disadvantage and it may be too late to start hedging bets.
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The gadget teardown experts at iFixit have forked out $530 for a Google Nexus One smartphone, taken it to bits and posted their thoughts online.
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Google wasn’t the only company announcing new Android-based devices this week. At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, several handset and mobile device manufacturers also announced new models and partnerships with mobile carriers for their Android devices, ranging from various mobile phones and tablets, to eBook readers.
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Certainly Google is a good open source citizen and they contribute back to Linux and the broader open source community (so I’m not knocking them on that front, cause they’re awesome there). But nexus one grows the Google Android community first and foremost and Linux only by association. It’s not the bold vision of the Linux phone world that existed a few years ago, it’s a Google vision.
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Yesterday, Google accomplished something I’ve wanted to see for a very, very long time: A Linux-based personal computing device getting enormous mainstream coverage. Granted, you weren’t hearing the word “Linux,” much in the coverage, but it’s still a good thing in my book.
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The wave of announcements appears to validate earlier predictions that the open-source Linux-based Android would become a major player in the mobile market, although market acceptance of the Google-backed OS may have taken longer than first expected.
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The phone runs on Android 1.5 with Motorola’s cloud-based Motoblur user interface.
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This machine’s presence at the show isn’t nearly the big deal it might be, for one simple reason: HP says it’s just experimenting with Android. This is a concept PC, and there’s no news about its chances of turning into a shipping product you can buy. Still, you gotta figure that if HP has gone through the bother of building this prototype, there’s a real chance it’ll commercialize it in 2010.
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This review is of the Star Trek Tricorder open source Android project by Moonblink. I’ve used the popular Tricorder theme with my previous phone, a Windows Mobile device, but I never imagined that a day would come when I would be able to use an actual Tricorder application which could actually sense environmental factors like magnetic flux, acceleration, sound waves and even solar activity. Ladies and gentlemen and starship cadets, I would like to present to you an application that does just that, not only for the Droid, but for any Android mobile device with at least most of the appropriate sensors.
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Sub-notebooks
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HP announced three netbooks using Intel’s N450 “Pineview” processor that support SUSE Linux: the Mini 210, Mini 2102, both with 10.1-inch screens, and the Mini 5102, which offers 10-hour claimed battery life. Meanwhile, at CES the company unveiled a prototype Qualcomm Snapdragon-based Android “smartbook,” says Engadget.
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CHIP MAKER Marvell has launched a quad-core ARM processor at CES 2010 in Las Vegas.
The chip is based on the same CPU architecture as Marvell’s Armada 500 and 600 processor series and uses the ARMv7 architecture.
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It uses a Lenovo build of Linux which includes simple application switching and an application dock similar to the one in Mac OS X.
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Jaspersoft CEO Brian Gentile (pictured), like many of his open source peers, has some lofty goals for 2010. With the help of SaaS and on-premise channel partners, Gentile says Jaspersoft — which specializes in business intelligence software — can grow 50 percent and generate positive cash flow in 2010. Here’s the scoop, including a FastChat video with Gentile.
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Development tools vendor JetBrains caused something of a stir in October last year with the news that it was releasing an open source Community Edition of its popular IntelliJ Idea Java IDE using the Apache License.
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Programming
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“Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python” is a free e-Book that teaches you how to program in the Python programming language. Each chapter gives you the complete source code for a new game, and then teaches the programming concepts from the example.
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The Python programming language community figured out how to put up-to-date Python programs and Python interpreters on old (like first generation) iPods. This has the same advantage as the LISP on your junk-yard Atari. It is taking stuff that the rich people think is trash and using it in new and productive ways. The under developed nations get old computers anyway, but they are putting them in toxic waste dumps. Most western teens do not want an iPod from 2001, and this Python interpreter allows them to be reused in a productive way.
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A beta for the third iteration of the wildly popular Ruby on Rails is due later this month or in early February.
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The Federal Trade Commission worries that consumers don’t really understand the privacy implications to storing some of their most crucial data in the cloud, and it wants the FCC to think about such issues when finalizing its national broadband plan.
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A 2010 software bug has left millions of German debit and credit card holders unable to withdraw money or make payments in shops, and thousands stranded on holiday with no access to cash.
About 30m chip and pin cards – a quarter of those in circulation in Germany – are thought to have been affected by the programming failure, which meant that microchips in cards could not recognise the year change to 2010.
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More than 200 data sets detailing life in London are to be put online by the capital’s governing body.
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Security
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On Tuesday, hacker Samy Kamkar demonstrated a way to identify a browser’s geographical location by exploiting weaknesses in many WiFi routers. Now, he’s back with a simple method to penetrate hardware firewalls using little more than some javascript embedded in a webpage.
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To judge from the news accounts, Umar Abdulmutallab did everything to get himself caught except wear an Osama bin Laden T-shirt onto that Northwest Airlines flight Christmas Day. Yet the danger didn’t dawn on anyone until he allegedly set himself on fire while trying to detonate the explosives hidden in his underwear.
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A binman from Ormskirk says he has been taken off his round of 34 years as ‘punishment’ for taking waste left at the side of wheelie bins. Albert Stewart, 60, of Scarisbrick Street, works as a refuse collector for West Lancashire Borough Council.
He told the Advertiser: “I have done the same round in Aughton for over 30 years, and just because I took some side waste, I’m being punished – they’ve taken me off my round.
“They weren’t just people I took rubbish from – they were my friends too.”
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Police officers have been told to avoid talking about crime to members of the public – after Home Office chiefs found it ‘upsets them’, it can be revealed today.
The report, called Improving Public Confidence in the Police Service, states that when officers highlight crime and anti-social behaviour problems at community meetings it can lead to ‘feelings of fear’ among the public.
One officer from Thames Valley Police, who did not want to be named, said the report sounded like a ‘bad joke’. ‘What the hell do they expect us to talk about at a public meeting? The price of tea in China or how much a pint of milk costs?’ he said.
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The problem with all these measures is that they’re only effective if we guess the plot correctly. Defending against a particular tactic or target makes sense if tactics and targets are few. But there are hundreds of tactics and millions of targets, so all these measures will do is force the terrorists to make a minor modification to their plot.
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Last week, I wrote an article that detailed just how exceedingly rare terrorist incidents aboard commercial airlines are. What I didn’t do is to compare the current situation to that of previous eras. Fortunately, there is quite a lot of data on this subject, particularly from the matter-of-factly named website PlaneCrashInfo.com. From their database, I compiled the number of passenger fatalities resulting in each decade from three types of incidents: sabotage (i.e. bombings), hijackings, and pilot shootings (which are much rarer than the other two types; just three in the database). Collectively, I term these Violent Passenger Incidents or VPIs; they are the things we might hope to prevent via tighter airport security.
In the 2000s, a total of 469 passengers (including crew and terrorists) were killed worldwide as the result of Violent Passenger Incidents, 265 of which were on 9/11 itself. No fatal incidents have occurred since nearly simultaneous bombings of two Russian aircraft on 8/24/2004; this makes for the longest streak without a fatal incident since World War II. The overall death toll during the 2000s is about the same as it was during the 1960s, and substantially less than in the 1970s and 1980s, when violent incidents peaked. The worst individual years were 1985, 1988 and 1989, in that order; 2001 ranks fourth.
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Can you spot a terrorist?
You’ve probably already tried it.
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Nicolas Sarkozy and 20,000 of his French government lieutenants will be equipped with specially-commissioned encrypted smartphones, following fears over the security of BlackBerries.
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Finance
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Bailouts and political connections go hand in hand according to a just released academic study. The study, which was conducted by the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan researchers, shows concretely that lobbying, campaign contributions, and the finance/federal government revolving door has helped the most damaging banks despite the dangers they pose to our economy.
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Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, gave a speech this week that made headlines and raised eyebrows: “Lax Oversight Caused the Crisis, Bernanke Says.” Finally, many thought, the Fed Chairman would fess up to his role in the crisis! Alas, 98 percent of the speech is dedicated to justifying what the Fed did right over the last decade, and the “lax oversight” apparently had more to do with other agencies charged with regulating mortgages and underwriting practices, not his own.
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PR/AstroTurf
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What is Cheney saying about this whole myth that President Obama won’t say the word “terrorism” Well, his speech writers helped kick off this little myth with a speech more cleverly worded than his minions can mimic on the talk shows, but the gist is the same. But-for the purpose of proving my point on the origin of the echo chamber, I would not quote this criminal at all; his line was that the president “seems to think if he gets rid of the words, ‘war on terror,’ we won’t be at war.”
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A GOP lawmaker suggested that President Barack Obama could improve his response to security threats by using the word terrorism more often. MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann took the congressman’s suggestion Wednesday and used the word terror 27 times in a single paragraph to show how Republicans exploiting it as a “brand name” are “doing the terror work of terrorists.”
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Censorship/Civil Rights
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On the journalistic front, the raw figures speak for themselves: in 2009, 76 were killed (vs. 60 in 2008), 33 were kidnapped, 573 were arrested and 1456 physically assaulted. The most dangerous places to be a journalist were war zones and disputed elections.
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Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights
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It’s one thing to speak from a position of ignorance, but admitting it and still then taking a strong position? That’s something special. U2′s Bono kicked off quite a firestorm by insisting that having ISPs monitor everything was a good way to deal with unauthorized file sharing online, citing China’s success with internet censorship (failing to realized that it hasn’t been that successful in reality). This resulted in widespread criticism of Bono and it appears that Nirvana’s bass player, Krist Novoselic, has stepped up to defend Bono (found via Karl Bode).
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A report commissioned by the French Minister of Culture Frédéric Mitterrand urges the introduction of a tax on online advertising such as that carried by Google, which would be used to pay the creators of artistic and other works who lose out to online piracy.
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A new proposal to tax internet advertising revenue was among the recommendations offered by the government-appointed panel. Money raised would finance the availability of cultural material online and fund the protection of artists losing out to piracy.
[...]
Zelnick’s recommendations follow the French government’s efforts to pass its controversial “three strikes” law that would disconnect internet users repeatedly accused of illegal downloading. His reports also taps into fears of the growing influence of major internet companies.
Margaret Aranyosi, Executive Director of KITE, Inc. 003 (2004)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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Posted in News Roundup at 8:51 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Where are the accolades for Linux?
A review of the company that made the Linux computer graphics happen, known as WETA Digital (Wellington, New Zealand, a Peter Jackson spin off company), is notoriously absent from the articles.
The underlying operating system, Linux RHEL (hundreds of HP blade servers running as Linux cluster) is also utterly absent from even the more technical news sources.
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In this episode: Google releases the Nexus One and Mark Shuttleworth has announced he’s going to relinquish control of Canonical. Freescale unveils a Linux touch tablet and we ask whether 2010 could really, honestly, be the year of Linux on the desktop.
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This is the Monet Frame-puter booting Ubuntu 9.10
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Desktop
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If you can do all you want and be all you can be and have the battery last all day using ARM and GNU/Linux, is there really any need to prop up the monopoly any longer? This could be an excellent year, again.
I have to wonder at the price of this particular gadget, though. How can Lenovo justify a premium price for the world’s least expensive processor and OS??? It could be the first-to-market price bulge. That could make sense, but why did they miss the Christmas season? Was the product just not ready on time or the deals not made? Perhaps folks who value mobile phones will pay a price for this. I know some people pay many hundreds of dollars for phones that are not this smart. I expect later devices will share the upswell of ARM and eventually compete by lowering prices. It’s all good.
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The Lenovo Skylight is looking to do two things: Be your constant companion and be always on. Lenovo has put their own custom version of Linux on it, along with their own custom GUI. The experience is built to provide seamless shuffling between videos, web pages, multimedia, and work space. No one has gotten their hands on it yet, but after CES 2010, I’m sure there will be a considerable buzz whether this new gadget is worthy. It’s an interesting offering from Lenovo, who’s been trying to differentiate themselves from the rest of the computer manufacturing masses. If successful, it could mean big things for their custom OS and their new product. Will it be a Lenovo-only distro, or will they unleash it on the masses? More on this latter…
Dell is still shipping their Mini 10V’s with Ubuntu Linux, and that’s good news for the Linux world. Since netbook hardware can be hit-or-miss with big name Linux distros, it’s nice to see Dell officially supporting the product. Although the reception to the Ubuntu Netbook Remix has so-so, it’s still a move in Linux direction.
The new HP Mini 210 is working on the Windows platform still, and aims to provide an easy to use experience. But for some reason HP has abandoned the Linux model. Once upon a time, they had a fancy GUI for their Linux distro, but it never went anywhere. So now HP is sticking with what they know. Will the success of Windows 7 differentiate themselves?
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There are two possibilities, either you create a door for yourself, or if you see a door, then just open it and walk in. We will talk about the door thing later, first tell me: what do you use for your computing? Did I hear Microsoft Windows? GNU/Linux? Some might be using Apple Mac as well.
Windows is passe nobody seems to be talking about it any more. Except for Microsoft, and even they may shy away if you say something that sounds similar to ‘Vista’. Now, the rage is Mac and GNU/Linux.
Apple Mac has increased its share in the market post Vista release. The market was there and Vista disappointed people. Windows 7 is nothing, but Microsoft’s re-polished Vista promises. GNU/Linux is fighting but, it has more yards to cover.
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Apple’s long-trailed tablet computer had better be good. Semiconductor maker Freescale will this week announce the outline of a cheap rival device it hopes will be adopted by computer makers to boost its in-house chip technology.
The concept is not something people will be able to buy immediately, but will be shown in the form of a reference design, a sort of blueprint for other companies to adopt as they see fit. But it appears to have been thought through and there is plenty in it to worry Apple as it ponders marketing for its own tablet system, rumoured to cost as much as $1,000 a pop.
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While I enjoy mocking Microsoft’s Jabba-ware, Linux is an offender as well. Too many Linux devs are all jazzed about GUIs and flashy junk, and ignoring or even trying to do away with the CLI. Dear ones, when your GUIs are as fast and efficient as the CLI, then I will quit crabbing at you. Where ever did you get the idea that I want to waste my life wading through poorly-organized menus, and waiting for lardy slow-ware to actually do something when I click, when I can accomplish the same task in one second on the command line?
So there is my computing wish for the new decade: I want something to happen when I click.
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No problem to install Mandriva 2010.0 on this new (for me !) HP mini 110. However, at reboot time, blocked on udev.
I found a similar bug report for another system that gave me the hint: Add ssb.blacklist=1 at boot prompt. And indeed it did the trick 
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Microsoft continues to sell consumers an operating system that needs anti-virus protection.
It’s not like they keep it a secret: if you install Windows 7, there’s three things splashed up on the screen for users towards the end of the process: configure the OS, activate the OS, and get anti-virus software.
To me, there’s something fundamentally wrong with knowingly send out a piece of software that’s vulnerable–so vulnerable that you have to tell users your product is unsafe until they get third-party protection.
[...]
With the wave of new Linux-based smartbooks, netbooks, and phones hitting the market, there are still critics who complain about an alleged lack of features in Linux. Even if this notion were accurate, and I am very sure it’s not, let me put the question to them: why would you rather have the latest gadget installed on your system as opposed to personal data security?
As a group, computer and electronics users need to reset their priorities. It’s not about the nifty toys and Easter eggs you can find in Windows. It’s about what personal information malicious users can find in your Windows.
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Applications
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After two years of work, the GCompris development team is happy to share with you the release of the version 9.0.
GCompris is almost 10 years old and it required some deep code restructuring. This release brings many mandatory changes to make it easier to enhance, maintain and distribute.
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Its Web site states that OpenMovieEditor has been “… designed for basic movie making capabilities… [and] to be powerful enough for the amateur movie artist, yet easy to use”. In fact I found OpenMovieEditor to be a surprisingly capable NLE, modest in its stated goals yet possessing some features not commonly found in Linux NLEs.
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Instant Messaging client ‘Emesene’ slipped a new release out on Monday but what’s new in it?
Aside from bug fixes all round – which even the team themselves admit “we’re too lazy to write ‘em all” – there are a few GUI changes that you’ll likely come across…
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Iron Browser is an enhanced version of the excellent Google Chrome browser. Google, however, has been criticized heavily by the data protection specialists for the fact that it creates a unique user ID for each of its Chrome user and sends entries to Google to generate suggestions. Iron Browser offers same wonderful browser experience as it is build on the Chome’s source and offers and looks the same. But it protects your privacy.
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Instructionals
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This is again a wonderful demonstration of the flexibility of GNU/Linux. This technique respects the EULA of that other OS in that any number of XP machines can connect to the GNU/Linux server without exceeding the 5 or 10 access limit an XP machine has.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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I’d like to talk about KDM and Plasma combining forces. Well, since I always need to be coding something, regardless of whether or not I have any free-time, I have (begun to plan out and create(began today), a Plasma frontend for our login manager, kdm. Before anyone begins shaking their fists in the air and such, I must stress this…The Plasma frontend will be *optional*. So if you dislike Plasma *that* much for some reason or are close-minded (perhaps mutually inclusive?): the regular, currently used frontend can be used.
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Industry Linux overview by Linux experts Aaron J. Seigo, Community leader at the KDE Foundation and Arnaud Laprévote, CTO Chief Technology Officer at Mandriva Linux. They analyse the influence of Linux on the Laptop industry with the advent of the Netbooks.
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- Alt+F3 will bring up the menu for right clicking on the title bar of the Konsole’s window.
- Right clicking on the Desktop area where the Konsole lies will not present the Desktop menu but the menu for right clicking in the terminal.
- An option to hide the Konsole Window when hitting Alt+Tab doesn’t seem to exist. If you have a workaround on this do tell.
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Hot on the heels of my Phonon PulseAudio integration, here is another set of patches for kdemultimedia that adds PulseAudio support to KMix \o/
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Here’s the next instalment of the graphics performance blog series. We’ll begin by looking at some background about how OpenGL and QPainter work. We’ll then dive into how the two are married together in OpenGL 2 Paint Engine and finish off with some advice about how to get the best out of the engine. Enjoy!
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GNOME Desktop
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Just in time for the holidays, GNOME received an awesome surprise!
While many people probably listed computers in their letter to Santa, I bet not many of them got one like this.
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GNOME’s Summer outreach program and FSF’s LibrePlanet conference highlight women’s participation in free software
Today, the FSF announced the dates for the 2010 LibrePlanet event, a conference for the free software community that expresses a vision for solidarity amongst developers, activists and users who are working towards the shared goal of a fully free software world–a world without reliance on proprietary software.
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Compare this gentleman’s reflection and consideration of RMS’ points with the enthusiastic ignorance we saw earlier on the very same point.
Examples like this are exactly why I have come to the conclusion that the noisy people that disagree with RMS (and, by extension, the “Free Software” concept) fall into one of two camps: ignorant or malicious.
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New Releases
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After the Christmas release of the new KahelOS Desktop installers 12-25-2009, there’s no stopping this citrusy fresh Linux Distribution.
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Red Hat Family
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SmarTrend identified an Uptrend for Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) on November 17, 2009 at $28.67. In approximately 1 month, Red Hat has returned 9.2% as of today’s recent price of $31.30.
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Debian Family
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A few people have been asking why IBM is promoting Ubuntu at the Young Scientist Exhibition when it is not an IBM product. In fact there are a number of good reasons:
1. IBM supports the concept of freedom and we would hate to think that students (or anyone) would feel locked in to using a particular brand of proprietary software just because it came with the PC when they bought it. Click here to view Bob Stutor explain in detail why IBM cares about software freedom.
2. Ubuntu provides an excellent quality stable desktop operating system for free, so we don’t want to see people wasting valuable money on purchasing licenses for software when they don’t have to
3. We think that Ubuntu is cool and we think that the students attending the exhibition will agree when they see for themselves.
4. IBM employees use Ubuntu internally for their work and IBM also partners with a Canonical and Verde to provide the Ubuntu based IBM Client for Smart Work.
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after some discussion in the MIR team and on ubuntu-devel@ [1], we simplified the Main Inclusion Request process to require much less bureaucracy.
What we really want is reporters to go through the checklist and discuss the violations of the MIR requirement standards in the bug report with the MIR team, not write lengthy wiki pages with boilerplate text (especially not for trivial packages like perl bindings).
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One of the nicest features of Pardus is the Kaptan application. What Kaptan is is a first-time, welcome application that gives a user the opportunity to customize a fresh installation of the distro. It can also be called up at any time after installation. mintWelcome, Linux Mint’s welcome application, is an attempt at that, but it does not offer the same features that you’ll find on Kaptan. In addition to the list of items on mintWelcome, here are three that I’ll love to see added:
* Customize your desktop
* Enable Network Time Protocol
* Enable Gufw, the graphical firewall manager
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Broadcom announced that it has ported Android and Windows CE to a ARM-based CPU described as “a PND [personal navigation device] on a chip.” The BCM4760 includes a GPS receiver and baseband, an ARM11 processor, a touchscreen controller, and an OpenGL ES 1.1/OpenVG 2.0-compliant graphics processor, the company says.
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ZiiLabs announced an HD-ready media hub reference design incorporating its 1GHZ, ARM Cortex-A8-based ZMS-08 system-on-chip (SoC). The Zii SiVo Digital Home Platform provides 1080p Blu-ray quality HDTV and 3D graphics UI for low-power connected home devices, and offers a development kit for Android or ZiiLabs’ Plaszma Linux stack.
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The Oregon State University Open Source Lab’s data center hosts some of the Linux community’s heaviest hitting projects including the Linux Master Kernel and the Linux Foundation. It is also the primary location for the Apache Software Foundation and Drupal, open source content management software. The lab, aka OSUOSL, also hosted the core infrastructure for Mozilla’s Firefox project, and currently host’s six of Google’s servers.
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Mozilla
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It’s been a long time coming but Mozilla has finally released Firefox 3.6 RC1. The first build is now ready to download from Mozilla’s FTP servers and is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
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The Flock developers have released version 2.5.6 of their social web browser based on Firefox 3, addressing several security issues. Flock is a popular cross-platform browser that automatically manages updates and media from several popular social services, including MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Digg, YouTube and Twitter.
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Databases
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If you sell something, you don’t own it any longer. MySQL is now SUNs business. And if SUN decides to sell themselves to Oracle – it is their business. If the MySQL founders and fanboys don’t like this, they simply shouldn’t have sold MySQL to SUN in the first instance.
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What does “Help MySQL” advocate, in a nutshell? It claims that if Oracle were to merge with Sun, MySQL customers would be trapped in a market that would be pretty much controlled and captured by Oracle, both through its existing propietary databases offerings and the acquisition of MySQL. Another issue explained on the web site is that the inherent free and open source nature of MySQL will not be enough to grant effective freedoms to the market since Oracle would be the sole copyright owner of the code and trademarks.
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Is Oracle keen on MySQL because of the market control? Or is it because Oracle sees MySQL as a means to possibly defeat Microsoft’s ambitions in the database market, where its SQL Server product is used for similar purposes as MySQL?
The only person I’ve noticed who mentioned this is Eben Moglen , a well-known legal figure in free software circles.
But anyone who knows anything about the history of the computer industry is aware of the intense animosity between Oracle supremo Larry Ellison and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.
At the level at which these men operate, money isn’t a consideration. Power is, rubbing one’s competitor’s face in the mud is, especially when there is past animosity. Here is just one example of how much Ellison dislikes Microsoft.
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The two primary interface standards for storage devices are SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) and SAS (Serial Attached SCSI). Both have been around for a number of years, SATA first appearing in 2003 and SAS appearing in 2004. Also, both of them have similar throughput performance currently at 3 Gbps (SATA started at 1.5 Gbps while SAS started at 3.0 Gbps). However, lately both protocols had been showing their age, particularly with the advent of SSD (Solid State Drives). However, the committees that oversee the protocols have not been idle and have created the next generation for each protocol – 6 Gbps.
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Security
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Foreign footballers face having to carry an identity card to prove who they are, it was announced today.
Professionals from outside the EU playing in the UK will have to apply for a card when they renew their visas, the Home Office said.
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Finance
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According to The New York Times, Goldman Sachs has set aside at least $16.7 billion for employee compensation in 2009, or an average of about $700,000. Goldman’s bonuses are on track to break the record they set in 2007. The firm has decided their top 30 executives will receive bonuses in long-term stock, rather than cash.
In addition to the $10 billion that Goldman received in Treasury-issued TARP funds, the firm got $13 billion from the government’s bailout of AIG and $22 billion worth of government guarantees on its debt.
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PR/AstroTurf
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Following the failed Christmas Day terrorist attack, many on the right have used the incident as a political football, trying to score partisan points on the issue of terrorism.
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Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights
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Because of all of the above, I have an enormously strong interest in copyright. I’ve been reading everything I could get my hands on, and based on what I’ve seen, the WIPO Internet Treaties, which are supposedly about artists rights, are instead one of the worst attacks on artists ever written.
Ratification of these treaties, will damage Canadian artists, will damage Canadian culture, and will destroy the very things that the treaties purport to support.
The recent Canadian legislation which ‘died on the order paper’ was a disaster. It too, in it’s attempts to enact the flawed WIPO Internet treaties, would have damaged artists badly.
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I thought the post might be one of those blog posts that reminds us how frequently everyone “technically” infringes on copyright incidentally and how this demonstrates how screwed up copyright law is. But, no, instead, this appears to be a serious “warning” claiming that most bloggers are risking the potential of $150,000 fines by using images they find online.
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Everiss simply hated the fact that Evony — the company trying to sue him — came up with a business model that involves exactly the sort of thing we like: giving stuff away for free, and coming up with more advanced reasons to buy. That still doesn’t excuse the libel claim, but Everiss does seem to have a bit of trouble understanding basic economics of digital goods. A whole bunch of you have sent in his recent rant about how many people “stole” Modern Warfare 2. It’s the sort of thing we had thought went out of style years ago, when people realized that every download wasn’t a lost sale, and there were lots of reasons that people might download other than a lack of “moral fiber.”
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In December 2009, Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Lorenzo Fertitta testified at a hearing of the US House Judiciary Committee, claiming that the UFC is losing millions to online piracy. Now, in an RIAA-style escalation, the company says it will not only start suing sites, but also individual downloaders.
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Oh boy. Here’s a fun one. You had to expect that there would be more defamation lawsuits about Twitter following the first one involving Courtney Love, but this one is quite impressive, considering of all the twists and turns that must be followed. It involves some company promoting something called “The Cookie Diet” (which appears to be exactly what you would think) suing Kim Kardashian for libel. If you don’t keep up with pop culture, Kim Kardashian is one of those people famous for being famous. The details of the lawsuit, though, are somewhat complex, and it’s difficult to figure out who to side with in this trainwreck in progress (and, yes, it seems pretty likely that the whole thing is a publicity stunt for all involved, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth covering).
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Angelyne claims that the biopic, about the life of the late hip-hop star Notorious B.I.G., featured a 12-second shot of one of Angelyne’s billboards without her prior consent or authorization.
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The National Music Publishers’ Association said Tuesday that it has won its latest copyright infringement battle against the operator of an illegal free-lyric Web site.
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Here’s the backdrop: Last week I was in Toronto for the holidays, visiting family and friends, and I decided to take my four-year-old son Gabriel and two-year-old son Zev to the Art Gallery of Ontario to see works by the Group of Seven. Zev was pretty entranced by the Lawren Harris paintings — that’s him above, checking out one of Harris’ works. (I didn’t note the name of that painting; does anyone know?)
[...]
Ah well. My line of logic here is, I admit, rather loose and rambling. Jamie’s video-game paintings do not actually impinge on any copyright from earlier paintings; they’re using the style of a former generation of artists, not their specific content. Still, the whole thing made me think a lot about the way art builds on art — and how copyright law can actually get in the way of art appreciation.
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The strange aspect of ACTA is that we don’t have public access to the shared documents. But is access to the drafts really necessary?
Margaret Aranyosi, Executive Director of KITE, Inc. 002 (2004)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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01.06.10
Posted in News Roundup at 5:05 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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I thought I’d also put this out there to the Linux community and see what they think of it. I’ve never done anything like this before so I’m not even sure if I should take on this idea, but I’d be interested in hearing what people think of it and any advice on how to make it happen.
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Remember how you’re not supposed to ask for something unless you really want it? I predicted, a few short years ago, that we would cease to bind ourselves to a particular platform or operating system. Now that the future is here, I’m looking to it with a tinge of trepidation. I’m not sure that I’m ready for what’s to come: a world without local operating systems. And one where everything is virtual. Windows, Linux, Mac OS, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX and will cease to have any significance to the end user. The end user will only see services or applications but not operating systems. For the end user, the operating system will not exist.
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People looking for traditional desktop operating systems can choose between Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.10 today.
Towards the end of the year users will be able to use cloud-based operating systems such as Google Chrome OS, or Linux, Symbian and Windows Mobile on a variety of devices.
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Before I start: this is for Linux. Specifically, it’s for Ubuntu and Debian, but it’ll probably work on other Linux distros if you know what you’re doing. With that out the way, I give you rTorrentWeb, the best BitTorrent client for Linux.
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Server
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But here’s something strange: Just before Christmas IBM announced Korea’s largest credit card company, BC Card, had decided to go with an IBM System z mainframe to support its payment system, rather than alternative products from HP and Oracle. “We chose System z for its continuous operation, service quality made available through IBM’s mainframe software solutions and economic returns for the years ahead,” Jeongkyu Lee, BC Card’s Chief Information Officer, is quoted as saying.
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So it was a strange feeling this New Year’s Day to have to part with a server that has been important to me for the past four years. At 12:01 a.m. 2010, the data center operations staff of The Planet reclaimed a Linux box that I had been using to run my company’s Web site and wiki. This reclamation ended an important chapter of my life.
The staff that takes the box off the rack will never know how it hosted a wiki that helped write more than 10 books, and that hundreds of people used the processor, memory and disk during the writing process. The people who strip this server down for parts won’t have any idea that the Web sites powered by this server took my company, Evolved Media, through several stages of evolution.
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Google
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When Google noted that Chrome OS is being launched, everyone from Microsoft to Apple to Linux based OS providers took notice. It’s not because of what was being presented in terms of the OS, but the general direction Google is heading is what terrified them. Within years they can put their fingers in every aspect, moving up the chain until there is no more room for competition.
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Kernel Space
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It’s been quiet due to the holidays, so -rc3 is reasonably small despite being a few days over the normal one-week mark. And most of the changes are pretty trivial, although both ext4 and reiserfs had some trouble in -rc2, hopefully all fixed now.
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Applications
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The download linked from this article is for Ubuntu 9.10 32bit. Other versions can be found on the Linux download page. There are downloads for both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Ubuntu 9.10, 9.04, 8.10, 8.04 and 7.10, and Fedora Core 10 and 9. The source code can also be downloaded from this page for use with other versions of Linux.
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The Opera Devices SDKs are built on the same engine as the company’s flagship browsers for desktop computers and mobile phones, offering browsing capabilities and tools such as user interfaces and application environments to be deployed on TVs, set-top boxes, portable media players, tablets and mobile devices, said the firm.
[...]
The SDK for Linux also boasts hardware acceleration and Open IPTV Framework for the development of Hybrid Broadcast Broadband TV and Open IPTV Forum clients.
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Instructionals
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With the beginning of this new year it’s time for a new release. 
Many people asked me whether there is a 64-Bit version, too?
Now i can say: Yes, it is!
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Debian Family
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Just a quick note that tomorrow (Wed 6th Jan 2010) at 7pm UTC/ 11am Pacific / 1pm Eastern, I will be starting back up with At Home With Jono Bacon: my series of videocasts about community growth and building, and sharing work and approaches with the communities that I am involved in, namely Ubuntu, Shot Of Jaq, and the Community Leadership Summit.
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FOR more than three years, I’ve been using Ubuntu, a popular distribution of Linux, on my home PC for work and play. As a long-time Windows user, I appreciated the freedom from crashes and system slowdowns that plagued my computing life before I made the switch. The notion that I would have to reinstall my operating system, so common in Windows when something went terribly awry, now seems so foreign to me as a Linux user.
I also enjoyed not having to put up with Microsoft’s intrusive and heavy-handed licensing practices, and not worrying that some malicious piece of code would get past my anti-virus software and wreak havoc on my files.
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And that’s an important thing to remember when talking about glitches in Linux: Yes, they exist, but they can crop up in Windows, too. In Linux, they don’t cost you anything — at least in terms of money. Time is another thing … especially if you’re not accustomed to the vocabulary and grammar of Linux.
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The top of the line Copia Ocean eReader features a 9-inch ePaper capacitive touchscreen, 768 x 1024 pixels resolution, 4-directional tilt-sensor, 3G connectivity (optional), WiFi (802.11b/g), Linux 2.6.21, 2GB internal memory, stereo speaker and 3.5mm stereo jack.
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Next up, there will be much more virtual Linux, particularly in Microsoft and Windows shops that are enjoying greater integration and support of Linux from Redmond. This — along with the growing base of enterprise Linux users leveraging virtualization and additional commercial support from Red Hat, Novell, Canonical and others — will help fuel more virtual Linux traction and growth. However, don’t expect Microsoft to talk too loudly about virtual Linux options and keep in mind we are still, even now in 2010, relatively early on in the enterprise adoption of server virtualization.
Moving on, what better place for Linux to hide inconspicuously than in cloud computing? We’ve covered the significance of community Linux in the enterprise and also community Linux in the clouds. With more support for community software and growing desire to build private and hybrid clouds, Linux (both commercial and community) figures prominently into the equation as a basic, flexible yet scalable building block. The end result is both use of Linux to build cloud infrastructure and availability of Linux in the clouds, even though it is likely to be labeled or branded something other than ‘Linux.’
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FPGA software provider PetaLogix has just introduced its PetaLinux SDK, a new system development software product to allow designers to build, customize and employ Embedded Linux on Xilinx FPGA-based embedded processor applications.
Introduced in conjunction with a design kit from Xilinx, the company claims that its PetaLinux SDK is the first commercially available Embedded Linux development environment specifically designed for FPGA-based embedded systems.
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The screen is detachable from the keyboard, and behind the screen you have a Qualcomm Snapdragon ARM-based processor, the Skylight Linux operating system, 512MB of RAM and 16GB of flash storage.
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I’ve been let down by my fair share of remote-control flying toys in the past, but the Avatar-chic, iPhone-controlled, Linux-based, Wi-Fi-ready, augmented reality-enhanced, dual video camera-wielding Parrot… well, you get the picture.
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AUGMENTED REALITY DRONE
A flying UFO-like device that can be controlled by an iPhone using WiFi. The quadricopter has two cameras that can stream video.
It was created by Parrot, a global leader in wireless devices for mobile phones. The company will make the software open source so programmers can create augmented reality games for the drone.
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The quadricopter is controlled by accelerometers and an embedded Linux platform originally designed for mobile phones, according to Parrot. The open-source platform is being made available to software developers at CES, the company said. In unveiling the AR.Drone, Parrot said that software for controlling the copter would be available on a number of platforms, not just the iPhone and iPod Touch.
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Android
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So we rooted the Nexus One. Before it was out. Without a device. Neat, but many knowledgeable commentators in the Android community noted that the root was only possible due to the engineering bootloader shipped on the devices distributed by Google, and that retail devices would likely have locked bootloaders. We told them not to worry… and here’s why.
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It’s easy too! Google WANTS you to be able to do whatever you please on your Nexus One, but they also want you to be aware of the consequences.
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Google is such a large company, and with increasingly large ambitions, that it is often hard keeping tabs on all of its activities. That’s particularly the case at the moment, when most of the tech world is understandably focussing on the imminent launch of Google’s own Android phone.
But important as these events are, we shouldn’t overlook some of the less well-publicised, but nonetheless strategic, moves it is making elsewhere. Perhaps the best example of that can be found in the field of open spectrum.
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Google leads with the fact that this is as much about *how* people buy phones, as what that phone is. As many commentators have noted, that’s a reflection of Google’s long-term plans to break the grip that the current mobile phone companies have on this sector, but it needs to proceeds cautiously, step by step, so as not to frighten the animals – hence the very limited scope of the present announcement.
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As the tech world readies itself for the unveiling of Google’s Android-based — and much-hyped — Nexus One, MIPS Technologies Inc. this morning said it will team with a host of partners to showcase new Android-based offerings at this week’s CES. Among them are set-top boxes, a netbook and a social media center designed to enable consumers to consume and share TV content.
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MIPS Technologies is hoping Google’s Android OS can find fame and fortune outside the mobile world where Google hasn’t set its sights on making a device of its own (yet).
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MIPS Technologies has announced plans to design set-top boxes running the Android platform. Linux is already a popular embedded software option for device makers. However, building a device around Android — which is based on the Linux kernel — could enable set-top boxes to run a wide variety of extra applications.
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Android: Last year saw the launch of nearly two dozen Android-powered phones, including the Verizon Droid. In a few days, Google’s Nexus One will launch as the first Android phone which can be unlocked from any given carrier (it is launching with T-Mobile). Android is Google’s answer to the iPhone, and as it reaches critical mass across multiple carriers and handsets it is becoming increasingly attractive to developers. There are already more than 10,000 apps on Android, next year there will be even more. And other devices running on the mobile OS are launching as well.
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It’s long been argued that FLOSS advocates should be looking at the next generation of computing devices. That strategy is paying off. More than 1.4 million Google Android (that’s Linux) devices shipped in the third quarter of 2009. It’s too early for numbers in the fourth quarter, but you can bet that they’re even higher. In three months, that’s 1.4 million users adopting Linux for personal computing. Granted, still a minority next to other smartphones, but the Nexus One looks ready to give other smartphone vendors a run for their money.
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For others, the move into equipment will in time fragment the Android OS world, so that some handset makers could develop their own Linux kernel based on Android, or put a middleware layer on top of Android, while remaining compatible with Android apps.
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Sub-notebooks
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And with the release of Microsoft Corp.’s streamlined Windows 7 a couple of months ago, netbook users can finally run a new version of Windows instead of the aging Windows XP. (Some netbooks ship with the free, open-source Linux operating system, but many users unwisely rule out that option.)
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Other features include Wi-Fi, webcam, and various operating systems including Windows 7 Starter, XP and Ubuntu.
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Hopefully, you’ll find something to learn from here, and the good news is that everything found in this post is free.
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The Beta release of the app will deliver not only tons of bug fixes, but also performance improvements, all-new features and official support for Snow Leopard and Ubuntu Karmic, according to the developers. An early access is also available to the beta, slated for launch tomorrow.
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The January issue of the Open Source Business Resource is available, with a focus on “success factors.” “The authors in this issue explore: the importance of well defined processes, the value of documentation to end users, the diverse tasks of a community manager, the value provided by participants who don’t contribute code, and how a community can assist in creating training materials. Each concentrates on a particular success factor, and as a whole, provide a fuller picture of what to look for in a successful open source project or company.”
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The recent international recognition of local developer Ken Kasina has boosted the country’s profile. Mr Kasina was presented with the Global Achievement Award for Open Source award last year for his work on open source platforms.
Last year, local software developer CompuLynx raked in Sh400 million in software development, with a portion gained from exporting solutions.
The company is now targeting Sh1 billion over the next year on the back of increased interest from foreign companies and countries.
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The worldwide community around OpenClinica, the rapidly growing open source clinical trial software, will gather on March 22nd, 2010 in Bethesda, Maryland (USA) for the first ever OpenClinica Global Conference.
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Participating in this panel were:
Anthony Gold, Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) President, Open Solutions Alliance
Joe McKendrick, Contributing Editor and Analyst, ebizQ
Pierre Fricke, Director of Product Management for the SOA & Business Rules Management System products, Red Hat
Debbie Moynihan, Director, FUSE Community & Marketing, Progress Software
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People seem to forget that Firefox is open source. They see it as a browser and probably don’t even contemplate it anymore. But I haven’t forgotten, and thankfully millions out there haven’t either. My experience with the Linux-based Maemo operating system on the Nokia N900 opened my eyes to open source and Linux.
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Winner: OpenOffice 3.1 — Thanks to some serious third-party and open-source community support, OpenOffice can handle almost any format you throw at it, including Office 2007. More to the point, OpenOffice can save to virtually any format it opens, and it has a top-notch native PDF output option. This versatility extends to both spreadsheets and presentations, too.
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Mozilla
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Mozilla’s Firefox 3.7 looks set to take a step closer to competing with Google’s Chrome and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 in the speed stakes, according to results of a pre-release version tested by a browser enthusiast.
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GNU
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Other than the open-source community’s GNU GCC, there isn’t really an alternative to the Intel compiler — and for some applications the Intel compiler is the only option.
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Mr. T loves using Photoshop at work, but it’s just too darn expensive to buy for his home computer.
That’s why he uses GIMP, which stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program.
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Macraigor Systems has ported their proprietary On-Chip Debug Technology (OCDemon), GNU Tools Suite and Eclipse Ganymede/Galileo platform to the ARM Cortex-A8 processor.
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Open Access
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Stan Peirce had been looking for new pursuits after a long career as an electrical engineer with Eastman Chemical Co. in Kingsport, Tenn. Then, last year, while searching the Internet, he stumbled on nearly 2,000 academic courses that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had put online. Peirce saw MIT’s offerings—its OpenCourseWare project complete with syllabuses, assignments, exams and, in many cases, audio or video lectures—as nothing short of an educational gold mine.
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We are pleased to announce the release of MapOSMatic, a set of tools to automatically generate cities’ map from OpenStreetMap data. MapOSMatic takes care of generating a labelled grid over the map, a list of street with references matching the grid as well as a nice layout of the city if its administrative boundaries are known. For now, it only supports rendering French metropolitan cities’ maps, but it will soon be extended to other parts of the world. MapOSMatic is Open Source / Free Software licensed under AGPLv3.
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OpenStreetMap Founder Steve Coast has announced that the OpenStreetMap (OSM) Project now has more than 200,000 registered users. The project, originally started in August of 2004, has become increasingly popular in recent months. The new milestone comes less than ten months after the project reached 100,000 registered users back in March of 2009. OpenStreetMap is an open source project, run by the OpenStreetMap Foundation, that builds free online maps, not based on any copyright or licensed map data.
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While this is currently experimental, in the future he plans to make it easy to export data in XML/JSON as well as to create more sophisticated visual representations of the data.
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Abstract: Articles whose authors make them Open Access (OA) by self-archiving them online are cited significantly more than articles accessible only to subscribers. Some have suggested that this “OA Advantage” may not be causal but just a self-selection bias, because authors preferentially make higher-quality articles OA.
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Other Openness
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“One of our hopes is that the open-source community will speed up development of the fuel cell and electrical network, as well as other key technologies,” said Hugo Spowers, a key partner in the Riversimple project and the man behind Morgan’s Lifecar fuel cell prototype.
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What commanders want and need is information regarding the local population. Because of this need, the report encourages collecting data from “open-source” channels such as civilian sources, NGOs, and other groups.
“The Cold War notion that open-source information is ‘second class’ is a dangerous, outmoded cliché,” the document says. “Lieutenant General Samuel V. Wilson, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, captured it perfectly: ‘Ninety percent of intelligence comes from open sources. The other 10 percent, the clandestine work, is just the more dramatic. The real intelligence hero is Sherlock Holmes, not James Bond.’”
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But software engineering is where the rubber meets the road. Few people care whether P equals NP just for the beauty of the question. The computer field is about doing things with computers. This means writing software to solve human problems, and running that software on real machines. By the Church-Turing Thesis, all computer hardware is essentially equivalent. So while new machine architectures are cool, the real limiting challenge in computer science is the problem of creating software. We need software that can be put together in a reasonable amount of time, for a reasonable cost, that works something like its designers hoped for, and runs with few errors.
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Storage
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Good things come in small packages–and when it comes to storage, the saying couldn’t be more true. No matter what size your data set is, you can find a stylish, pocketable wonder of modern miniaturization to store it and transport it.
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Seagate has upped its BlackArmor external drive interface from USB 2.0 to the faster USB 3.0.
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NVerzion, a leading provider of digital broadcasting and television station automation solutions, and Open Source Storage today announced Southern Illinois University, Carbondale station WSIU has completed installation of its new NVerzion automation package that will control 24/7 operation of the station’s three channels, unattended overnight operations, server interface and master control interface, as well as provide a complete media database and interface to the station’s existing traffic system. WSIU has also added Open Source Storage’s award-winning OSVault™ Network Archive, providing a powerful, yet economical data management appliance ensuring the station’s ability to maintain high-speed file exchange, portability, data preservation and longevity in a non-proprietary, open network environment.
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Security
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A few days later the TSA, to its credit, rolled back some of the more arbitrarily punitive restrictions — in-flight entertainment systems can now be turned back on, and passengers are, at the airline’s discretion, again permitted to use the toilets during the last hour of flight.
But while a degree of sanity may have returned to some of the rules, the TSA’s new security philosophy appears to yield significant advantage to attackers. The current approach may actually make us more vulnerable to disruption and terror now than we were before.
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An unidentified man breached airport security at Newark Airport on Sunday, walking into the secured area through the exit, prompting an evacuation of a terminal and flight delays that continued into the next day. This problem isn’t common, but it happens regularly. The result is always the same, and it’s not obvious that fixing the problem is the right solution.
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Those who do cross the Albanian border, for whatever odd reason, will probably find, besides the aforementioned stolen Mercedes, a beautiful country, filled with wide quiet beaches, rough mountains, and disarmingly friendly and helpful people.
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One of the Bush administration’s most pernicious legacies is the never-ending War on Terrorism, a perpetual state of emergency that supposedly authorizes the president to break the law, abridge civil liberties, and ignore due process, all under a cloak of secrecy. Last week former Vice President Dick Cheney accused the Obama administration of forsaking Bush’s War on Terrorism. If only it were true.
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On Christmas Day, police in the U.K. rounded up tourists taking photos of the royal family at Sandringham church and confiscated their cameras. At The Independent, Dominic Lawson’s dismay subsides to confusion: Britain’s police are “descending into obvious madness,” he writes. ” …Their explanation of their behaviour is usually much harder to understand than the errors they seek to mitigate.”
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Married couples could be arrested and charged for insulting each other under a new law in France banning ‘psychological violence’.
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Airport security is a big deal these days. But since when has reporting your income been a matter of national security?
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Animals
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Director Louie Psihoyos talks about his film “The Cove,” which won the Golden Space Needle award for best documentary at the Seattle International Film Festival. The film is about a cove on the Japanese coast where for generations residents have survived by killing and processing dolphins. It opens Aug. 7 for a regular run.
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Dolphins are almost as clever as people and should be given human status, according to a zoologist at Emory University.
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Since the summer of 2003, I’ve crisscrossed the country speaking at colleges and theaters and bookstores, first with The Weather Underground documentary and, starting in March of this year, with my book, Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen (William Morrow, 2009). In discussions with young people, they often tell me, “Nothing anyone does can ever make a difference.”
[...]
Aha! Activism = self-expression; organizing = movement-building.
Until recently, I’d rarely heard young people call themselves “organizers.” The common term for years has been “activists.” Organizing was reduced to the behind the scenes nuts-and-bolts work needed to pull off a specific event, such as a concert or demonstration.
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Environment
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Saudi Arabia says it is “satisfied” with the conclusion of last month’s UN climate summit in Copenhagen.
However, the country’s lead negotiator Mohammad Al-Sabban told BBC News that the UN climate process may be heading for stalemate, like world trade talks.
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This research note is an attempt to map out the range of reasons for governments’ silence on peak oil. These reasons can be seen along a continuum, from ignorance (“we don’t know”), to disbelief, to conspiratorial silence (“we know well, and have plans, but we’re not sharing them”). This post surveys some of the more common ideas regarding governments’ lack of attention to the issue, in the hope of spurring comments from readers regarding which of the scenarios is more plausible in light of available evidence.
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An Australian father and son team are going global with new power board technology designed to cut household energy use by automatically switching off electronics devices when they are not in use and eliminating “standby” power consumption.
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Finance
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In early 2008, while federal investigators were busy investigating disgraced financier Robert Allen Stanford for his part in an alleged $8 billion fraudulent investment scheme, Eastern European hackers were quietly hoovering up tens of thousands customer financial records from the Bank of Antigua, an institution formerly owned by the Stanford Group.
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Asian capitalism, notably China and South Korea are competing with the US for global power. Asian global power is driven by dynamic economic growth, while the US pursues a strategy of military-driven empire building.
One Day’s Read of the Financial Times
Even a cursory read of a single issue of the Financial Times (December 28, 2009) illustrates the divergent strategies toward empire building. On page one, the lead article on the US is on its expanding military conflicts and its ‘war on terror’, entitled “Obama Demands Review of Terror List”. In contrast, there are two page-one articles on China, which describe China’s launching of the world’s fastest long-distance passenger train service and China’s decision to maintain its currency pegged to the US dollar as a mechanism to promote its robust export sector.
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In a twist to the island nation’s much-watched struggle to cope with its massive debt, Mr. Grimsson blocked a $5-billion (U.S.) deal to pay Britain and the Netherlands for losses suffered by depositors in one of Iceland’s banks.
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Arianna Huffington has a solution: Change to a community bank. In a post written with economist Rob Johnson at The Huffington Post, she advocated that people close their accounts at the big four banks and open accounts at small community banks.
The idea is simple: If enough people who have money in one of the big four banks move it into smaller, more local, more traditional community banks, then collectively we, the people, will have taken a big step toward re-rigging the financial system so it becomes again the productive, stable engine for growth it’s meant to be. It’s neither Left nor Right — it’s populism at its best. Consider it a withdrawal tax on the big banks for the negative service they provide by consistently ignoring the public interest.
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Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights
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While warning that consumers could get ripped off if they don’t shop around when buying music, an expert on saving money says that if it’s serious about winning over pirates, the music industry must wake up and embrace price competition.
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The controversial French ‘three strikes’ law has hit yet another delay – it has failed to win approval from the French data protection agency.
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The good news is that Americans spent more money at the movie theater in 2009 than the year before. The bad news is that they spent less on DVDs—a lot less.
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MP3 players given as presents have helped boost UK single sales to an all-time high in the week after Christmas.
According to Official Charts Company figures, 4.22m singles were sold in the last week of 2009, beating the previous record of 4.03m over Christmas 2008.
Margaret Aranyosi, Executive Director of KITE, Inc. 001 (2004)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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