08.12.10
Posted in News Roundup at 5:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Desktop
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I have now changed my laptop to a linux (Ubuntu) machine and run a piece of software (Virtual Box) on it. Virtual Box is a program which pretends it is another computer – a virtual computer. On virtual box I run Windows. This is – I believe – a superior set-up and it is unlikely I will ever run a machine primarily on Microsoft again. I will explain why more fully below – but first I just wish to make a simple observation… if I take the hard drive out of my laptop and install it in my old laptop everything works just fine – the whole computer is functional. If I tried to do that with a windows operating system it would fail. This is likely to be important in the future of computing because I will be able to migrate my computer from a laptop to the cloud – or possibly onto my (linux powered) phone. It is unbelievably useful to have a hardware-independent computer.
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Kernel Space
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Where exactly is the Linux kernel heading?
Here at the LinuxCon conference, a panel of Linux kernel developers from Red Hat, Google, Novell and Oracle discussed what’s next for the ecosystem, and why not every kernel debuts with a big new feature.
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Graphics Stack
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If all goes according to plan, X.Org Server 1.9 will be released in about two weeks, but after that there still is the X.Org 7.6 release “katamari” to be done. While X.Org releases themselves aren’t as important any longer with the X Server releases being done at different points and the rest of the X.Org package collection being modular, the X.Org 7.6 release is expected in October.
Alan Coopersmith, the X.Org wrangler at Sun/Oracle, has done some X.Org 7.6 planning on the xorg-devel mailing list. On the date of the xorg-server 1.9 release, which is scheduled on the 20th of August but could potentially slip by a few days, all driver and protocol updates needed for the 1.9 release should also have been released. At this point, Alan would also like the first release candidate of Xlib 1.4.0 to be tagged.
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Applications
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SANE is just the application programming interface, a collection of tools and software libraries that allow developers to write powerful software, but it isn’t really a user application itself. The XSane project has built a nice graphical user interface, based on SANE and originally using the X graphical environment used on pretty much everything that isn’t Windows. And if you want to know why “X” is the name of the graphical environment, you’ll have to ask the people at MIT who invented X and made it open source and very popular.
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Essentially all the UbuntuOne plugin for Shutter does is save the file to a specified synchronised UbuntuOne folder – which UbuntuOne notices and proceeds to upload. It’s nifty in that it means you don’t have to manually do anything – but you’ll still have to head to your UbuntuOne folder to grab a public link.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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The stable release of KDE 4.5 was released yesterday and again thanks to neoclust, we have packages for Mandriva 2010 Spring since the same day !!
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GNOME Desktop
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Indeed, Canonical has no need to fork GNOME and enhancements to a user interface don’t represent a fork. Look at Android. Motorola has its own MotoBlur interface that sits on top of the OS, but users are still running Android underneath.
Recently, we reported that Red Hat is in fact the largest contributor to GNOME–an environment that the company has a stake in. It’s not surprising to see Canonical experiment with how to treat GNOME, but it would be completely surprising for the company to choose to do an actual fork. Why? GNOME is a very well-done environment that will only increase in popularity, and it’s a user interface, where having users comfortable with it is part of its attraction.
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If you’ve ever run a Linux LiveCD (or LiveUSB), or booted from a rescue disk, you’ve probably used a version of SYSLINUX, even if you didn’t know it at the time. SYSLINUX, the work of H. Peter Anvin, is a bootloader for Linux which can boot from an MS-DOS FAT filesystem or create a bootable floppy (very old-school!); its close cousin ISOLINUX handles booting from CDs and similar media. SYSLINUX has always been enormously useful for first-time installs, when you’re often booting from a machine that is currently running Windows, but until fairly recently, you had to switch to another bootloader post-install, since SYSLINUX doesn’t handle ext* filesystems. However, EXTLINUX, a fairly recent addition to the Syslinux Project, does handle these filesystems (see below), giving another boot option besides GRUB and LILO for Linux systems.
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Red Hat Family
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Wipro has become the first Red Hat Premier Partner in India. The two companies have strengthened their strategic partnership through joint marketing and integration opportunities designed to bring open source solutions to enterprises across the subcontinent.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Making a virtual appliance is not that big a deal, but VMware faced some particular challenges in putting Zimbra in a virtual shrink wrapper to distribute it in a virtualized appliance format. For one thing, most of VMware’s customers are running Windows server operating systems, but Zimbra runs on Linux.
In the case of the virtual appliance version of Zimbra Collaboration Suite, the Linux in question is a distribution of Ubuntu. But SMB shops that use Windows don’t want to learn Linux, and VMware didn’t want to port ZCS to Windows, either.
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The canonical-census package was created for a specific, but undisclosed, OEM customer of Canonical. It will be up to that customer as to whether or not they reveal the results of the data collection, says Spencer, and future plans for canonical-census beyond this one OEM have not been made, but if the scheme works well, it could be considered as an option at the next Ubuntu Developer Summit to provide data to the community.
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You can probably use the OS for years, and never know what a command line parameter is. Quite simply one of the easiest to use Linux distros right out of the box, Canonical has seriously upped the ante and made an OS that can be enjoyed both for its simplicity and capability by anyone, geek or average consumer.
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Phones
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Nokia/MeeGo
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Here is a visual preview for you. If you have tried MeeGo on your machine, you can send us your review under our AuTIER program and get paid.
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Android
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Make no mistake about it: Open source developers can be a very passionate bunch.
At the LinuxCon conference, the topic of why Google Android code is not part of Linux was the subject of some intense discussion. One such discussion became so heated that a panelist wound up telling a combative audience member to “shut up” before asking them to leave.
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There’s no question that gaming on the Android platform has heretofore been relatively underwhelming, but that looks like it’s all about to change. It seems that Sony Ericsson — a company that has yet to even introduce an Android 2.0 device — is at work on a project to redefine gaming on Google’s mobile platform. We now know (via a trusted source) that the company is actively and heavily developing a brand new gaming platform, ecosystem, and device (possibly alongside Google) which are already in the late stages of planning. And we’ve got the goods on it.
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Jolicloud
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The particularly interesting aspect of this OS is that the main guts of it are located on hosted servers. Almost everything is based inside the browser which is like an open source version of Google Chrome (called Chromium).
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Jolicloud 1.0 just became available as a free download. This is the very first free cloud computing-based OS. As expected, Jolicloud is based on Linux and features an HTML user interface.
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Jolicloud 1.0 is another Linux distribution that just released its first full version after several months of being in beta. What makes this different from the other Linux distributions available out there is that it integrates both native applications with web-based applications that looks like native apps. If that sounded familiar, well, it should if you tried Google’s ChromeOS or if you have use the pre-iTunes App Store iPhone and iPod Touch — where you save web-apps on the launcher and it looks like a native app.
Installing Linux distributions has gone a long way – from dozens of 3.5” diskettes to multiple CDs and to single DVDs. And now, you simple click a few buttons and that’s it – a few minutes later, you have a brand-spanking-new Linux desktop. The same can be said of Jolicloud. However, Jolicloud differs in one aspect — post-install, you need to register at Jolicloud.com for an account.
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OLPC
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Wondering what to do with your old XO laptop now that the novelty has worn off? Consider donating it to the Digital Literacy Project (DigLit) and put a computer you’re no longer using into the hands of an elementary school student in one of two schools within the Boston Public School system.
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just got a mail from adam holt, the olpc community support manager. olpc-affiliated filipino community group ekindling.org is looking for anyone with strong open source/sysadmin/teaching skills who could help on the ground deploying XOs and Sugar for an organized laptop deployment (100 XO-1.5s) beginning around september or october in the philippines.
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Tablets
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Smartbook AG is shipping a seven-inch, 800 x 480 tablet computer for the German market equipped with Android 2.1. The Smartbook Surfer runs on a Telechips TTC8902 processor clocked to 720MHz, and offers 256MB of DDR2 memory, 2GB of flash, 802.11b/g, optional GPS, and a webcam, says the company.
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With its roots in Eclipse and Java, BOS 5.2 boasts broad platform support, and runs on Linux, Windows and OS X. I tested the studio application on CentOS 5.5, Fedora 13 and Ubuntu 10.04, with good results across the board.
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Oracle
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Hosts: Randal Schwartz and Simon Phipps
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Oracle Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is a complete management, hosting and access solution for virtualized desktops hosted in the datacenter. By enabling standardized virtual desktop images, Oracle Virtual Desktop Infrastructure helps reduce administration overhead, lower total cost of ownership and increase security.
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CMS
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Programming
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There’s an important corollary here. Hackers, by their very nature, like playing with code, and the easiest/best/most satisfying way to do that is to play with open source code, and to share it with other hackers for feedback and kudos. As a result, many of the best hackers tend to be found either in the free software community, or at least aligned with many of its ideas.
Graham’s argument about the centrality of hackers to any company that needs good software therefore implies that free software is something that should be deployed at least internally – not just because of its own, evident virtues, but because it will help to keep those crucial hackers happy, and to attract more of the same. It’s an approach that is certainly much cheaper than trying to bribe them to stay despite the unhackerish software they are forced to use.
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Standards/Consortia
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Understanding switching costs is definitely lacking in today’s discussion. That’s why people are locked in to proprietary standards, and have to pay astronomically high prices to decrypt their very own data back to ‘raw data’, to make it suitable for input in another program. Lot’s of people don’t see proprietary standards for what it is: Encrypting your data while you don’t have the key to decrypt it. Those people fail to note those exit costs of a platform are related to their very own choice of ‘entering’ that platform to begin with, and not related to the choice of migrating to another platform.
That’s why requiring open standards matters: It’s another way of requiring your own data not to be encrypted too much. Another way to require a supplier to enable you to retrieve your own raw data without infringing their intellectual property (monopoly? and being sued by them.
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Security/Aggression
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A COUPLE who painted their side of a garden fence were shocked to be given a fine for criminal damage after a neighbour complained.
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Labour’s controversial child protection database has been switched off, with a minister dismissing it as a “surrogate ID card scheme”.
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Britain’s eccentrics, recluses and misanthropes, you can relax. Ignoring neighbours and keeping your curtains permanently shut to the world outside might not win you many friends, but you’re no longer likely to be denounced as a possible terrorist.
A radio advert that urged listeners to consider calling the police’s anti-terrorist hotline if they had suspicions about local people who avoided company, kept their windows covered and eschewed bank cards for cash has been banned for potentially causing “serious offence”.
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Putting aside the cost to the taxpayer (I’d say that these councils spend money like drunken sailors, but it’s an insult to drunken sailors who are at least spending their own money), what on earth does this mean..? Does it mean that people can use public facilities to snoop on who’s using particular car parks? To conduct surveillance on their neighbours, their “friends”, their co-workers, their spouses suspected of adultery..? Does it mean that people can scope out car parks to see what vehicles are there worth nicking? Can people read the numberplates on the cars (presumably so)? The list of infuriating possibilities is endless…
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Oppressive heat and waves of toxic smog in Moscow has seen the death rate reach 700 a day – twice the normal rate, a senior Russian health official said today.
“The mortality rate has doubled,” said Andrei Seltsovsky, head of the city’s health department. There were usually 360 to 380 deaths a day in the city, but “now that number is about 700″.
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How did the new forest law make things worse?
The function of forest protection completely disappeared, with no human or technical resources allocated to it whatsoever. It was no longer a federal mission and central management was dropped.
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“Sometime in the next decade we may pass that tipping point which would put us warmer than temperatures that Greenland can survive,” Alley told a briefing in Congress, adding that a rise in the range of 2C to 7C would mean the obliteration of Greenland’s ice sheet.
The fall-out would be felt thousands of miles away from the Arctic, unleashing a global sea level rise of 23ft (7 metres), Alley warned. Low-lying cities such as New Orleans would vanish.
“What is going on in the Arctic now is the biggest and fastest thing that nature has ever done,” he said.
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Finance
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Government austerity measures are already plunging the British economy into reverse according to figures published today which reveal sagging high street sales and renewed falls in house prices.
Expectations of widespread job cuts in the public sector have begun to discourage households from moving home or buying “big ticket” items such as furniture and carpets, with spending going on essential items and replacements only, said the British Retail Consortium. One of the worst-hit sectors is big-screen flat televisions, where sales have slowed markedly, but the BRC also noted year-on-year falls in items such as shoes. It said that high street sales are running 0.5% higher than last year on a like-for-like basis, with the small rise largely due to food price inflation. “Talk of public spending cuts is unsettling consumers and they are concentrating on essentials,” said the BRC director general, Stephen Robertson.
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Two more regulating bodies, the U.S.-based Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) and UK-based Financial Services Authority (FSA), are still probing into the bank’s failure to disclose to its investors a Wells notice that the SEC had handed it in early 2009– an entire year before the SEC’s lawsuit in April 2010.
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Capmark Financial Group Inc.’s creditors sought court permission to sue Citigroup Inc. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. over a $1.5 billion loan made to the commercial property lender.
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Contrary to first impressions, the new financial reform law could help rather than hinder Goldman Sachs, The Los Angeles Times reported.
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One of the most talked-about changes facing Wall Street is the end to proprietary trading. A number of banks were already scaling back their proprietary trading operations because of losses incurred during the financial crisis. Citigroup and JPMorgan are said to be looking at moving employees in those operations to other trading functions, as Goldman has started to do.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Sven Juerss, the chief executive of Microdrones GmbH, a German firm which built the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), said he expects to provide “dozens” more in the future.
However, Google has moved swiftly to deny that the purchase was for company use – Peter Barron, a spokesman for the firm’s UK office, told the Telegraph: “Google is not testing or using this technology. This was a purchase by a Google executive with an interest in robotics for personal use.”
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Should companies be able to sue for libel? The recently launched Lord Lester libel reform bill includes a provision that companies would have to show substantial financial loss before being able to sue. The House of Commons select committee for culture, media and sport has also called for fundamental reform of libel law in respect of corporate reputation, while many Australian states have limited actions in libel to companies with fewer than 10 employees.
But to the conventionally minded English lawyer there is no question that companies should be able to sue for libel. After all, companies are “legal persons” – and in English law, personality goes a very long way. The view is that if “natural persons” can sue for libel then so can companies.
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When Raja Petra Kamarudin, one of Malaysia’s best-known bloggers, heard he was to be detained without trial for the third time last February, he decided to flee the country. He was already facing sedition and criminal defamation charges after publishing a string of stories that linked the prime minister Najib Razak and his wife to the gruesome murder of a beautiful Mongolian translator, Shaariibuugiin Altantuyaa, in 2006.
While Raja Petra says he was prepared to fight those charges in court, he was not willing to face detention without trial again under the country’s draconian Internal Security Act. “Under the ISA, they bypass the court process entirely,” says the blogger, whose Malaysia Today website regularly exposes the abuses of power that blight the south-east Asian nation. “If I’d let them get me a third time, I would have been a glutton for punishment.”
Richard Stallman Speech 2009
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:28 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Want to hear something interesting? The often made claim that “there are no distinctions between developers and users” is at worst a lie and at best misinformation. What it actually means is that if you really don’t like something about a program you have the code and can change it yourself. What the implication though is that if you have an issue with a program you can contribute these thoughts to the developers and be taken seriously — which pretty much is never the case. The reality of the matter is that unless you are willing to actually code the fix yourself it simply wont get done and even then you have no guarantee of it actually being included. On average you have more chance of being listened to by closed source developers as their success is financially linked with your usage.
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The very fact that no efforts are made to find out what your users think and what problems they are having is disturbing enough, actively putting roadblocks in their path is just madness. After all the only people who make it through this trial-by-fire are going to be the most tenacious pro-Linux advocates. Of course they think everything’s hunky dory and dispute what I say, it’s the very definition of selection bias — the unhappy people all left a long time ago.
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Kernel Space
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While Linux 2.6.36 development continues apace, a number of new stable releases iron out various quirks in previous versions. New versions of PowerTop and graphics drivers for AMD and NVIDIA graphics chips offer numerous enhancements and bug fixes.
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Applications
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GNOME Do and Docky aren’t the only options Linux users have if they want to install a dock-style launcher on their systems. Two others, Avant Window Navigator and SimDock, are also in the running. While AWN has its faults and frustrations, it narrowly beats out GNOME Do on style points. SimDock, on the other hand, just doesn’t measure up to either.
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Proprietary
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Adobe rolled out a security update to their Flash Player yesterday and for Mac OS X users this update also integrates Gala — their codename for H.264 GPU video decoding in Flash on Mac OS X. With Adobe Flash Player 10.1.82.76 on Apple Mac OS X there is now GPU video decoding enabled by default to offload more of the playback work to the graphics card, assuming you are using a newer NVIDIA graphics processor. This is coming after Adobe introduced H.264 GPU decoding in their Windows Flash Player 10.1 release, but they continue to shaft Linux users with video support.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Hamish Paul Wilson started let me know of his porting of The Chzo Mythos to GNU/Linux at May 2010, and updated me on his progress at June 2010, now finally the porting is done and The Chzo Mythos is available for GNU/Linux free of charge !
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They are available for purchase and download right over the Internet (often DRM-free), and some of them are pretty high quality. Here are five more you might not have played but are definitely worth giving a try.
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Ok, today I have quite a lot of stuff, and its all Quake2 related :p Believe it or not Quake2 is alive and kicking… and its engine is featuring some of the very best open-source games!
For those who might have missed it: AlienArena 7.45 has been released recently and the release makes an already solid game even more awesome 
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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THE DESKTOP ENVIRONMENT KDE has been updated with over 1,700 new features and 16,000 bug fixes.
The cross platform application project best known for its desktop environment that is shipped by many Linux distributions has issued this major update a month after the rival project Gnome put one out. The latest KDE update features integration with Webkit in applications such as Konqueror, the default KDE web browser.
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GNOME Desktop
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After giving it a spin for a few hours, GNOME Shell never really felt like a complete disaster for me. It works quite well in my 3 year old laptop with basic configuration. Though GNOME Shell still leaves a lot to be desired, you have to keep in mind that GNOME Shell is a still a work in progress.
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Reviews
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Absolute Linux seems to get frequent updates and while writing this update 13.1.4 was already released on 30/07/2010 (Update: On 08/08/2010 apparently 13.1.41 was released). These incorporate the latest updates from Slackware but when looking at the Changelog on the website seem mostly small Absolute usability updates and bug fixes. This makes for the impression that it is always a bit of a moving target and never ‘quite right’ at release time, which begs the question why the developer does not rather wait a few days longer and release less often.
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A deluxe version of Vector Linux 6.0 “SOHO” is due out in 10 days and will cost $22.99 on the Vector Linux website. This is something Vector Linux started doing during the 5.9 release. I like the idea of having a deluxe version available for convenience. Make sure you check out the Lighter version of Vector Linux which are lightweight, fast, and great on old hardware. Enjoy these screenshots of Vector Linux 6.0 SOHO edition.
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PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Except for office applications we couldn’t complain about the packages that came with the OS. For instance in the internet and communications domain PC Linux came with a browser (Firefox), a twitter client (Choqok), an IM client (Pidgin), mail client (Thunderbird), torrent and even Dropbox ! There was no office suite bundled and the text editor (KWrite) was pathetic. At least AbiWord would’ve raised the score a little above the zero that we gave it on this criteria. The main menu was well categorised but a Mepis or Mint-like search would’ve been better. Although a nice addition was the displaying of recently used applications. Kwallet – the default password keeper integrates into all programs that require logins. We checked randomly for codec support and found that SM Player could handle all of the different encoded video files we threw at it. The default music player was Amarok which does what it’s supposed to quite well. For file managers there was a choice between Dolphin and Conqueror – nothing spectacular.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Copyright licensing and trademarks are two different areas of law, and we consider them separately in Ubuntu. The following policy applies only to copyright licences. We evaluate trademarks on a case-by-case basis.
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Flavours and Variants
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The combination of Chromium and the Ice SSB edges out (barely) Peppermint OS One. It’s not a big enough difference that you could go wrong using Peppermint OS One, but the Chromium/Ice SSB combination was just fast enough to warrant using Peppermint Ice.
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Ludwig Enterprises, Inc. (Pink Sheets:LUDG) board of directors announces that TheOne(TM) receiver will utilize Linux as its base operating software. This architecture will allow applications from other application developers to operate in TheOne(TM) radio. Applications such as jpeg viewer, media players, web mail, foxfire and others may be utilized. Rather than restrict or block outside applications Ludwig welcomes collaborative input from independent application developers resulting in rapid evolution of superior software. A report by the Standish Group states that adoption of Open Source software models has resulted in savings of approximately $60 Billion per year to consumers.
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Phones
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Android
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Mobile syncing remains a vital task that few really get right, but the open source NoSQL initiative aims to fill the gap, at least on Android. CouchDB, the open source database that is part of NoSQL and Apache, has been made available for the Google OS and will also be supported by Hewlett-Packard’s next release of webOS.
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Modders and ROM developers are about to bury themselves in source code today and will chug six packs of Red Bull to stay up late into the night hacking away. HTC has released their valuable Android 2.2 source code for the EVO 4G, DROID Incredible, Aria, and Wildfire today allowing programmers and enthusiasts to get their hands dirty with code.
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Linux has become omnipresent. It’s presence is so deep that a user may not even know that he/she is in-fact using Linux, the kernel. The GNU combined operating systems do give Linux its identity.
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Sub-notebooks
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Yesterday we looked at Jolicloud as an option for netbook owners keen on using the net’s cloud computing potential. Today, we look at the big name in Linux: Ubuntu.
The latest version of Ubuntu “Lucid Lynx” — 10.4 — comes in a netbook-optimised version that is designed for computer makers to deploy on new netbooks, but it is also available for public download. It’s a great operating system choice for netbook users.
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I personally prefer the Netbook Edition over the vanilla Desktop version. The user interface is very intuitive, and the resources footprint is smaller than the normal Ubuntu system. For most netbooks, you will be surprised with the power that Ubuntu Netbook Edition has in a fresh install, and the Ubuntu/Debian software installation system is one of the best on any platform, so installing the software to suit most user needs is rather easy and quick (or even the operating system itself for that matter).
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Open source software is poised for rapid growth in enterprises over the next 12 months, but cost is no longer the primary driver behind open source adoption.
That’s according to a new study from global consultancy Accenture, which based its findings on interviews with 300 executives at organizations in the United States, the United Kingdom and Ireland with annual revenues above US$500 million.
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The group cites several reasons why women don’t participate more readily in the free software community and offers some solutions for remedying the problem. But is it enough?
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Intelligence analysis software is about to go open source. Matthew Burton, a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst and software developer, is working on an open-source version of a CIA software tool called “Analysis of Competing Hypotheses.”
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Another key factor that keeps open source appealing is that it often does not require a high-end system to run well. Some of the applications run well even on older computers.
There are also open source equivalents to many programs Windows and Mac users would normally need to pay for. Among them is OpenOffice—a free, full-featured office suite.
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Fiorina had a vision of HP as a GM of high tech. Hurd’s view was that of a new IBM, even though that had been done. These open source times call for something different, and a bigger dream.
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The Mendix AppStore is a fantastic example of our own community embracing open source. Most of the content in our AppStore is open source.
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Devotees of Google Wave have set up a protest site to persuade the global advertising giant not to abandon the collaborative messaging platform, following last week’s decision to halt development of the tool.
The decision to pull the plug on Wave was a giant blow for Google Australia, which led development of the tool. Now Wave followers from around the world have called for the company to reconsider.
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When looking at the commercial RBAC marketplace, it’s important to note that some of the biggest players in the market aren’t the biggest companies. Because RBAC’s potential is still being realized, if a vendor can react faster to advancements in RBAC functionality, it can gain an advantage over its competitors. This positions smaller, boutique companies like Aveksa Inc., BHOLD Company and SailPoint Technologies Inc. in front of larger enterprise competitors like CA Inc., IBM and Sun Microsystems Inc. (recently acquired by Oracle Corp.).
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The Global Software Institute (GSI) has announced that, effective immediately, OpenDragon is available for free download by users anywhere in the world. OpenDragon offers a full suite of image analysis and raster GIS capabilities including image enhancement, supervised and unsupervised classification, geometric correction, measurement and statistics, vector capture and display, slope, aspect and buffer calculations and multi-criterion decision making. OpenDragon also includes the OpenDragon Toolkit, which allows users who can program in C to extend the software functionality.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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SaaS
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Historically, the open source community has impacted both the economics and the innovations of the computer industry. Open source software is known for causing previously monolithic applications to become commoditized. In the database space, one only needs to look at MySQL and PostgreSQL. In the Web server space, there is Apache, and in application servers, there are Tomcat, JOnAS, JBoss, Jetty and GlassFish. In programming and scripting languages, there are the likes of Java, Perl and PHP. GNU Linux, in particular, has done so much to commoditize the operating system market that even phones use it.
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Databases
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As MySQL grew, Widenuis’ message of community got pushed back and that’s where things started to go wrong. Widenuis also slammed Sun, saying that had no respect for engineering talent. Wiednuis left Sun in 2009 and the main reason for his new MariaDB was about saving the people that he cared about and he wanted a good home for MySQL that he didn’t believe was in good hands.
A focus on community is what MariaDB is all about, Widenuis said he is now following a hacking business model. It’s not a company that is being built to be sold, it’s democratic and employees are all shareholders.
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Oracle
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At the company’s strategy update, Oracle outlined the future for Solaris 11, but said nothing about OpenSolaris. Oracle’s John Fowler says that Solaris 11 will be a major upgrade to key components, such as networking stacks, threading, file systems, package management and maintenance. A focus on scalability would also be incorporated in preparation for the next generation of hardware, like the 128 core, 16,384 thread system with 64TB of memory that Oracle is currently developing. Solaris 11 is expected around the second half of 2011.
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The motto for the 3.3 release is “Fit and Trim.” The phrase is vague, but suggests a concern with interface improvements. This impression is reinforced by the first item on the features list, which is “First Achievements of the Renaissance Project,” an OpenOffice.org sub-project focused on improving the interface. Further confirmation, if any is needed, is provided by the fact that only a few new features are scheduled and the rest are enhancements of existing features.
The 3.3 release is available on the OpenOffice.org site in 323 and 64 bit .RPM and .DEB packages, as well as source tarballs. Regardless of your choice of formats, the release installs into a separate sub-directory of /opt, allowing it to co-exist with other OpenOffice.org releases. To start the release, click /opt/ooo-dev3/program/soffice. The build is relatively stable, and documents created in it can be opened in earlier versions of OpenOffice.org, but you should probably use 3.3 sparingly in case of problems.
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CMS
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Webiva is yet another content management system that aims to give the likes of WordPress, Joomla and Drupal some competition. The difference? In addition to being an open source, Ruby on Rails system, Webiva comes packed with a SaaS hosting platform that cuts out a ton of management hassle.
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Webiva.com allows web professionals to build websites on a load-balanced, backed-up and replicated cloud without the hassle of installing and maintaining a Ruby on Rails installation. It competes with other web 2.0 CMSs like Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress.
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Education
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“We’re seeing a lot of activity in the K12 arena for folks looking to open source technology for both professional development and teaching in the classroom,” says Joe McAvoy, vice president of sales and marketing at Moodlerooms. “These are really powerful technological tools that are giving people new, different and innovative options.”
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The pair of servers and peripheral equipment is valued at more than $100,000 new.
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The Free Technology Academy (FTA) is an international institution based in Europe, whose goal is to provide online education, at master level, about Free Software. I recently spoke with Wouter Tebbens, president of the Free Knowledge Institute and FTA director, to know how the FTA works and what are its plans for the next year.
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Business
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Project Releases
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The developer of free, open source flash player Lightspark announced the release of Lightspark 0.4.3. In addition to a number of bugfixes, the software includes a number of additional features since the last release.
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Government
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Open source software is the key to prevent the initiative from becoming simply another unfunded mandate. With open source software, governments developing open information innovations have the freedom to share software code and applications with other like-minded governments and organizations.
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The Open Knesset project exposes the activity and participation of MKs.
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Now that organization has completed its first quite successful year of operations, and it’s decided to celebrate that event by announcing an awards program to recognize those that have been most influential in advancing its goals.
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Licensing
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Deploying the tools and training in house will help alleviate fears. But the kingpin of the program is the standard format for data exchange. The Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX) working group will do what it can to accelerate adoption. If this takes off, it will vastly reduce the complexity involved in ensuring compliance and enable customers and developers to develop and deploy open source software with far greater confidence – and fewer costs. It will be interesting to see if this format makes gains or dies on the vine.
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The Linux community is generally behind a new open source licensing compliance program proposed by the Linux Foundation. The Open Compliance Program aims to make it simpler for developers to distribute infringement-free open source software code.
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What does it take to gain that adoption and push forward adoption, Hammond offered a top ten list of best practices based on his experience with the enterprise open source adopters.
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Openness/Sharing
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We did a small experiment along these lines with the Peer to Patent project, which seized upon the truth that each of us is an expert in something. The idea behind Peer to Patent was to take the problem of bureaucratic slowdown and inefficiency in the patent office, and to marry to this the idea of self-selected expertise. This would create a process by which people could volunteer in a self-selected way, and work together to help discover information that would help an examiner decide whether a patent truly deserve a 20-year grant of monopoly rights – whether the patent is truly non-obvious and novel as the law requires. By creating a software interface and system that would allow groups of people to self-select, come together, and review each other’s works, some of the burden would be taken off the beleaguered government examiner. By using visual interfaces to help reflect back to and explain to people clearly what it is that the examiner needs to do, and how they divide up the tasks of examining a patent, we were able to set up a project not removed from government but together with government – the first institutionalized social network in the U.S. federal government to participate in the work of decision-making.
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Another option could be open-source textbooks, as are available on curriki.org, a nonprofit that seeks to provide “universal access to free curricula and instructional materials for grades K-12,” according to its website. For college professors, though, who are generally very specific about which textbook their students work from, it could be a long time before open-source curricula are adopted widely.
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Open Hardware
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Liquidware Launches First Open Source IT Hardware provider Liquidware has launched the first 100 Percent Open Source Hardware and Open Source Software Scientific Calculator – the Open SciCal X101.
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Science
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In a footnote, this comment is followed up by: “Virtually no one who is taught and believes relativity continues to read the Bible, a book that outsells New York Times bestsellers by a hundred-fold.”
Does relativity really steer people away from God? Or maybe – and this is just a theory, to use their favourite phrase – the same kinds of people who study general relativity are simply less likely to consult the Bible for answers to the questions of the universe.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Five years ago, the leaders of this sun-scorched, wind-swept nation made a bet: To reduce Portugal’s dependence on imported fossil fuels, they embarked on an array of ambitious renewable energy projects — primarily harnessing the country’s wind and hydropower, but also its sunlight and ocean waves.
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Finance
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As economic recovery wavers in the United States, evidence is mounting that growth abroad is also slowing and may be unable to sustain the fragile rebound here.
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A federal judge in California ordered Wells Fargo & Co. to change what he called “unfair and deceptive business practices” that led customers into paying multiple overdraft fees, and to pay $203 million back to customers.
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The personal income of California residents declined last year for the first time since World War II, state officials said Wednesday.
An analysis by the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis found that statewide income fell by $40 billion in 2009 to $1.56 trillion. That’s down about 2.5 percent from the previous year and even lower than the 2007 figure.
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The United States is selling fewer products around the world and spending more on cheap imported goods, an imbalance that hurts the job market at home and means the economy is even weaker than previously thought.
The trade deficit of nearly $50 billion for June is the biggest in almost two years, and economists fear that economic growth for the second quarter, which came in at a sluggish rate of 2.4 percent in early estimates, may turn out to be only half that.
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Stocks were deeply in the red Wednesday after the U.S. trade deficit widened unexpectedly and a string of weak economic reports from Asia and Europe heightened concerns that the global recovery is veering off track.
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Companies using criminal records or bad credit reports to screen out job applicants might run afoul of anti-discrimination laws as the government steps up scrutiny of hiring policies that can hurt blacks and Hispanics.
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Youth unemployment across the world has climbed to a new high and is likely to climb further this year, a United Nations agency said Thursday, while warning of a “lost generation” as more young people give up the search for work.
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Full flights? Get used to them. Stressed flight attendants and call centers in India? Get used to those, too.
While the current state of the U.S. airline industry can be frustrating for passengers, it’s bad for employees, too – and some suggest it’s getting worse.
U.S. airlines have cut jobs for two straight years, the government said Wednesday, an acceleration of a trend since 2001. What’s worse for employees: There’s no indication that trend will reverse sharply anytime soon.
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A federal judge in California ordered Wells Fargo & Co. to change what he called “unfair and deceptive business practices” that led customers into paying multiple overdraft fees, and to pay $203 million back to customers.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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We spend a lot of time discussing bad legislation around here, every so often it’s nice to hear of some good legislation. Last month, we noted that an anti-libel tourism bill was making its way through Congress, which would protect US citizens from foreign libel judgments on laws that went against the First Amendment. Thankfully, that bill has now been signed into law — and it may be even better than we initially expected. That’s because, at the urging of folks such as Public Citizen, Congress inserted a bit into the law that also extends the important Section 230 safe harbors to this bill.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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In 2007, when the Android OS was still vaporware, Google made a gutsy $4.6 billion bet on mobile net neutrality. While they never had to pay out the money, that all-in move forced the FCC to license wireless spectrum with binding rules that finally force the wireless carrier that wins a spectrum auction to let Americans use whatever handsets, services and apps they wanted to connect to it.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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A spokesman for Sky, which is 39.1pc-owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, said the company was trying to prevent Skype from using its trademark in relation to the sale of TV or internet service, because customer might assume that ‘Skype’ is part of Sky.
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Copyrights
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US Copyright Group, which is controlled by Virginia law firm Dunlap, Grubb, & Weaver, has sued more than 14,000 Americans this year for allegedly downloading various independent films on BitTorrent networks. In January, it brought the first two of these cases, targeting 749 anonymous “Does” for sharing the film The Gray Man and 83 Does for sharing Uncross the Stars (later upgraded to 195 Does).
US Copyright Group used the suits to subpoena ISPs, trying to get real names and addresses instead of the IP addresses it had collected. The lawyers then sent out settlement letters to these defendants, asking them to pay up or risk a named federal lawsuit.
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HADOPI is effectively an anti-piracy organization that oversees and enforces Frances three strikes law. Unfortunately for HADOPI, someone else took the Trademark of ‘HADOPI’ – someone who just so happens to be opposed by the new French copyright laws to be more precise.
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Even odder? Apparently EMI has issued a takedown notice for just that one video pulling it off YouTube. This is despite literally hundreds of Empire State of Mind parodies on YouTube. Those 55 best parodies? They’re all on YouTube (with the exception of the Darth Vader one…). Honestly, I thought this had to be a mistake, or some weird Content ID error by YouTube. Considering the vast number of these parodies that have all remained up this whole time, would EMI really issue a takedown for this one parody?
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In a move that surprises no one, Viacom plans to appeal the ruling that struck down its lawsuit against YouTube and Google earlier this year.
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We are not lawyers, but as the last case was dropped by ’summary judgement,’ we doubt the ability of Viacom to turn the tables in their favor. They lost hard in the last dispute, what can they do to change that this time around? Still, the company has its arms out and is pushing forward yet again. Perhaps after another judge sticks with YouTube they will drop the case. Then again, perhaps not.
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Werner Müller, boss of the Austrian film and music industry trade association, has canceled his participation in a panel discussion on “Art in the Digital Age” after he learned that Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde was one of his fellow participants. Müller stated that he refuses to sit at a table with a “convicted criminal” who supports “professional theft”.
Richard Stallman Speech UCSD 2007
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08.11.10
Posted in News Roundup at 1:51 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Kernel Space
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I’m realizing that PowerTOP got released 3 years ago now. While not nearly as old as the Linux kernel, it’s time to look back and then forward again.
[...]
So it’s now time to rethink some of the code code and make things much more scalable for adding new checks and features. In addition, the output also needs to improve to be more useful as a diagnostics tool. I’m thinking about adding a “generate a report” option, that basically gives a complete report card of the system.
This doesn’t mean I want to leave the end user behind; not at all. But in terms of new features, with all the low hanging fruit taken care of, some of the things PowerTOP needs to do are just a lot more technical than what PowerTOP 1.0 offered.
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Applications
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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News from the dot is picked up by quite a few major news sites like LWN.net and (soon) linux.com – so don’t underestimate the readership of the dot. Think about that when you write an interesting blog about what has been going on in your app lately, or when you announce something on your blog! These things can easily go on the dot, so contact us a few days in advance so we can schedule things.
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Red Hat Family
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We’re excited to announce that Red Hat has entered into an agreement with atsec information security to certify Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 under Common Criteria at Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 4+, which will include certifying the KVM hypervisor on both Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. The Common Criteria EALs represent the depth and rigor of the evaluation, giving consumers the confidence that products certified at a specific level meet the package of security assurance requirements associated with that level and comply with internationally recognized security standards.
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Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, and Wipro, a leading Indian IT solutions and services provider, today announced that Wipro has become the first Red Hat Premier Partner in India and the two companies have strengthened their strategic partnership through joint marketing and integration opportunities designed to bring open source solutions to enterprises across the subcontinent.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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It hasn’t helped that Canonical is already bearing the brunt of some community animosity over recent reports indicating they might not be contributing enough code upstream to the GNOME Project, followed up by a stunningly obtuse rant (and, later, apology) against free software by a prominent member of the Ubuntu community.
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Phones
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Nokia/MeeGo
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Android
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This open-source title was built specifically for the Android platform, and the fact that the main character is a dead ringer for Android’s mascot is no coincidence.
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“Easy Root” – an easy one-click solution for users looking to root Android 2.2 on their Motorola Droid, Droid-X and Milestone has reportedly been removed from the Android Marketplace. While I have not been able to try the app out myself, the app presumably offers an easy way for non-techie users of these Android handsets to be able to root their Motorola phones. Unlike most other rooting applications, Easy Root does not require users to connect their handsets to a computer. Instead, they were required to download the $1 app from the Marketplace and tap ‘Root Me‘ to get started.
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Tablet makers may be warm to Google’s Android operating system (OS), but the OS’ inability to scale beyond 5-inch screens works against its favor. Industry watchers, though, note this is just one factor affecting user experience and predict support for bigger screens will come in time.
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HTC has more Android smartphones than any other company, and it’s a trend that looks set to continue into the next year. The latest model on the horizon has a spec that could include an amazing 1.2GHz dual-core processor, along with a sliding QWERTY keyboard. To find out more, join us after the break…
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Understandably, most manufacturers choose to source their OS from someone else. Android is the licensed OS of the moment, largely because the other options didn’t innovate fast enough – Microsoft had to abandon Windows Mobile and start fresh with Windows Phone 7 and Symbian ought to be doing the same thing.
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It wasn’t the most well-kept secret in the world, but the news is nonetheless exciting, as Verizon Wireless finally announced the Motorola Droid 2 on Tuesday.
The Droid 2 will be available for presale on Verizon’s Web site starting August 11 and will be in stores August 12 for $199.99 with a two-year contract and after a $100 mail-in rebate. As expected, the smartphone will ship running Android 2.2, which among other things includes support for Adobe Flash Player 10.1. The Droid 2 can also be used as a mobile hot spot for up to five devices, but you will need to sign up for Verizon’s 3G Mobile Hotspot Service, which costs $20 per month.
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At long last, the leaks are being plugged by none other than Verizon itself, who today confirmed that the Droid 2 is more than just a figment of everyone’s imagination. Shortly after hamstringing the Froyo update for the original Droid, Big Red is tossing a tempting upgrade all up in your grille, as the Droid 2 ships with Android 2.2, mobile hotspot (a $20 / month add-on), Flash Player 10.1 and a revised QWERTY keyboard.
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The application is installable from the Android Marketplace (search for “CouchDB”) and runs on Android 2.1 and 2.2 devices. The source code is also available from a GitHub repository.
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Enterprises are leading the way in open source, according to our readers’ poll, while governments lag behind. Next up: the majority of my business’s desktops are…
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Lockheed Martin, the giant defense contractor, is wary of letting its staff use social networking. Probably something to do with secrecy. It also knows its staff are people, so it’s built its own social network structure, dubbed Eureka Streams, and is now releasing it open-source for … well, pretty much anyone to use.
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It is said that there are three subjects you should never discuss at the dinner table; sex, religion and politics. I’d like to add a fourth to that combustible list – open source software.
Open source is one of those subjects journalists treat cautiously, which is probably why a recent report by security company Qualys relating versioning to vulnerabilities in some open source web apps has caused some angst ever since I tackled it for a news story.
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The use of open source technology in the IT industry and other sectors allows companies to obtain real time statistics and analytics without investing too much, according to Nicola Clark, features editor at Marketing Magazine.
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The OpenAjax Alliance (OAA) has announced it has created new open source tooling technology to help software developers access and use Web 2.0-enabled business, government and consumer web sites. The new tooling technology simplifies the way Web applications are tested for compliance with current accessibility standards and guidelines, helping to speed up delivery of new accessible Internet applications.
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Last month we tested out Intel’s new GLSL compiler for Mesa when running the ATI Radeon classic Mesa and Gallium3D drivers to see how this GL Shading Language compiler designed by Intel employee’s for their hardware and open-source driver work for the other open-source drivers, since all of the Mesa drivers will be affected once this “GLSL2″ compiler is merged into the Mesa code-base by month’s end. The experience using Intel’s new shader compiler with the ATI Radeon graphics driver worked fine except for Warsow where serious regressions were visible, but in the other games that are capable of running off Mesa, the experience was fine. What we have been curious to test since then with this new OpenGL shader compiler has been the LLVMpipe driver — a Gallium3D driver we have been very excited about as it finally provides a better software rasterizer for Linux by leveraging Gallium3D and the Low-Level Virtual Machine (LLVM) compiler infrastructure for accelerating the Mesa state tracker atop a modern multi-core CPU that supports SSE4 instructions. We have now finished running tests of the Intel’s GLSL2 branch with the most recent LLVMpipe driver code.
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No surprise, 98% of enterprises are using open source. But the tide is turning in terms of perception: More than 71% of those surveyed at the 2009 USENIX Large Installation System Administration (LISA) conference say that open source is easier to deploy than proprietary software.
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SaaS
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Red Hat moved its Deltacloud open source project into the Apache Software Foundation’s incubator in June. In July, Rackspace made its Cloud Files code open source and will collaborate with partners, including NASA, in a project called OpenStack. A standards body, DMTF, is producing another set of APIs (see below). Is that more than the emerging cloud market can absorb?
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Oracle
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Oracle GlassFish Server, a premier Java EE application server based on GlassFish Server Open Source Edition, offers small businesses an open source application server with true interoperability that delivers rich features enabling superior documentation, administration, and configuration. The Oracle white paper “The Oracle GlassFish Server Advantage for Small Businesses” outlines the features of this solution that the small to medium business will find useful.
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CMS
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Business
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As far as open source is concerned, people do not necessarily need a huge pile of money to create a software asset. Linus Torvalds never charged anything for Linux. He wrote it because he felt that to be an important thing to do. I think most of the people who do open source have a day job or have a company. They’re selling all of their services around open source. So something like open source can continue to just run without actually monetizing the software asset directly.
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Openness/Sharing
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One of the points of convergence among the many strands of the A2K movement is resistance to the one-size-fits-all ratcheting up of intellectual property provisions around the world. The resistance is grounded in analysis showing that intellectual property rules often create social costs that far outweigh their intended benefits. Much of the A2K movement’s advocacy for limitations of intellectual property rights is located within the field of intellectual property law – promoting the inclusion and use of balancing mechanisms within the laws granting intellectual property rights. But intellectual property rights are also shaped and limited by their interaction with other fields of law, competition law being a prime example. After describing the theoretical and doctrinal underpinnings of a shift of A2K legal advocacy toward the use of completion law, this paper surveys some of the strategic advantages of using competition norms to reframe political debates and shift struggles into new, potentially more hospitable, forums.
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All talks will then be uploaded to the Open UP archive for the world to see. After the talks there will be an open discussion where people can network and learn more about incorporating open source ideas and principles into their work. This project is an extremely exciting opportunity for cross pollination and discussion of Open Source Ideals.
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Scientific researchers may want the input of others in the community but are understandably hesitant to share data and information they’ve worked so hard to uncover. When scientists working on similar projects are flung far and wide around the globe, collaboration becomes even more of a challenge. CoLab, a new open source project launched by two California-based scientists, aims to make it easier for the scientific community to work together toward its common goals.
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NYU political science grad student (and occasional Danger Room contributor) Drew Conway has done just that, using an open source statistical programming language called R and a graphical plotting software tool. The results are unnerving, like stop-motion photography of a freeway wreck. Above is the latest example: a graph showing the spread of combat from 2004 to 2009. It’s exactly what you wouldn’t want to see as a war drags on.
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The map from Open Maps, which will be completed by the end of this month, will be an open-source map — meaning anyone can contribute to it, edit it and tweak it to their needs: It’s Wikipedia-meets-cartography, developing world-style.
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When I explain the project, people often ask what the real differences between Apertus and other camera projects really are, or in other words, what advantages an “open” project really possesses for the end user. Since most creative people in the film industry like DOPs (directors of photography) and camera operators are not software developers, they have a very blurry understanding of words like “Linux” and “open source”. If anything they would associate them with “geeks” and “nerds,” but nothing they would expect to work with closely in their future everyday work.
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Open Data
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In October 2007, 30 open government advocates met in Sebastopol, California to discuss how government could open up electronically-stored government data for public use. Up until that point, the federal and state governments had made some data available to the public, usually inconsistently and incompletely, which had whetted the advocates’ appetites for more and better data. The conference, led by Carl Malamud and Tim O’Reilly and funded by a grant from the Sunlight Foundation, resulted in eight principles that, if implemented, would empower the public’s use of government-held data.
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Open Access/Content
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The BBC is still refusing to release to the public the requirements specifications for Project Canvas, despite a formal condition of the BBC Trust in approving its participation in the proposed joint venture broadband connected television platform. The BBC Trust now says it does not believe that publication is appropriate at this stage, saying that it would not be in the interests of interested parties.
The aim of Project Canvas, as stated in the original application from the BBC Executive in February 2009, is “to create an open technical specification for internet connectivity to encourage the growth of internet protocol (IP) connections into set-top boxes.”
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Open Hardware
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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YOU are the juror: would you trust DNA evidence? Most people regard it as near infallible- it produces the right result or no result, exonerating the innocent and securing convictions where other evidence fails.
But DNA is not as objective as you might think. In the first of a two-part investigation, New Scientist reveals that much of the DNA analysis now conducted in crime labs can suffer from worrying subjectivity and bias. We asked forensic analysts to interpret a sample of real DNA evidence and found that they reached opposing conclusions about whether the suspect matched it or not. Our subsequent survey of labs around the world also shows that there are significant inconsistencies in the guidelines on how to interpret a sample. The findings suggest that the difference between prison and freedom could often rest on the opinions of a single individual.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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On Monday, we wrote about the ridiculous manner in which The Discovery Channel was treating a fan site that it had previously supported strongly. At the very top we clearly noted that the domain name of the site — DeadliestCatchTV.com — was indeed a problem, and I could totally understand the trademark claim. But there are all sorts of ways this could be dealt with, and The Discovery Channel appears to have chosen the absolute worst. First, it’s important to point out that for over a year (at least), The Discovery Channel has actively supported this fan site. Not only did staff members happily email the site’s owner, John White, with encouragement, preview videos and content, but it also linked directly to the site on the official webpage for the show Deadliest Catch — even “framing” White’s site with its own dashboard.
However, after actively supporting the show, suddenly Discovery switched 180 degrees and sent over a legal nastygram, demanding that the site be taken down and the domain handed over. Beyond the (again, probably legitimate) trademark issue, the lawyers added on the absolutely ridiculous claim that White’s embedding of clips from the Discovery Channel’s own YouTube channel (that had embedding enabled) was copyright infringement. This is copyfraud. Discovery specifically chose to allow the world to embed. To then accuse someone of copyright infringement for doing so is blatant legal bullying.
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Copyrights
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The Access Copyright tariff proposal that calls for a 1300% increase in fees to $45 per full-time student has generated some interesting discussion. I noted in one of my responses that my courses only use openly accessible materials – court cases, statutes, government reports, and open access licenced articles. This comes without any loss in the quality of materials and without the need for further payment or permissions. I don’t think this is particuarly unusual for law, which relies heavily on these kinds of materials in addition to textbooks purchased by students and works in databases that are separately licenced. The amount of additional copying in that environment that falls outside private study or research such that it requires a licence is tiny to non-existent. Indeed, the inclusion of education as a fair dealing category would not change a great deal for thousands of Canadian law students.
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In a very rare event, a Chinese anti-piracy group says it will sue several websites and companies for their involvement in film piracy in the country. As it teams up with the studio behind the recent martial arts hit Ip Man 2, not only will web portals and Internet cafes be sued, but one of China’s biggest file-sharing link sites, VeryCD.
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There’s an interesting development going on with the US Copyright Group (USCG) vs The People lawsuits. In the two earliest cases filed way back in January of this year, G2 Entertainment (Uncross the Stars) and World Wide Entertainment (The Gray Man), have dismissed their cases – without prejudice. The following verbiage appeared in motions filed by these companies…
[...]
WorldWide Film Entertainment had 749 defendants, the third lowest number of defendants in all of the USCG lawsuits. Only the Call of the Wild lawsuit has fewer, with 358 unnamed defendants.
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If you want to understand copyright law, its history, and how it’s been abused, you really ought to read this excellent overview by law professor and practicing intellectual property attorney, Lydia Pallas Loren, called The Purpose of Copyright (found via Teleread). The article kicks off with a point that we’ve made over and over again here, that many people incorrectly believe the purpose of copyright law is to protect creators. Unfortunately, this false belief permeates many in society — including copyright lawyers:
Copyright permeates our lives and yet, despite its impact on our lives, relatively few people, including lawyers, have sufficient knowledge or understanding of what copyright is. And far too many people, including lawyers, have major misconceptions concerning copyright. These misconceptions are causing a dangerous shift in copyright protection, a shift that threatens the advancement of knowledge and learning in this country. This shift that we are experiencing in copyright law reflects a move away from viewing copyright as a monopoly that the public is willing to tolerate in order to encourage innovation and creation of new works to viewing copyright as a significant asset to this country’s economy. The most recent example of this shift is the new Digital Millennium Copyright Act, sign by the President on October 28, 1998.
Understanding the root cause and the dangers of this shift requires exposing the most fundamental and most common misconception concerning the underlying purpose of the monopoly granted by our copyright law. The primary purpose of copyright is not, as many people believe, to protect authors against those who would steal the fruits of their labor. However, this misconception, repeated so often that it has become accepted among the public as true, poses serious dangers to the core purpose that copyright law is designed to serve.
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At the risk of sounding nerdy, I have to say I’m happy to be spending my summer talking and writing about copyright. As a performer, Canadian copyright laws play a big part in how I make my living—or not, as the case may be. The only downer is I’d rather be talking up Bill C-32, the government’s recently introduced copyright legislation, to make sure it gets passed, not working so hard to make sure it gets amended.
Richard Stallman Speech 2001
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Posted in News Roundup at 9:10 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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With his work with Felton Friends of Locally Owned Water (FLOW) and other activities in Felton (like the Friends of the Library), Frank seems to know everyone in Felton. People come to the table and say hello to Frank, and immediately Frank starts off into his pitch about FOSS and GNU/Linux.
This farmers market table seems to be working well, not only for the LUG — which had nearly 20 people attend the meeting last Saturday — but also for FOSS in general.
People have a general sense of what Linux is — it’s that operating system thing, right? — and seeing it in an arena that’s not normally a “tech environment” makes it a lot less threatening, for loss of a better term. So I would strongly urge everyone who wants to promote FOSS, GNU/Linux and Linux (for those who want to make that distinction, which I don’t anymore) take the word forth to places where you might not normally find tech talk; like farmers markets, or tractor pulls, or gun shows. Anywhere where people congregate is a place where FOSS can be pitched.
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Events
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The panel consisted of:
* Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier, Linux.com & Ostatic
* Jason Brooks, eWeek
* Sean Michael Kerner, InternetNews
* Ryan Paul, ArsTechnica
* Steven Vaughan-Nichols, ComputerWorld
[...]
Sean: The first stories were about SCO, and it’s the “story that keeps on going.” It was FUD and is still FUD. The bogey monster in the corner.
Steven: Linux is real. It was IBM making Linux the center of their business operations. Now over half of large enterprises are using Linux. We’re now the majority, and that started when IBM said Linux is real.
Jason: The birth of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It was something that had to happen, where distros forked out into the kind of stability that was needed for where Linux has gotten to be. And it set up an example of a business model and created a space where Red Hat Linux had been, which Fedora filled, and in that space, Debian filled part of it, and CentOS has risen. It was a move that had to happen and an important step in the development of Linux.
Ryan: The growing ubiquity of the Linux platform in the mobile device ecosystem. It’s practically dominant, whether it’s your TiVo or Kindle. And other key components of the open source stack are there.
Zonker: The rapid ascent of Ubuntu and forcing companies to really focus on community. Where Red Hat and certainly Novell weren’t focused on community and were concentrating on the enterprise, Ubuntu’s rapid ascent forced companies to look at community in developing their products.
Kerner: Fedora was born about the same time.
Zonker: Fedora was a failed attempt until they were forced to do something.
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The continuum includes:
* Linux kernel releases (and associated kernel development).
* Linux distribution releases (and associate events/developments)
* Linux application/system management
* My app/hardware runs on Linux type stories
* This is the year of the Linux desktop
* Linux is (in) secure
* Linux is used by everyone on Earth (stats stories)
* Legal stories (including the FUD mongers)
* Linus says (i.e the kernel is bloated)
* Shuttleworth says ..
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Desktop
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Software packaging, gas used to travel to the local big box store for software…I could go on. But I think you see where I’m going with this. When you utilize desktop Linux as an option instead of the usual proprietary OS, you generally find that you’ve saved on both wasted packaging for software as well as the expense of going out to buy it.
Digital software copies have helped with this to some extent, but the fact is, brick and mortar stores are still stuffed to the gills with packaged proprietary software for the masses.
Some individuals may say this is fine, as it’s helping our economy. Software sales are connected to jobs. But what happens if there was suddenly a big enough shift in the economy that people stopped buying software both in person and online?
How is a big box store full of packaged software with a ticking expiration date of OS compatibility a good thing for anyone?
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Dell makes PCs for consumers. The company that made its name selling directly from its website, doesn’t claim to be on the bleeding edge of PC hardware but if consumers want it, Dell will deliver it. So it’s unsurprising that in the main Dell has always supplied PCs equipped with Microsoft’s Windows.
It was a little surprising when Dell recently set up a dedicated sub-section on its site for Ubuntu Linux. Even more surprising was that the microsite listed, in detail, why Dell thought Ubuntu was a big deal. The one that stood out for most users was that the site said that Ubuntu was “more secure” than Windows.
[...]
All told, Dell appears to be throwing more and more of its weight behind Ubuntu Linux.
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DistroWatch, the popular Linux distribution-tracking website, publishes a continually updated list of what it judges to be the ten most widely-used Linux distributions globally. This post provides a brief overview of each distro on today’s “DistroWatch 10″ list, which range from the newbie-friendly Ubuntu to the sysadmin-oriented Gentoo.
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Kernel Space
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In an early morning announcement, LinuxCon kicked off with an introduction from Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the The Linux Foundation, to the newest member of the Linux Foundation Board, Rob Chandhok of Qualcomm. Qualcomm joins companies like IBM, Intel, NEC and Oracle as a platinum level sponsor of the foundation.
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There is a widely held belief that Linux is a completely secure operating system. But to Brad Spengler of the grsecurity project, the belief is far from accurate. And he has the kernel exploits to prove it.
Speaking at the Linux security summit during the Linux Foundation’s LinuxCon conference here this week, Spengler described how his efforts have resulted in Linux becoming more hardened for security, even though his approach — developing Linux kernel exploits — may be viewed with suspicion by some.
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Jim Zemlin: In the last year, there’s been this huge increase in device makers using Linux and open source in a much more high volume, high stakes way with more sophisticated supply chains. To make a Nexus One, you’ve got a chipset vendor, a radio supplier, a middleware supplier, a network operator — all these different people passing code around and shipping stuff.
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Applications
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User interface prototyping is supposed to be a creative discipline, where the tools don’t get in the way, so you can place your ideas on the screen just like you would draw them freehand on the back of a napkin. Up until recently, however, there was not a high quality open source UI prototyper, so designers were left with the less-than-optimal workflow of creating mockups in Inkscape or the Gimp, or else forced to use proprietary web applications that limited storage or added watermarks. Those days are in the past, though, thanks to Pencil.
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Server provisioning is nothing but load the Linux or UNIX like operating systems automatically with actual operating systems, device drivers, data, and make a server ready for network operation without any user input. Typically you select a server from a pool of available servers, load the operating systems (such as RHEL, Fedora, FreeBSD, Debian), and finally customize storage, network (IP, gateway, bounding etc), drivers, applications, users etc. Using the following tools you can perform automated unattended operating system installation, configuration, set virtual machines and much more. These software can be used to install a lot (say thousands) of Linux and UNIX systems at the same time.
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The story of how Icarus Falling is being written and published is almost as interesting as the book itself – that is if you are nerdy kind of writing geek. The book was originally written in MS Word 97. Over the last several years, our computers have been upgraded a few times and my wife migrated permanently to Linux, Ubuntu specifically.
[...]
Icarus Falling was prepared almost entirely with open source software.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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That would be over a quarter of a million dollars from Linux gamers (in just over a week of the game’s release). Are you telling me it would cost more than a quarter of a million dollars to bring a game, that can already run 100% using OpenGL, to the Linux operating system?
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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New Versions of the KDE Development Platform, the Plasma Desktop and Netbook workspaces, and many applications are released today with the version number 4.5.0. The KDE team focused on the usability, performance and stability of many previously introduced new features and technologies. Below, find the 3 separate announcements for each of KDE’s products: The Development Platform, the Applications Compilation and the Plasma Workspaces.
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Did you know that you can actually make Plasma (the desktop shell) animate faster? I didn’t know about this until recently, and it’s really handy.
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The best way to get a new version of KDE is to wait until your distro includes it in a stable release. Users who want to get an early look can compile the KDE SC 4.5 source code, which is available for download from the project’s Web site. There are also experimental binary packages available for several different Linux distributions. I tested KDE SC 4.5 on Kubuntu 10.04 using the Kubuntu PPA. For additional details about the release, you can refer to the official announcement.
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Bottom line: for now I switched back to Konqi, but will continue to follow Rekonq’s develpment closely.
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Gentoo Family
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Long live Gentoo! As the quantity and quality of this year’s entries will attest, Gentoo is alive, well, and taking no prisoners!
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PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Being awhile since Mandriva 2010 Spring was released. Considering the company’s financial woes, and the rumored takeover negotiations, we thought they might never release it, but they did. Mandriva Linux 2010, aka Mandriva Linux 2010.1, was made available for download on July 8, 2010. There are three versions:
* Mandriva One 2010 Spring – the free live CD edition that contains the usual cast of free software and a limited set of non-free applications. Available for 32-bit platforms in KDE and GNOME.
* Mandriva Free 2010 Spring – the no-cost edition that ships free of proprietary (non-free) applications. Available for 32- and 64-bit platforms.
* Mandriva Powerpack 2010 Spring – this is the fee-based edition (49 €, or about 65 USD). It comes loaded with all the applications – free and non-free – that you will ever need. It ships, for example, with non-free applications that are missing in Mandriva One. Like Mandriva Free, it is also available for 32- and 64-bit platforms.
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Red Hat Family
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Debian Family
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Debian developer, Chris Lamb, has created a web-based service to allow users to build their own customized live operating systems. After selecting your preferred options, the server builds and readies your image. Users can select from CD, DVD, USB, or Netboot images. Debian Live Studio requires registration, but is free of cost to use and consists of 100% free software.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu and community have largely become two words that are known to work well together. The Ubuntu community comprises a large group of individuals from many backgrounds, not just the stereotypical bearded geek. With such a vast and diverse group of people, there has to be some form of governance. While this largely meritocracy-based control, where individuals are empowered based on their proven contributions, isn’t there to dictate what community members should be doing, it is there to try to organise what individuals would like to offer and how best they can go about that. It is also a support mechanism and network for all Ubuntu enthusiasts.
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If Canonical’s commercial customers want to count their user-base, that’s between Canonical and those customers. I do not think this kind of functionality has any place in a free software product. I do not think this should be in the Ubuntu repository or on the Ubuntu project ISO images.
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Currently this system is only slated to be used by the specific OEM customer who requested it, and it will be up to the customer to disclose the data they collect as they wish. I wonder if it would be a good thing to install on normal ISOs though, but this would be part of our normal participatory community decision making process. Projects like this make think that users would like to be counted, so long as they can’t be tracked. We’ll see how it plays out, it may be something to discuss at UDS if the community feels the data would be useful.
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First of all, I was not impressed with Shuttleworth’s response to the whole upstream commits issue. He sounded more poetic than a technical guy to me on that post. Jono Bacon did a little better. That notwithstanding, the fact remains that there are millions of Linux (sorry GNU/Linux!) users out there that got exposed to the entire FOSS world via Ubuntu. That in itself is no small feat.
I also agree that Ubuntu is not synonymous with Linux, I am not aware if Canonical is seeking to achieve that goal anyway. However, what I seriously have a problem with is the needless and mostly very inflammatory comments that some hardliners make at the mere mention of the word Ubuntu. Is it not ironic and hypocritical to have people that claim they are saving others by giving them choices other than Windows get all worked up at the mention of one of the options available as part of the choice subset they offer?
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Phones
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Android
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BTS’ particular pride and joy is its “Praefectus” operating system, which BTS claims can link commercial smartphones such as iPhones and Androids (with a BTS proprietary SIMM card installed), militarized handhelds from different companies, and existing military radio nets into a seamless whole.
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Android is often cited as a success story for mobile Linux. Yet, Google’s Android code is no longer part of the mainline Linux kernel.
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Google’s Android has won partial re-admission to the Linux kernel, but much work lies ahead for a full re-entry.
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Sub-notebooks
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With netbooks, you can either run “lite” software, or push the grunt work into the cloud. Jolicloud OS, based on Ubuntu, aims to do the latter.
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This return to the core engagement in co-development in transparent communities is very welcome. Software freedom matters, and this approach leverages rather challenges it. So the bubble is over, and open source will live on stronger than ever – “the King is dead, long live the King”.
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The Open Source Awards is an annual online event held by Packt Publishing to distinguish excellence among Open Source projects.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has been in a heated discussion with some of its users over a major change in Firefox 4 that has somewhat snuck up without warning. Firefox will be updating itself silently, without required user action. Now it appears that Mozilla may be looking for a compromise that may result in a half-baked solution that may or may not silently patch security problems in Firefox and most certainly will not upgrade your browser to the latest version.
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Oracle
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Wim Coekaerts, senior vice president for Linux and virtualization engineering at Oracle, came to LinuxCon with a message: The open source operating system will remain a priority at Oracle even now that it owns Sun Microsystems and its competing Solaris OS.
In a keynote address here at the Linux Foundation’s conference, Coekaerts detailed Oracle’s Linux efforts to date and provided some guidance to Linux kernel developers on where the platform should go next.
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As part of an effort to maintain customer commitment to its derivative of the venerable UNIX operating system, Oracle today said that it plans to deliver a version 11 of its Solaris operating system in 2011.
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OOo 3.3.0 Beta is available for download. The build is delivered as Developer Snapshot OOo-Dev OOO330m3.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Richard Stallman will speak about the Free Software Movement, which campaigns for freedom so that computer users can cooperate to control their own computing activities. The Free Software Movement developed the GNU operating system, often erroneously referred to as Linux, specifically to establish these freedoms.
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Freedom for software users is no less important today than it was five years ago.
The definition of free software is that it respects users’ freedom. It’s free as in freedom — price is not the issue. Specifically, it means that you as user are free to run the program as you wish, study the source code and change it so that the program does what you wish, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. With these freedoms, the users control the software and control their computing.
Without these freedoms, the software controls the users. Don’t let that happen to you!
I launched the development of the GNU operating system in 1984 specifically to make it possible to use a computer without letting the software control you. In 1992, the kernel Linux was freed and filled the last gap in GNU. The GNU/Linux system makes it possible to use a computer and have freedom, but in order to realise this benefit, you need to take care to avoid installing non-free programs.
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Gmane is by now a very important piece of my Emacs life. It allows me to get postings to lots of mailing lists using NNTP, i.e., using Gnus, i.e., in a way fully integrated with the “information retrieval and massaging” engine i’ve built around a handful of Emacs packages and elisp snippets (one central actor among them being org-mode).
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One thing that I discovered recently is that external factors can sour the impressions of a piece of software.For instance, I was using a UNIX session where the keyboard mapping weren’t optimal. There’s nothing like unfamiliar behaviour for throwing you off track because you felt your usual habits were being obstructed. For instance, finding that a Backspace key is behaving like a Delete one is such an obstruction. It wasn’t the fault of Emacs and I have found that using Ctrl+K (C-k in the documentation) to delete whole lines is invaluable.
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Government
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I’m actually fairly excited about the OSFA and their mission, because I think the argument for Open Source and non-Proprietary standards is even stronger for public records than it is in the private sector (and I think it’s pretty damn strong in the private sector to start off with!)
The US Gov’t could close Bug #1 virtually overnight if it standardized on an Open Source platform. I know that won’t happen, but the American government is so influential, it is a very effective target for Free Software and Open Source promotion.
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Licensing
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This led to a very low-key, discreet approach, whereby defenders of the GNU GPL – since this was the main licence involved – tried to persuade companies to comply, without resorting to heavy-handed legal methods. That explains why there have been so few cases argued in court, and why those that have moved in that direction have all ended successfully for free software, as in the latest example.
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The Linux Foundation announced today their own FLOSS license compliance program, which included the launch of a few software tools under a modified BSD license. They also have offered some training courses for those that want to learn how to comply.
If this Linux Foundation (LF) program is successful, I may get something I’ve wished for since the first enforcement I ever worked on back in late 1998: I’d like to never do GPL enforcement again. I admit I talk a lot about GPL enforcement. It’s indeed been a major center of my work for twelve years, but I can’t say I’ve ever really liked doing it.
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Openness/Sharing
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Knowledge equals power, goes the saying. If that’s true, Mendeley’s API could be very powerful indeed. The service, pitched to universities as a way of organising, tracking and ranking citations in academic and science research papers, has opened its API to the public.
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Open Data
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The University of East Anglia is to receive JISC funding for a project to open up its research on global warming to scrutiny and re-use.
The university, which was at the centre of a scandal revealed by leaked emails from its Climatic Research Unit, will examine how best to expose climate data for re-use, make it easier for researchers to find the data and to understand its validity.
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Programming
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I got 804 responses, which is more than I expected. Since the survey was sent out to the main Haskell mailing lists, posted on my blog, and announced on Twitter there’s most likely some selection bias in the results. However, given the number of replies, I still think the results are indicative of the community as a whole.
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Standards/Consortia
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Gem for generating .odt files by making strings, images, tables and sections replacements in a previously created .odt file.
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What a surprising news. ODF will soon become a mandatory format for all government documents. I have posted this since a year ago and two years ago, but finally it will come true. Right now, the Indonesian government is trying to migrate all computers in the governmental level to use Open Source to reduce it’s spending just to buy licenses for Windows and many other Microsoft products (mostly Microsoft Office). When that target has been completed (estimated 2011), they will follow with standarizing the national format to use ODF.
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Muro works in all modern browsers, and you can dive in and start drawing on a blank canvas, all without Flash or any other plug-in. There are several brushes available to everyone, but to access the more advanced features, you’ll need to create a DeviantArt account and log in.
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THE LAST PART of SemiAccurate’s look at the Intel/FTC settlement examines some of the worst accusations against Intel. Compiler tricks, technical openness, and a watchdog. Intel could be seriously hamstrung by some of these remedies, and worse yet, they could be the ones hamstringing themselves.
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Those simple rules have allowed Gordon to rack up a record-setting 2.8 million miles on his beloved Volvo P1800. We caught up with him last week, when, shortly after his 70th birthday, Gordon announced he hoped to reach 3 million by the time he turned 73. That feat will require him to drive an average of around 5,500 miles per month.
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Health
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International travel and medical tourism have led to the rapid, global spread of drug-resistant bacteria that may presage the end of antibiotics and leave doctors struggling to treat infected patients, scientists warn today.
A new gene conferring high levels of resistance to almost all antibiotics has been found to be widespread in forms of gut bacteria that can cause potentially life-threatening pneumonia and urinary tract infections.
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Security/Aggression
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A radio advert urging listeners to report suspected terrorists has been banned by a watchdog for potentially offending law-abiding people.
The anti-terrorist hotline ad suggests suspicious behaviour may include paying with cash and keeping curtains drawn.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Now Tibetan poet and writer Tsering Woeser has compiled an impressive dossier that shows that the Zhouqu landslide in Gansu Province that has killed (so far) 702, with over 1,000 still missing, was likely precipitated by a variety of devastating ecological activities by – yes – man.
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This past weekend, coal company executives convened for the annual West Virginia Coal Association meeting in White Sulphur Springs, WV. The event, which was closed to the public, was held at the lavish Greenbrier Resort, where an overnight stay can cost upwards of $6,000 (plus tax). One panelist at the meeting, state Senate Finance Chairman Walt Helmick, pointed out the exclusivity of the resort hotel: “I used to drive by the Greenbrier often when I was young, but I never had the money to come in because I’m a former coal miner.”
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Finance
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The dollar edged towards a 15-year low against the yen on Wednesday after the Federal Reserve moved to bolster the weakening U.S. economy, while technology plays dragged Asian stocks lower.
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc. was sued by five computer-network technicians who claim the bank denied them overtime pay for their work as contractors.
The lawsuit seeks class-action status and unspecified damages, Goldman Sachs said today in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The plaintiffs contend they deserve overtime pay for working more than 40 hours a week.
Goldman Sachs’s conduct was “willful and in bad faith,” according to the technicians, who say the bank never paid them overtime for work weeks that topped 70 hours. More than 100 employees in New York and New Jersey were underpaid as a result, according to the lawsuit filed in May.
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U.S. and British regulators are investigating the timing of Goldman Sachs Group Inc’s (GS.N) disclosure to them that the bank was the subject of a federal civil fraud probe, Goldman said on Monday.
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc. executive director Fabrice Tourre had “very preliminary” talks with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to settle the agency’s civil fraud claims against him, an SEC lawyer said.
“I would characterize us as having very preliminary discussions along those lines a while back, and that’s all,” SEC lawyer Lorin Reisner said in a hearing today in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.
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Goldman was already scrutinized by the panel for its derivative deals with the bailed out insurer AIG during the financial crisis.
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According to information provided by the bank to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, derivatives businesses generated $11.3 billion to $15.9 billion of the company’s $45.17 billion in net revenue for 2009, as said in media reports. That’s 25 to 35 percent. Until recently, a good chunk of that came from CDO-related activity.
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In “The BoomBustBlog Review of Goldman Sach’s 2nd Quarter, 2010 Performance: I Told You So!” I took the time to remind readers and subscribers that Goldman Sachs, despite adulation in the press and the sell side, barely covers its cost of capital in ROE. This means that the firm is actually a lot riskier (economically) than many either realize or admit.
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The bank admitted to the investigation in a regular quarterly filing with the SEC, which showed it lost money on ten days in the second quarter, breaking its three-month winning streak from the first quarter when it made money on every single trading day.
Meanwhile, lawyers acting for Fabrice Tourre, the Goldman banker named in the fraud allegations alongside the bank itself, said during a pre-trial hearing he may subpoena as many as 50 Goldman colleagues at his upcoming trial with the SEC.
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A monkey economy is as irrational as our human economy. Why do people make irrational decisions in such a predictable way? Laurie Santos looks for the roots of human irrationality by watching the way our primate relatives make decisions. This video documents a clever series of experiments in “monkeynomics” showing how some of the silly choices we make are made by monkeys, too.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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The owner of an internet service provider who mounted a high-profile court challenge to a secret FBI records demand has finally been partially released from a 6-year-old gag order that forced him to keep his role in the case a secret from even his closest friends and family. He can now identify himself and discuss the case, although he still can’t reveal what information the FBI sought.
Nicholas Merrill, 37, was president of New York-based Calyx Internet Access when he received a so-called “national security letter” from the FBI in February 2004 demanding records of one of his customers and filed a lawsuit to challenge it. His company was a combination ISP and security consultancy business that was launched in the mid-90s and had about 200 customers, Merrill said, many of them advertising agencies and non-profit groups.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Let’s go back in time, shall we, to around 1997 when Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were college students at Stanford. Let’s suppose that there were no such thing as net neutrality, that the idea the internet should be an open place never occurred to anyone.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Sony was busted (and paid out much more) for even more egregious violations back in 2005. Sony’s promoters went so far as to tell radio stations that the “real people” (they were planted) calling in to request songs had to be more convincing.
“As for Saturday nights, you need to rotate your people,” said one message from a promoter. “My guys on the inside say that it’s the same couple of girls calling in every week and that they are not inspired enough to be put on the air. They’ve got to be excited. They need to be going out, getting drunk, or going in the hot tube [sic], or going clubbing… you get the idea.”
Later that year, fellow major label Warner Music paid out $5 million to make its own payola problems go away.
In 2006, the world’s largest music label, Universal, paid $12 million for a long history of payola. As the New York Times noted, the payola could take many forms, including trips and baseball tickets.
“In April 2004, Universal provided Mr. Michaels—by then a programmer at WHYI-FM in Miami—with a New York hotel room and New York Yankees tickets. The company booked the room under a false name and used a false Social Security number to conceal the transaction, the document states.”
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Because this is not just any movie. This is a Tesco movie. The supermarket giant that inhabits virtually every corner of our existence has this year moved into film-making with a straight-to-DVD movie or, as its makers prefer, a “DVD Premiere”. This autumn, Paris Connections will go on sale exclusively in Tesco stores. If successful, it could revolutionise the movie business, removing distributors and agents in one swipe and transforming how many films are made and funded.
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Determining whether a work is still under copyright or is in the public domain is one of the most fundamental—and yet most challenging—problems of copyright law. A leading source of the problem is the law. The law of copyright duration is a mess. I have written elsewhere about the problems associated with understanding and applying the duration law. I am happy to post to the Copyright Advisory Office website a new paper intended to walk you through the process of “Researching the Copyright Status of a Book” (PDF). It is linked from relevant pages on the website about permissions and copyright duration.
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ACTA
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The United States and European Union are scheduled to meet Aug. 16 in Washington to try reach agreement on contentious issues that have emerged between the two governments within the Anticounterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) negotiations, according to informed sources.
The two governments will attempt to come to an agreement on whether the ACTA should address protection of geographic indications (GIs), patents and industrial design, and if end users would fall under the definition for commercial scale infringement, an informed source said.
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Computer Science rap at Stanford
Permalink
Send this to a friend
08.10.10
Posted in News Roundup at 4:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Still another explanation is that Windows procedures for moving information from one application to another were not designed with security in mind. Scripts, too, such as Word or Excel macros, can be saved in data files and can alter the way Windows works, with disastrous results.
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Events
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Dear all, this is with a lot of struggles that we have finally managed to open the SFD 2010 registration! As you can see there is still a lot of ongoing work on the site, and this includes a New Wiki where you can create your team page, a new home page for all the information about Software Freedom International and other generic and important stuff and much more to come.
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Last week I was invited to take some publicity shots for the Software Freedom Day Melbourne crew at the State Library of Victoria Experimedia centre. Asides from occasional complaints from my camera (the infamous Nikon ERR CHA happened 3 times) I managed to get about 200 shots which I’ve whittled down to 26 of the best and put them up as a set on Flickr.
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Industry observers will be looking for answers to that question this week at the Linux Foundation’s LinuxCon conference in Boston, where a wide range of participants, contributors and stakeholders in the Linux ecosystem will be gathering to discuss a broad range of topics.
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A LinuxCon session led by Red Hat’s Matthew Garrett discussed the lessons learned from Google’s ongoing attempts to include power-management code in the mainline Linux kernel… and revealed there’s still some emotions running high in the debate.
If there was any doubt that feelings are still running high regarding Android code’s inclusion into the mainline Linux kernel, those doubts were quickly dispelled when Red Hat developer Matthew Garrett asked an audience member to leave the room as an argument began brewing between that audience member and another during the Q&A session of Garrett’s talk at the 2010 LinuxCon in Boston today.
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Kernel Space
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Ever wonder how lolspeak, the language of lolcats could be used to secure Linux?
At LinuxCon, Joshua Brindle from Linux security vendor Tresys (pic left) detailed something he called lolpolicy for making SELinux security policies easier to manage.
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Graphics Stack
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Colin Ian King, an Ubuntu Kernel Developer, has released Firmware Test Suite (fwts), a tool for the automatic testing of a PC’s firmware. King explains in a blog posting that many subtle or vexing kernel issues can be caused when a PC’s firmware is buggy and so a tool to automatically check for BIOS and ACPI errors is useful. Fwts incorporates over thirty tests and is able to offer advice on how to fix, or workaround issues, that it finds. In future, King plans to expand the number of tests whenever he finds an automatically diagnosable issue.
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Applications
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We’ve featured an open source SingStar-like karaoke game before, but if you’re looking for something a bit simpler, OSD-Lyrics automatically downloads and displays lyrics for a ton of popular Linux media players.
If you’ve been looking for other alternate uses for your Linux-based HTPC, you can check karaoke machine off the list by installing OSD-Lyrics. Unlike previously mentioned UltraStar, it’s not a full-fledged game; instead, it just displays lyrics for a number of different media players like Amarok, Banshee, Exaile, Rhythmbox, and Songbird (to name just a few).
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IBM (Proprietary)
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Canonical’s long-term goal is to see Ubuntu available to every organisation and individual on servers, desktops, laptops and netbooks. The company recently launched a virtual appliance of IBM’s DB2 Express-C ‘no-charge’ community edition of DB2 software running on the Ubuntu cloud computing platform in both private and public cloud configurations.
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IBM on Thursday will make a new release of Lotus Sametime available for purchase. Sametime version 8.5.1 introduces support for the latest releases of desktop and smart phone operating systems, as well as support for Linux on the desktop, and Linux running on the System z mainframe.
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IBM AIX, Linux, IBM i and VMware are now supported and a Canadian data center is available to allay legal concerns about trans-border data flow.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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The game should run well in Windows, but you may have trouble when attempting to install the game on Linux. Certain versions of the game reportedly do not work at all under Wine (A Windows program launcher for Linux), and there is no official support for the platform. A great game if your netbook is running Windows, but it may take a bit of work with Wine so Linux players may have trouble with this one. If you’re determined to get it going you can take a look at the WineHQ page here for more info.
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Games
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Everybody who downloaded our game illegally (for free) has now a chance to redeem himself and get the latest version of the game (Win+Mac+Linux) and it’s fantastic Soundtrack only for $5 (instead of $20).
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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“With a proven track record of more than 190 installations, Raytheon High-Speed Guard is able to sustain full transfer rates on dual-processor commercial off-the-shelf servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with a strict Security Enhanced Linux policy,” the company said.
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Debian Family
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After the first day of enthusiastic activities like talks and hands on workshops, the momentum had been set for the second day of the MiniDebConf. The proof for it was the missing students in the Seminar Hall, who were all busy in the lab since morning trying out packaging and other technical skills.
Although, the intervention was made by us, moving the talks scheduled for the day to the lab.
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John Ferlito, president of Linux Australia, has said that the latest freeze on Debian 6.0 — known as “Squeeze” — means that users are likely to see a stable release within six months.
The Debian Project announced the freeze at its annual developer conference “Debconf10″, meaning that no new features will be added to the release.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Here is the visual preview of Maverick Meerkat Alpha 3 or Ubuntu 10.10. It is running inside an Oracle VirtualBox. At the alpha stage you can’t expect major changes from users point of view, but I noticed a new option ‘Input Method Switcher’ (image 6).
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Flavours and Variants
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If you’re in the same boat, you might be able to give that system a new lease on life. Jolicloud is a free, Linux-powered operating system designed specifically for netbooks. It’s fast (way faster than Windows), easy to use, and better optimized for cloud computing.
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There’s great news in store for Synology Disk Station owners, in the form of a major update to the firmware. Although the current version – 2.3 – is well designed, Synology has clearly been busy completely redesigning the interface to its NAS products yet again.
[...]
Rather than a website-like menu on the left, though, there’s now a ‘taskbar’ at the top, which makes DSM 3.0 look a lot like Ubuntu Linux. In fact, there’s more than a passing resemblence to Ubuntu in these screenshots. Given that the Disk Stations are Linux-based devices, this is no huge surprise.
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Phones
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Embedded Linux runs on virtually every smart phone today and will help support the 20 times more mobile data and 40 times more spending on mobile transactions that are forecast to occur in 2015.
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Nokia/MeeGo
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As Nokia continues to work towards launching its MeeGo operating system, industry experts are speculating why the company continues to ignore Google’s Android OS.
Many suggest that developing a smartphone to run on the Androind OS is Nokia’s best chance for competing with market rivals.
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The Nokia N900 is a touch screen and slider phone that has a QWERTY keypad. It is also Nokia’s fist phone that runs Maemo5, a Debian Linux-based operating system that can run on computers and phones and it may end up being the only Nokia phone with Maemo5. This leads to the question is the N900 worth the purchase?
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Nokia’s head of sales and marketing, Niklas Savander, took part in a Q&A session on Twitter last Thursday to face consumer comments and questions directly.
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The handset maker is banking its future on its new MeeGo OS. But success would come much easier if it just gave Google some love.
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Android
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We saw our first images of the Desire HD over the weekend, and just as day follows night, video leaks typically follow pictorial ones. You’ll already be familiar with the mooted specs — including 720p HD video recording, WVGA screen resolution, and an 8 megapixel imager — so what else does this handset tour reveal?
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security applications, is now focusing on the world of mobile, this is due to many publications, which relate to information for each users main platform. For example, iPhone does not JailbreakMe, which opened the devices operating system could potentially destroy the security system is easy.
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Divergent to Apple, Android gives the users the control to evaluate an app before it is installed. Security research firm, Lookout recently discovered that apps found on the Android are frequently not capable to gain access to a person’s contact data.
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Within one day sells about 160.000 phones with Android on board, while at the same time is only 95.000 new iPhone owners. RIM sells the BlackBerry 120.000 per day.
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A home grown operating system, GNU/Linux based Bharat Operating System Solutions (BOSS) with Indian language support, has been developed by NRCFOSS. BOSS desktop version 3.1 and BOSS server version 1.0 have been released for deployment. Currently the BOSS Desktop version supports 18 Indian languages – Assamese, Bengali,Bodo, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. BOSS comes with features like multimediasupport, cameras and scanners, USB devices, on-line dictionary, internet tools and support for integrating mobile internet devices etc. BOSS can be downloaded for installation from http://www.bosslinux.in. Both BOSS desktop and server versions have obtained Linux Standard Base (LSB) certification from “The Linux Foundation” which ensures that any LSB (Linux Standard Base) certified application will work correctly on BOSS. BOSS has implemented the security features such as Security Audit, Cryptographic Support, Objectreuse functionality, User Data Protection, Identification and Authentication, Security Management etc.
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One of my recurring themes in this blog is related to the advantages that OSS brings to the creation of new products; that is, the reduction in R&D costs through code reuse (some of my older posts: on reasons for company contribution, Why use OSS in product development, Estimating savings from OSS code reuse, or: where does the money comes from?, Another data point on OSS efficiency). I already mentioned the study by Erkko Anttila, “Open Source Software and Impact on Competitiveness: Case Study” from Helsinki University of Technology, where the author analysed the degree of reuse done by Nokia in the Maemo platform and by Apple in OSX. I have done a little experiment on my own, by asking IGEL (to which I would like to express my thanks for the courtesy and help) for the source code of their thin client line, and through inspecting the source code of the published Palm source code (available here). Of course it is not possible to inspect the code for the proprietary parts of both platforms; but through some unscientific drill-down in the binaries for IGEL, and some back of the envelope calculation for Palm I believe that the proprietary parts are less than 10% in both cases (for IGEL, less than 5% – there is a higher uncertainty for Palm).
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Oracle
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Oracle has announced the availability of version 3.2.8 of its open source VM VirtualBox desktop virtualisation application for x86 hardware. The latest maintenance update includes several bug fixes and a number of changes over the previous 3.2.6 release from late June, including various stability improvements.
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Education
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Business
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In the open-source world we’ve been “hell-bent on deepening relationships with customers” through support (in whatever guise), but if the HBR article is correct, this is the very thing that will be most likely to be dropped the minute a customer can. And, in fact, this is precisely what happens, as Jon Williams (formerly of Kaplan Test) famously pointed out at OSBC years ago.
So what’s the right revenue model?
Red Hat has a good model in which it packages up support as an ongoing stream of software updates, patches, etc. (Red Hat Network) Salesforce has an even better model, frankly, wherein it delivers the updates as part of the application: support is just part of the overall experience. But it’s not really an open-source model, so I’ll disregard it here.
Red Hat’s model, admirable though it may be, is not ideal for all kinds of open-source companies. For example, it is a poor fit for a Java application like Alfresco, my past employer. We considered it but there weren’t enough moving parts in the application itself to make an RHN service compelling enough in itself to justify buying an Alfresco subscription. (Red Hat’s model works precisely because Linux is so complex.)
Nor does Red Hat’s model work in the case of Canonical, my current employer, which has made a commitment to make all software – including bug fixes, updates, etc. – completely unfettered for customers and non-customers alike. (This isn’t to say that RHEL is proprietary, but only that easy access to the code, including ongoing maintenance, is available under a subscription.)
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Project Releases
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The GNU Compiler Collection version 4.5.1 has been released.
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Licensing
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It had included BusyBox software in its high definition TVs. BusyBox is a set of programs for embedded systems, part of which was written by Erik Anderson. He released his software under the GNU General Public License (GPL) Version 2, a licence used by open source programmers that allows others to use material for free under certain conditions.
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Openness/Sharing
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The article discusses the travails of Mathew Burton, a former analyst and software programmer at the Department of Defense who spent years trying to get the software he wrote into the hands of those who desperately needed it. But alas, no one could figure out the licensing rights for the software it was supposed to work with… so it never went anywhere. Today Mathew has (unsurprisingly) left Defense and has open sourced the code so that anyone can use it. The lesson? The tangled mess of navigating all the license agreements isn’t protecting anyone and certainly not the public. It’s just preventing interesting new and derivative works from being used to render American safer.
In short, the crises here doesn’t have to do with size of government, but in a misplaced desire by many governments to protect “intellectual property.”
Now I understand the need of government to protect physical property. A forest, for example, can only be logged once every few generations, so allocating that resource efficiently matters. But intellectual property? Things like documents, data, and software code? It’s use is not diminished when someone uses it. Indeed, often its value increases when numerous people start to use it.
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Throughout all of this accept that as research becomes less directed or applied that the measurement becomes harder, the error margins larger, and picking of winners (already difficult) near impossible. Consider mechanism to provide baseline funding at some low level, perhaps at the level of 25-50% of a PhD studentship or technician, direct to researchers with no restrictions on use, across disciplines with the aim of maintaining diversity, encouraging exploration, and maintaining capacity. This is both
politically and technically difficult but could have large dividends if the right balance is found. If it drops below an amount which can be useful when combined between a few researchers it is probably not worth it.
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If the Smithsonian Commons project is any indication, the answer is yes. I talked to Michael Edson, director of Web and New Media Strategy for the Smithsonian about the project.
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Meet All Our Ideas, the “suggestion box for the digital age“: a crowdsourcing platform designed to crowdsource concepts and opinions rather than facts alone. The platform was designed by a team at Princeton under the leadership of sociology professor Matt Salganik — initially, to create a web-native platform for sociological research. (The platform is funded in part by Google’s Research Awards program.) But its potential uses extend far beyond sociology — and, for that matter, far beyond academia. “The idea is to provide a direct idea-sharing platform where people can be heard in their own voices,” Salganik told me; for news outlets trying to figure out the best ways to harness the wisdom and creativity and affection of their users, a platform that mingles commenting and crowdsourcing could be a welcome combination.
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Open Access/Content
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Even China and South Korea, both of which have made rapid progress in science and technology in the past decade or two, have not taken full advantage of the open access movement.
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Programming
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The Federal Trade Commission said today that it had permanently killed the operations of a group that it said posed as domain name registrars and convinced thousands of US consumers, small businesses and non-profit organizations to pay bogus bills by leading them to believe they would lose their Web site addresses if they didn’t.
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Technology can certainly make for some interesting clashes with regulatory regimes. Social networking, for example, starts to bring up all sorts of questions about the fine line between certain regulated areas of advertising, and basic free speech communication issues. Eric Goldman points us to the news that the FDA is warning pharma giant Novartis (pdf) over its use of a “Facebook Share” widget on its site promoting the drug Tasigna (a leukemia drug).
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How many CEOs will the Hewlett-Packard board have to force out before it realizes that the person who should have succeeded Lew Platt back in 1999 is Ann Livermore, the HP veteran running the company’s enterprise business? If the board blows it again and fails to name Livermore to replace ousted chairman and CEO Mark Hurd, the way it blew it when Carly Fiorina was booted out in 2005, the wasted opportunity will be inexcusably senseless.
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A Transportation Security Administration agent has been arrested for allegedly stealing nearly $500 dollars from a wheelchair bound passenger as she passed through a security checkpoint at Newark Airport.
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It was snug, round and had a stunning view of a lake, and its residents liked it so much that they stayed put for several hundred years.
Welcome to the oldest house in the UK, newly unearthed by archaeologists amid a series of finds which are changing our knowledge of the earliest Britons.
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Science
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Security/Aggression
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The Obama administration has asked Britain, Germany, Australia, and other allies to consider criminal charges against Julian Assange for his Afghan war leaks. Philip Shenon reports.
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One of the alleged ringleaders behind the 2008 hack of RBS WorldPay has been extradited to the U.S., where he was arraigned Friday in the Northern District of Georgia on charges that he helped coordinate the global $9.5 million bank card heist.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology quietly published a list late Sunday of 2,087 steel mills, cement works and other energy-intensive factories required to close by Sept. 30.
Energy analysts described it as a significant step toward the country’s energy-efficiency goals, but not enough by itself to achieve them.
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Global warming is one of those really strange, politically-charged topics. Politics is weird that way. Sometimes really obvious things, like rising global temperatures, become wedge issues between the political parties.
On one level, it makes sense. If the world is getting warmer and we’re all doomed, fixing the problem could get expensive. After all, environmentally-sound behavior isn’t necessarily cheap.
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Finance
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Thanks to a better-than-expected response rate, lots of advertising and a little luck, the Commerce Department announced today that it is returning to the Treasury $1.6 billion in savings from the 2010 Census.
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I joined Goldman Sachs in 2005, after five flailing years in a physics Ph.D. program at Berkeley.
The average salary at Goldman Sachs in 2005 was $521,000, and that’s counting each and every trader, salesperson, investment banker, secretary, mail boy, shoe shine, and window cleaner on the payroll. In 2006, it was more like $633,000.
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Wall Street, like Scientology, has an all-inclusive and claustrophobic value system all its own. Particularly at Goldman Sachs, which prided itself as a breed apart from other firms, this provincialism went even further. Former employees who had left Goldman were rarely mentioned. The unanimous phrase for it was ‘no longer with the firm,’ said in the same tone used to describe the passing of a family member.
This tendency reached the height of comedy inside the strategies division, where some of the quants published academic papers on the more theoretical aspects of their work. If an author quit Goldman though, his name would be removed from the official version of the publication. It got to the point that some papers had no authors, and had apparently written themselves. So it goes. No longer with the firm.
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The Goldman meat grinder doesn’t really need me. It doesn’t really need you either, gentle reader. That feel-good saying that made the rounds on Twitter a couple months ago is actually totally right: go out and write your own story, or you’ll just be a character in someone else’s.
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House Democrats on Tuesday pushed through a $26 billion jobs bill to protect 300,000 teachers and other nonfederal government workers from election-year layoffs.
The bill would be paid for mainly by closing a tax loophole used by multinational corporations and reducing food stamp benefits for the poor. It passed mainly along party lines by a vote of 247-161.
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The president’s comment came the same day that G.M.’s chief executive, Edward E. Whitacre Jr., avowed, “We don’t want to be known as Government Motors,” and told an industry conference, “If you liked our first-quarter financial results, stay tuned for our second-quarter financial results.”
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As Federal Reserve policymakers meet Tuesday, they will face the challenge of a faltering economic recovery without a clear consensus on what, if anything the central bank should do about it.
Fed leaders still think that the recovery is on track, though the pace of growth has slowed and the risks of a dip back into recession have risen since their last policymaking meeting in late June.
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Keeping Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in business will cost taxpayers billions. But getting the federal government out of the mortgage business would cost home buyers dearly, in the form of higher interest rates.
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Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Monday that tough economic times require that he shutter a major command that employs some 5,000 people around Norfolk, Va., and begin to eliminate other jobs throughout the military.
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Birkenfeld got paid, too: A starting salary of 180,000 Swiss francs (just over $170,000) plus an American-style bonus, which in his best year, he said, put him at one million Swiss francs in total compensation (about $946,000). When home from the road, Birkenfeld drove a BMW M5 and split time between a plush apartment in Geneva and a chalet in the shadow of the Matterhorn in the Swiss Alps. Id, Part II.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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A confidential, seven-page Google Inc. “vision statement” shows the information-age giant in a deep round of soul-searching over a basic question: How far should it go in profiting from its crown jewels—the vast trove of data it possesses about people’s activities?
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I am baffled by the Google-Verizon agreement on nonnet-nonneutrality. I’m mostly baffled by why Google would put its name to this. What does it gain?
As I see it, the agreement makes two huge carve-outs to neutrality and regulation of the internet: mobile and anything new.
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South Korean police raided Google Inc’s Seoul office on Tuesday, the latest in a series of legal challenges the company is facing because of data collected by its controversial fleet of “Street View” cars.
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The Verizon-Google Net neutrality deal is now public. In brief: neutrality for Plain Old Internet, transparency but not neutrality for wireless, and nothing for “Additional Online Services” unless they “threaten the availability” of POI. They’re pushing their plan as a legislative framework.
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The question is, why would Google do this?
Is it a matter of corporate naivete? Verizon is, at base, a telephone company; it thrives in the interstices of state regulation the way small marine organisms thrive inside the nooks and crannies of a coral reef. That is its preferred habitat. Its organizational culture evolved there and it is brilliantly adapted to it. Google is a company built by engineers.
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The Federal Bureau of Investigation is giving short shrift to processing DNA from missing persons cases, taking as long as two years to handle profiles, according to a Department of Justice Office of Inspector General report.
Overall, about 40 percent of the FBI’s backlog of processing 3,200 DNA profiles stems from missing persons cases, according to Monday’s report.
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“Backlogs can also prevent the timely capture of criminals, prolong the incarceration of innocent people who could be exonerated by DNA evidence, and adversely affect families of missing persons waiting for positive identification of remains,” the report added.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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We’ve covered a few different recent stories of various sports leagues or professional sports teams trying to limit how journalists and photographers can report on their games, and have even covered cheeky attempts to get around such restrictions by having reporters cover events from home while watching on TV. Now, a whole bunch of you have been sending in variations on a story in the UK, where the Southampton football team apparently has decided to ban photojournalists from taking images of matches, instead telling newspapers they need to buy photos from the team’s “official” photographer.
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Copyrights
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Take.fm is a new movie torrent indexer that is a step above the plain old torrent indexes most BitTorrent users have become used to. The site, which only lists verified and high quality releases, combines a pleasant and great looking user interface with all the functionality needed to find the best films.
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When an edition of the Sunday Times newspaper included a free CD of a Jimi Hendrix concert without the permission of Hendrix’s estate it deprived the estate and two film-makers of potential profits for a year, the High Court has found.
The paper believed it had permission from the concert’s rights holder to distribute the CD but the musician’s estate said that it had not. The paper will not have to pay additional damages, though, because it had genuinely attempted to licence the music, the Court said.
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The research compared the book markets in the UK (with a strong copyright law) and Germany (with either weak or non-existent copyright), and found much more writing going on in Germany and (more importantly) much more innovation in the bookselling market. In the UK, where copyright limited printings, books were expensive and only owned by the wealthy and elite. In Germany, where copyright was weak or didn’t exist, certainly there was a fair amount of copying of other books, but it resulted in widespread innovation in the book market, including segmenting the market into hardcovers (for the wealthy and the elite) and cheaper paperbacks for those less well off.
Richard Stallman Speech Sina 2005-09
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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I will start with a conclusion which should not surprise any geek – but tends to surprise non-geeks: linux is the “real deal” and is a much bigger threat to Microsoft than Apple. However it will also change Apple’s (laptop) business model beyond all recognition – and it will do so via virtualization. It will also change the hardware business beyond recognition. Indeed it is already doing so.
I have now changed my laptop to a linux (Ubuntu) machine and run a piece of software (Virtual Box) on it. Virtual Box is a program which pretends it is another computer – a virtual computer. On virtual box I run Windows. This is – I believe – a superior set-up and it is unlikely I will ever run a machine primarily on Microsoft again.
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Desktop
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Recently I went on a week’s vacation to “get away”. When I got back, I had 3 Windows XP computers waiting to be fixed by a few family relatives. Not exactly a warm welcoming committee. The first one was fixed fairly easily, Windows Internet Connection Sharing settings disappeared and I had to guide over the phone on how to set that back up. The second PC was blue screening at random intervals, and the third was infected with spyware and viruses (with loads of popups), as well as running slower than ever. The PCs were basically useless and probably need to be reformatted and have Windows installed all over again.
However, for a while now I have been contemplating a new rule to deal with users and relatives bringing plagued Windows computers to me, in hopes that I can rectify them like a doctor. Basically, I can sum it up with “No, I will not fix your Windows computer, but I will install Linux on it for you.”. So, I ran the idea of Linux by the users, who seemed open to trying out a new operating system that will be practically immune to spyware and viruses, and overall more stable so that they will not have to bring it back to me over and over again. They too have had enough of the viruses and spyware that occur all too often in Windows.
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Events
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In LinuxCon’s education mini-summit, Bryant Patten of the National Center for Open Source and Education gave a presentation titled “Can open source save the world?” He noted a quote from Mary Lange, Educational Technology Resource Teacher at San Diego Unified School District. She says that we often assume students know how to use computers and that they are really good at it. But the truth is, they know how to use technology for personal reasons but not necessarily for education. They will say “I know how to do that,” but when it comes to reality, they don’t.
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DebConf was really an awesome conference. I’m happy that I have finally met so many of the fellow Debian people I only knew from the mailing lists or planet. There where lot’s of interesting talks, the hacklabs where always busy, and the overall atmosphere was very good. Now that I’m back in Berlin, I’m already missing it — I’m by the way also missing my luggage which is apparently still at the JFK airport.
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One conference track, for instance, covered Java packaging, which has changed a lot since Sun opened up Java’s licensing. There were sessions on coordinating with the Ubuntu project and on working with enterprise projects such as Samba.
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Kernel Space
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SELinux is a great way to limit the access rights/roles on a Linux machine.
But how do you limit CPU or memory usage of a given application? Red Hat engineer Dan Walsh (pic left) has a solution that he calls SELinux Sandbox which he demoed at the LinuxCon conference today.
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There are number of access control systems available for Linux but which one is easier to use?
At LinuxCon, Z. Cliffe Schreuders (pic left) a doctoral candidate at Murdoch University in Australia presented the findings of a small usability study he conducted into Linux access control systems.
Long story short, his study of 39 people found that AppArmor was generally found to be more user-friendly than SELinux. SELinux is the system used by Red Hat, while AppArmor is favoured by openSUSE and and Ubuntu.
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Applications
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Spicebird runs on Linux and Windows and connects to a standards-based email server. A handful of plugins support foreign language dictionaries, Firefox Personas, and allow users to associate photos with contacts. It’s integrated with Windows search and offers access to Web services like Google Maps without leaving the application.
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By using Video Wallpaper you will be forfeiting the ability to use the ‘desktop’ as normal – no icons, files etc will show. Any drop shadows present on panels will also disappear. If you’re tuff enuff to cope, here’s how…
You will need: -
* shantz-xwinwrap (download here)
* zenity (already installed)
* mplayer (click here to install)
* the script (here)
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Continuing our posts about security, we’ll speak of a door, a window to the outside world that can be a potential security breach.
Let’s talk about how to protect our beloved Firefox browser.
I will present some extensions and one tip to improve security in Firefox.
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Games
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For those too impatient to wait for next month for a new native Linux game release when Amnesia: The Dark Descent is set to premiere, there is another game with a native Linux client that was released today: And Yet It Moves.
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This is the first handful, but there will be more to come soon.
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Riddle me this, riddle me that… So goes the popular line from one of superhero fiction’s most popular villains. And we are hooked as The Riddler plots Batman’s downfall with a riddle. That’s the hook that a good riddle delivers. Come to think of it, even a stupid one gets the gears in our brain moving. There actually are no stupid riddles; just easy ones and difficult ones.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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With KDE’s 4.5 release day coming up, the KDE Promotion Team has been reviewing our brand structure that we first applied when Software Compilation 4.4 came out. There was lively discussion at Akademy, review of the things that have worked well and those that have not worked so well and discussion of how to make sure we use our brands consistently and in the ways that make sense for who we are and what we are doing:
* KDE is us, the people who develop, translate, beautify, explain and promote the software
* KDE’s products include the workspaces Plasma Desktop and Plasma Netbook, many KDE applications and the KDE Platform on which applications can be built
* KDE Software Compilation is not a brand, but just a name for the stuff that we release simultaneously. It’s unlikely that anyone uses the whole software compilation and probably no one only uses the software compilation – even most distros don’t install the whole thing by default and all include other software too (I don’t use the software compilation, but I do use KDE software)
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Marco’s been doing some more amazing work on Plasma Mobile.
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There were quite a few good comments on my last blog entry on how to get more people wikiing for KDE. Thank-you to everyone spent time thinking about it and providing feedback.
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Reviews
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I enjoyed the hell out of LFS and consider it time well spent.
Beyond the obvious lessons learned, I took away a new way to evaluate a distro for my personal use: packaging and technical support.
See, most of this I can do and I enjoy doing. So, a distro basically needs to “take over” those areas that I don’t want to bother with – and, by contrast, get out of my way in those areas I do want to bother with.
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New Releases (Also BSD)
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Parted Magic 5.2 updates GParted to 0.6.2, fixes some bugs, and improves international language support. The new GParted re-enables MiB partition alignment option and fixes the problem with logical partition move overwriting the EBR. A mess of bugs have been fixed with the help of Dick Burggraaff (burdi01), Jason Vasquez, and most of all, users willing to take the time to report them and help us test. Asian language support has been greatly improved with the addition of SCIM and GCIN. GCIN is automatically started when Taiwanese is selected at the boot menu and SCIM is automatically started when Japanese or Chinese is selected at the boot menu.
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Gentoo Family
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Red Hat Family
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When Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) reported earnings 45 days ago on June 22, 2010, analysts, on average, expected the company to report earnings of $0.18 on sales of $203 million.
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Of the three primary Linux vendors (Canonical, Novell, and Red Hat), Canonical and Red Hat have made the biggest splashes in the cloud computing market. Canonical’s focus appears to be simple partnerships and bundling software, rather than the comprehensive enterprise products offered by Red Hat. At its 2010 Summit, Red Hat provided a complete and separate track of cloud sessions that introduced its family of cloud products and services, along with its cloud strategy. While Red Hat provides an abundance of information about its cloud offerings, it’s not always clear how they fit together.
The overarching strategy behind Red Hat’s cloud offerings is to provide a consistent environment that allows you to run your workloads in your enterprise data center (fully or partially virtualized, with or without a private cloud) or in a public cloud. This consistency extends all the way through licensing.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Just uploaded to the Ubuntu Lucid repository for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (and we imagine it will appear shortly in Maverick too for Ubuntu 10.10) is a new package called canonical-census, which marks its initial release. Curious about what this package provides, we did some digging and found it’s for tracking Ubuntu installations by sending an “I am alive” ping to Canonical on a daily basis.
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Google Trends is not an authentic source of popularity index, but it can definitely give you a lot of pointers on what future holds for Ubuntu and Linux. As you can see from the above Google Trends screenshot, popularity of Ubuntu is almost same as that of Linux in 2010.
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Flavours and Variants
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You may recall my previous reviews and screenshot postings I did on Peppermint OS One and Peppermint OS Ice, both I liked very much. Just like previous releases this new release Peppermint OS One-08042010 is based on Ubuntu and includes the LXDE desktop environment with web applications integrated into the desktop using Prism. It includes many bug fixes, new artwork and several new features. PeppermintOS went with Firefox 4.0 beta 2 in this release due to instability with the 3.6 series.
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Phones
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Android
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While Apple may have dominated the headlines with iPads and iPhones, 2010 has been a pretty good year for Android. Now Consumer Reports is recommending a variety of Android devices.
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Tablets
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Consumer electronics retail giant Best Buy has tipped an upcoming Android-based “Rocketfish” tablet, say industry reports. Meanwhile, the rumored Android tablet from Motorola and Verizon won’t ship until Feb. 2011, and other tablets waiting for Android 3.0 may also miss the holiday season, sources say.
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Eureka Streams a great way to bring the ever-growing field of remote workers together and allow users of huge companies to connect with other employees beyond their immediate cube farm. It’s already got a lot of really great features in place for a newly-launched, with more to come. Learn more at the project’s Google Group or check out the source code for yourself at GitHub.
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GNU: The grand-daddy of them all, and everyone’s favorite recursive acronym, the GNU project was founded in 1984 on philosophical grounds that software should respect users freedom. GNU is the founder of several other projects, but possibly the most important in sheer scope is the GNU General Public License, the GPL. The GNU project also tried for years to come up with a complete desktop system based around the Hurd kernel, but found another kernel that quickly leapfrogged GNU’s efforts, and was quickly adopted.
Linux: Linux is now used to refer to a class of operating system that generally uses GNU userspace tools and the Linux kernel. Developed by Linus Torvalds as a college project to clone the Minux kernel, Linux has taken off in ways that were unimaginable a few years ago. Linux runs on the largest mainframes, and the smallest cell phones.
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Oracle
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They hope the news — published in a release that also said HP and Dell can resell Solaris OracleVM and Oracle Enterprise Linux — signals new pragmaticism and flexibility on the part of a company they feared was becoming ever more proprietary.
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Software freedom means no project with a community will go away, so long as they have the means and will to sustain it. That’s usually considered a good thing, but sometimes it’s less of a feature and more of a bug. Consider, for example, the sad case of OpenSolaris.
Since Oracle gobbled up Sun, it’s remained mute on the fate of OpenSolaris. Attempts to get someone at Oracle to comment have been fruitless. I’ve spoken to Oracle PR and some of the employees on the community side about OpenSolaris and the responses have been both off the record and totally discouraging. To put it bluntly, Oracle seems to have put OpenSolaris out to pasture and won’t even do its community the courtesy of making it official.
So a hardy band of OpenSolaris enthusiasts led by Nexenta have taken up the banner and are trying to save OpenSolaris with the Illumos project.
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CMS
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Funding
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This year could be of critical importance to the open source software industry, with a recent survey showing a majority of businesses and organizations in the U.S. and United Kingdom expecting to increase investment in it this year.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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Simply put, education needs raw, real-time data.
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Open Hardware
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Wired’s Priya Ganapati took an in-depth look Arduino recently, and says its maturity and strong community are largely responsible for the project’s success. “Arduino’s popularity means it’s easy to get started. Companies such as Adafruit, SparkFun and Liquidware not only sell chips, but they also host blogs that suggest ideas on how to use your Arduino while providing extensive project plans to guide you in completing your creations,” he writes. Lets take a look at two projects that use Arduino as the basis for their gadgetry.
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According to the filing, Skype’s revenues for the first six months of 2010 were $406 million, with a net income of only $13 million. But a big portion of that was from interest income. That is only a 3 percent net margin, and this isn’t exactly a new business. Its income from operations was only $1.4 million for the six months. However, its gross margins are 51 percent, and have been expanding steadily as the company benefits from the scale of is operations and is able to negotiate lower telephone termination fees around the world.
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Multiple accounts are being used by these people, who combine to dislike articles put up for Digg consideration. By not liking something in their large numbers they are able to push those news and commentary items further and further away from the front page of the Digg website.
The groups regularly send out ‘bury’ lists that urge the gang to act out against articles that lean to the left or in some cases appear fairly random, for example, “SETI Opens All Data To The Public” and “Sarah Ferguson: I Was Drinking At The Time Of Video Sting”.
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Moving with the speed of an injured rock, NatWest has finally withdrawn its legal threats against a student advice site.
118student.co.uk offers advice to students and has pages reviewing all the major banks’ student accounts. Site owner Peter Hale was shocked to receive a letter accusing him of abuse of trademarks and attempting to pass his site off as part of NatWest.
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In a criminal prosecution stemming from false evidence used in a family law dispute, a defendant was convicted of sending fake emails to herself with the intent that the emails would be used to influence a court proceeding. The appeals court affirmed her conviction.
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Science
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Let’s face it: The planet is heating up, Earth’s population is expanding at an exponential rate, and the the natural resources vital to our survival are running out faster than we can replace them with sustainable alternatives. Even if the human race manages not to push itself to the brink of nuclear extinction, it is still a foregone conclusion that our aging sun will expand and swallow the Earth in roughly 7.6 billion years.
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Security/Aggression
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Any citizen, any foreign spy, any member of the Taliban, and any terrorist can go to the WikiLeaks website, and download detailed information about how the U.S. military waged war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2009. Members of that same military, however, are now banned from looking at those internal military documents. “Doing so would introduce potentially classified information on unclassified networks,” according to one directive issued by the armed forces.
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The internet’s next-generation addressing scheme is so radically different from the current one that its adoption is likely to cause severe security headaches for those who adopt it, a researcher said last week.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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REPRESENTATIVES from both political parties who chair the US House of Representatives Bi-Partisan Privacy Caucus have asked some large websites for answers to allay online tracking concerns.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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It is imperative that we find ways to protect the future openness of the Internet and encourage the rapid deployment of broadband. Verizon and Google are pleased to discuss the principled compromise our companies have developed over the last year concerning the thorny issue of “network neutrality.”
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Negotiations between Vevo and MTV, the two heavyweights of the music video, have broken down with dire results for visitors to MTV’s websites where music videos from Universal Music Group, the largest record label in the world will no longer appear.
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The lawsuit, which Henley had largely won at the district court, involved two videos made by the DeVore campaign which took the lyrics from Henley’s songs “The Boys of Summer” and “All She wants to do is Dance” and substituted in new lyrics attacking president Obama and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA). DeVore argued that the videos were fair use parodies of Henley’s songs, but the court held that the videos were satirical rather than parodic and rejected the fair use defense. Questions of willfulness and damages were still to be resolved. The court did rule for the defendants on the plaintiffs’ Lanham Act claim, which alleged that DeVore’s videos falsely associated Henley with the Republican’s campaign. DeVore lost the June primary to former HP exec Carly Fiorina (R) for the chance to take on Boxer in November.
HTC Aria Review: Pocket Android
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08.09.10
Posted in News Roundup at 5:48 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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One of the frustrations of promoting GNU/Linux is that retail sellers of PCs tend to ignore or are ignorant of GNU/Linux yet about 10% of retail customers are very familiar with GNU/Linux. That makes no sense. It may maximize current cash-flow but will cause retailers to lose customers as GNU/Linux grows and start-ups or smaller retailers cater to the business. The result is a chicken-and-egg situation where many who would buy GNU/Linux on price and performance do not have much choice and because most users of PCs are not do-it-yourself types GNU/Linux does not grow as rapidly as it could.
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Kernel Space
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Chris Mason, the Btrfs lead developer, quickly responded that Btrfs is not being aggressive enough in allocating chunks of data, which is making the flusher come in and start data I/O. Chris is now working to reproduce and address this issue. No fix has yet been committed, but it’s expected that it will land within the Linux 2.6.36 kernel.
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Graphics Stack
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Ubuntu’s Christopher James Halse Rogers has just issued a notice that X.Org Server 1.9 is soon going to be uploaded to the Ubuntu Maverick repository for Ubuntu 10.10, which is part of Ubuntu’s X and Mesa plans. X.Org Server 1.9 isn’t going to be officially released until later this month, but the Ubuntu 10.10 feature freeze is coming up this week so the existing X.Org Server 1.8.2 release is being replaced with an X.Org Server 1.9 snapshot until the final release is made available.
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Applications
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The next question is will Linux developers wish to test the waters by including libdvdcss in their distributions? While the libdvdcss available for Linux systems has never been expressly challenged, its DeCSS-like decryption prevents many distributions from including it for fear of legal issues. One would hope that Garcia’s decision will alleviate those fears, but given the Copyright Office’s lack of exemption for Linux, it certainly looks like users will have to continue to install the needed decryption software themselves.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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QUAKE PLAYERS REJOICE as ID Software has finally taken Quake Live out of beta and announced incentive packages.
ID launched ‘Premium’ and ‘Pro’ services today for the web browser-based, ninja-speed frag-fest Quake Live.
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Playing Quake, an all action First Person Shooter, inside your browser window was completely mythical five years ago. But the free game phenomenon now has some pay-to-play options for those wanting more from their browser based bangs.
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Debian Family
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You click on the gNewSense icon on the page at http://goodbye-microsoft.com and start a download of the installer which you run to install a bootloader for the real GNU/Linux installer.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Introducing: The best Ubuntu yet?
Since its release a month ago I have been testing Ubuntu 10.04, Lucid Lynx, and I have been pleasantly surprised by the improvements in this version of my favorite distribution of Linux. It really is faster, better looking, and more feature-rich than ever. In this video review I give my thoughts about the operating system, and how it compares to Windows.
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What was especially interesting about a recent conversation Mark Shuttleworth started with musings about tribalism and treating people with respect was the turn it took when blogger Mairin Duffy steered it in the direction of the “Great Sexism Debate,” in which Shuttleworth’s unfortunate remarks about women at LinuxCon played an incendiary role. “Did you ever end up apologizing?” Duffy asked.
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One of our key objectives when we started conceptualising the new themes was their ability to be immediately recognisable as Ubuntu, even if represented as a small screenshot. As easily recognised as when it used to be brown – but not that brown… the incarnation that we initially launched was a bold new statement: a little unrefined maybe, but a good starting block on which to build.
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derStandard.at: Looking back at Lucid, are you happy with how the release turned out to be?
Jono Bacon: Personally I’m really happy, Lucid is a really great release. With every release we try to invest more and more in building a really strong user experience and it felt for me that with Lucid a lot of this has been coming together. There are always things to be fixed – we are developers so we look at the defects as opposed to the things that work after all – but generally we’re pretty happy.
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This year the Ubuntu Global Jam will take place over the weekend of 27th – 29th August and it’s a great opportunity to work together to improve Ubuntu. Everyone is able to contribute to the Jam, and everyone is welcome and encouraged to get involved. It’s for all levels so don’t be put off thinking it’s only about development and looking at bugs for the weekend, there are loads of areas to help.
The Ubuntu Global Jam incorporates events that have been organized over the world to get Ubuntu contributors and fans together to have a great time and improve Ubuntu. Each event has one or more of our themes:
* Bugs – finding, triaging and fixing bugs.
* Testing – testing the new release and reporting your feedback.
* Upgrade – upgrading to Maverick from Lucid and reporting your upgrade experience.
* Documentation – writing documentation about how to use Ubuntu and how to join the community.
* Translations – translating Ubuntu and helping to make it available in everyone’s local language.
* Packaging – work on Ubuntu packages and improve them.
* Other – other types of contribution such as marketing and advocacy etc.
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Flavours and Variants
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There are so many Linux distributions out there it’s dizzying. Some are simply respins of various base distributions with a different theme or maybe one or two specific applications thrown in for good measure. Sometimes it’s hard to reason why someone actually created a new distribution because there’s so closely resembles the distribution they used as a base. And then there’s Uberstudent. Uberstudent is a Linux distribution, built upon Ubuntu, that targets students in higher-education settings. It’s goal is to become a perfect platform to aid in the process of education. It is, essentially, a learning platform and to this end it succeeds with aplomb, elegance, and power.
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Phones
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Android
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There are two questions many people tend to ask when they first see Dell’s Streak. The first is usually “what is it?” And the second, following a slightly puzzled look, is “who’s it for?” On one hand it’s essentially a 5”-screen smartphone masquerading as a tablet device; on the other it’s a small-form-factor tablet pretending to be a phone. It’s a case of dual personality and whichever way you look at it, there’s no easy way to pigeonhole it. If you were to ask the folks at Dell they’d certainly err on the side of tablet, but this does little to change the fact that it’s basically a very large example of any of the latest Android-based Smartphones you can read about here or elsewhere.
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Recommendations for removing barriers and broadening membership among women in open-source projects were published July 16 by the FSF’s Women’s Caucus, which was formed nearly a year ago and was tasked to devise solutions to address the problem.
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I am of the opinion larger open source projects (and companies) should make an effort to recruit developers who have good people skills and, at the same time, discourage their developers who lack people skills from representing the project publicly.
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Business
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Stephen O’Grady and Simon Phipps have both recently published interesting posts on the current state of open source, with Stephen pondering the relative growth of open source and Simon wondering whether the “commercial open source” bubble has burst.
What they are describing, I believe, is the culmination of the trends we predicted at the beginning of 2009 for commercial open source business strategies – specifically the arrival of the fourth stage of commercial open source.
What is the fourth stage of commercial open source? In short: a return to a focus on collaboration and community, as well as commercial interests.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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Weather data is one of the datasets the current administration loves to talk about. Indeed, it’s proof that transparency goes beyond accountability. The data from the National Weather Service supports a huge industry. According to the American Meteorological Society, the total size of the private sector weather market is greater than 1.5 Billion Dollars. Keeping in mind that it isn’t its core function to support industry, a federal agency that has a billion dollar annual budget is supporting a more than billion dollar private industry through the release of its data is a great lesson in the power of open data.
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Dominic Raab, Conservative MP for Esher & Walton is threatening 38 Degrees that if we don’t take his email address off our “contact your MP system” he’ll report us to the Information Commissioner.
We’ve been in touch with the Information Commissioner and they’ve reassured us that because he is an MP and his e-mail address is in the public domain, he has no grounds to report us.
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Last week, we wrote about how the misguided, politics-driven media campaign against Craigslist was ramping up again with a half-page ad in The Washington Post, obviously targeted at DC politicians. Paul Levy, who had sent over a scan of the ad now alerts us that the very next day, the Washington Post had a one-sided anti-Craigslist article, where it cites the ad. As Levy asks, has the Washington Post now stooped so low that buying a half-page ad gets you a one-sided story? Very disappointing move by the Washington Post.
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This coming Wednesday I was supposed to be attending the Congressional Internet Caucus’ State of the Net West event, but late last week it was announced that the event was postponed, because for only the third time in the past twenty years, the Speaker of the House (in this case, Nancy Pelosi) has called the House back into session early to vote on pending legislation. With Congress back in session the Congressional reps scheduled to attend the event couldn’t make it, and it’s not much of a Congressional Internet Caucus get together without Congressional reps. Anyway, the last time the House was called back early like this, it involved emergency legislation to deal with Hurricane Katrina. So what’s so important this time around? Apparently, it’s The ______Act of____.
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Kudos to attorney Lisa Bloom, who last night blasted out one of our favorite press releases of the year. In it, she warns journalists not to refer to clients Michaele and Tereq Salahi as “party crashers” because “that statement is false and defamatory.”
Bloom might have her work cut out for her. Our quick Google search for “white house party crashers” delivers 158,000 results, the first few pages of which all feature the Salahis. And we’re pretty sure we’ve never heard Ms. Salahi, currently starring on Bravo’s “The Real Housewives of D.C.,” referred to as anything except “White House party crasher Michaele Salahi.”
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The impact of the widespread spraying on the local communities has been devastating. The planes have targeted not just illegal coca plants, but all vegetation, including staple crops that local populations depend upon. Rivers have been contaminated, and elderly people and children have been particularly badly affected by skin rashes and asthmatic attacks. There are also unconfirmed reports of congenital malformations occurring as a result of these herbicide fumigations. Many of us have a long-standing commitment to the communities in the region, which we have visited many times. We know what we are talking about.
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Finance
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When it comes to crises, this former IMF chief economist knows what he’s talking about. Nowadays, analysts who claim they spotted this bust coming far outnumber musicians who swear blind they saw the Sex Pistols play Manchester’s Free Trade Hall in 1976. But Rajan really did, bravely telling America’s bubble-blower-in-chief Alan Greenspan just that at a 2005 conference.
So when Rajan names as the first of his fractures the gap between America’s rich and the rest, it’s worth paying attention. The reasoning is simple: since middle-American families saw barely any increase in their wages over the last decade, they were forced to borrow dangerous amounts to buy houses, to keep up living standards – or simply to keep from falling behind. As he points out, Clinton and Bush allowed this lethal explosion in credit as it was “the path of least resistance”. Clamping down on all those dodgy home and car loans and credit cards would have been tantamount to sticking two fingers up at their own voters.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Champagne corks are popping on K Street as the White House’s ethics chief Norm Eisen is heading out with an appointment as ambassador to the Czech Republic. The New York Times reports that heavywieght Democratic lobbyist Tony Podesta is calling Eisen’s departure, “the biggest lobbying success [lobbyists] had all year.”
Eisen spearheaded major White House efforts to increase transparency and slow the movement from government to the lobbying sector. These projects included the online publication of White House visitor logs, lobbyist contact disclosure for Recovery Act projects and TARP money, the Open Government Directive and imposing tight controls on the hiring of lobbyists and the contacting of former officials turned lobbyists.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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After leaking secret nuclear details in 1986 Vanunu was kidnapped in a honeytrap set by Mossad agents in Rome.
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Guantanamo’s Camp Justice is a place where you can sit at your laptop or by your phone only if there’s a member of the military within earshot.
It’s a place where you can go to court only in the custody of a military public affairs officer. Inside, if there’s only one escort — this happened recently — and somebody has to go to the bathroom, every reporter has to leave court, too.
It’s a place where a soldier stands over your shoulder, looks in your viewfinder and says ‘Don’t take that picture, I’ll delete it.’
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In the last year, the Maltese government has banned the play Stitching from being performed, has arrested and put students on trial for writing and publishing an “obscene” story, and has prevented the artist Alexander Stankovski from exhibiting paintings which contained nudity. The updated criminal code will make public obscenity or blasphemy in public punishable by up to a year in jail, even if the words or sentiments are part of a work of fiction, theatre, or art.
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The National Conference of State Legislatures’ (NCSL) approval today of a resolution calling on the Obama administration to make significant reforms to the past U.S. trade agreement model is yet another indication of the nationwide, bipartisan demand for the administration to implement the president’s campaign commitments to trade reform, Public Citizen said.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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So, of course, fashion designers and politicians keep doing it. Pretty much every year Chuck Schumer trots out just such a bill, and this year is no different. Reader Steve Phillips points us to the announcement of the bill being introduced and ReallyEvilCanine points us to a celebratory post by a professor who was involved in drafting the bill. This time around the bill has Senators Boxer, Feinstein, Hatch, Graham & Hutchison as co-sponsors, so there’s quite a bit of firepower, as they seek to build up protectionist policies that may benefit a few top designers, but will significantly harm up-and-comers. Just as we’ve seen throughout history, intellectual property protections lag innovation, rather than cause it. That’s because the top players in the space use those laws to reduce, not enhance, competition. This is no exception.
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Copyrights
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A bunch of you sent in this NY Times puff piece that basically follows around a BMI “enforcer,” for a day, watching as she tries to get restaurants, clubs, bars, skating rinks, etc. to pay up for playing music in their establishments. It’s all legal, but it has all the hallmarks of a pure shakedown — which is why operations like BMI and ASCAP are notorious for doing more harm than good, by making it much more difficult for up-and-coming musicians to find venues to play in. Many venues simply stop playing music, rather than deal with expensive BMI/ASCAP licenses. On top of that, because of the way these systems work, they tend to funnel money disproportionately to big name artists, again harming less well known songwriters. BMI, in fact, has been particularly obnoxious about this. Last year, when a songwriter who had not received any of the promised royalties was brought up, BMI responded that it wasn’t their problem, and “I would like to tell him is that he needs to write a hit song.” Nice, huh?
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This is the first in more to come about the proposed $45 per university student tariff – a more than 1,300 % increase over the current basic charge. Access Copyright (“AC”),the proponent, is probably Canada’s fastest growing and least understood collectives. It started out as a reprography collective right after the 1988 reform package was proclaimed. Its initial cash flow came conveniently from a lucrative multimillion dollar contact with the Federal Government. It has since managed, with little effective resistance, to convince Canadian provincial governments, school boards, colleges and universities to pay well over $30 million a year into its coffers. The only actual Copyright Board challenge to date that has gone to fruition resulted in a big loss for the K-12 school boards and the provinces ultimately behind them under the umbrella of the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada (“CMEC”). This loss was recently confirmed by the Federal Court of Appeal. More about this and whether this case will go to the Supreme Court of Canada below.
Lucid Dream
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Posted in News Roundup at 8:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Recently I have had a lot of people comment (on this forum and other forums) that Linux isn’t user friendly, that Linux will never make it to the average user’s desktop, that “Windows rulez and Linux droolz”. Among most of those detractors hardly a one will offer a solid reason to back up their statement. So this time I am throwing down the gauntlet of challenge to say “prove to me that Linux is not user friendly”.
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Linux doesn’t have a CEO. Consequently, there’s no annual keynote hosted by a charismatic alpha male. But if it did, and if there were a conference covering the first half of this year, the first speech would start with three words: “Linux is winning”.
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Desktop
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One of the many attractive features of Linux is the possibility to add beautiful effects to the desktop. Compiz provides the best known set of effects and they can be used both in Gnome and KDE distros. You get this set by installing it from the distribution repositories. However, KDE has its native effects, which are also nice although a bit stiffer: Kwin. (This is Kwin’s flipswitch, an application switcher effect that is is also seen in Compiz and in Windows Vista)
[...]
Some people consider effects a waste of computer power. They may be right but, in my modest opinion, the cube, the multiple wallpapers, fire-writing, water, and snow make my computer environment more appealing to me. I find this aspect significant because, believe it or not, those pieces of eye candy become quite relaxing when you are trying to write an article on, say, Japanese acceptance/rejection ambivalent syndrome or the dark night of the soul in T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and the muses decide to hide from you. Plus, when the poor souls trapped in Windows 7 Starter see me enjoying my writer’s block by playing with the desktop effects, they always ask themselves why I get so many cool features for free and they have to pay to be able to use the over-rated Aeroshake.
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One of my friends made a offhanded comment about me being an “internet hipster”. Well, and that got me thinking. Well, I don’t think
that I’m that abnormal from my peers, so perhaps it’s time to look at how the collective “us” are conducting ourselves. The more I thought about
it, the more I got myself thinking that the GNU/Linux community is the “Hipster” sub-culture of computing. Seems a bit backwards, after all, most
of the actual hipsters use Apple products.
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Kernel Space
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Every now and then, a shiver runs through the Linux community as people realise afresh that the entire edifice has a single point of failure: Linus Torvalds. These episodes usually manifest themselves as concerns about the scalability of said individual – whether he can continue to oversee and manage the amazing distributed development model as it grows ever bigger and more ambitious. To counter those fears it is probably worth looking at what happened as a result of the first – and by far the most frightening – “Linus does not scale” episode, not least because it led to multiple positive outcomes.
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Applications
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There is other dedicated software around that can offer superior facilities in the separate fields of photo editing, web page design and desk-top publishing, but nothing that offers all this functionality in a single program. But because it is so detailed, new users may experience a steeper learning curve.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Desktop Environments
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LXDE
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I keep running into LXDE derivatives. Not physically of course, but it could be an unintended side effect of being on the lookout for distros to try on the Mebius.
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PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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One lesson I learned from this, something that was brought up in one of the comments in Manual LVM configuration on Fedora 13, is that if you are going to create a separate partition for /boot and you are going to run the system through several update/upgrade cycles, be very generous with disk space allocation – to /boot.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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Round about last week, I switched my desktop from Gentoo to Fedora. It took a few days to get everything the way I wanted. But it only took that long because I had lots of data to backup and (selectively) restore, and I only worked in the evenings. Fortunately, a “re-install” is way less painful than Windows, since all you really need to keep is your home directory. I just don’t know how Windows users live through it, especially without all their programs in a convenient package manager. I can happily say I have never re-formatted Windows for any reason (and that’s not because I don’t used it).
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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So, Benjamin Humphrey of OMG! Ubuntu! and Ubuntu Manual team lead has a blog post he considers so brilliant he made sure it went out twice: “Dude, you’re a 35 year old with a neck beard“.
Mr. Humphrey’s particular post is so chock-full of ignorance that it deserves a proper dissection.
Let’s begin!
Step One: Mischaracterize and dehumanize the opposition
Mr. Humphrey leads off with the old tried-and-true one-two punch of the anti-Free Software crowd: first, stereotype your opposition and second, blame them alone for all failings.
Stereotype. “Extremist diehard Linux geeks” – according to Mr. Humphries – refer to Linux as “GNU/Linux”, use the terminal window, and only exercise once a year by walking their dog.
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Flavours and Variants
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Version 1.0 of the operating system incorporates a user interface built with HTML5 that includes an application launcher, a library of compatible applications with one-click installation and removal, a display of all machines associated with user account, and a social activity stream that enables users to compare installed applications
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I spent the past week installing and testing Jolicloud 1.0 on two of my systems – one “real” netbook, the HP 2133 Mini-Note, SVGA 1024×600 model, and one “oversize” netbook, the HP Pavillion dv2-1010ez. The results have been mixed, to put it mildly. I think that I see what they are doing, and where they are going with this. It is a very, VERY web-centric / cloud-based operating system, not only at the level of the applications such as Facebook et. al., but at the level of the operating system itself. That kind of operating system is not for me, on both levels. I don’t use “social networking” applications at all, period. I don’t want my computer(s) to be tied to, dependent upon, or constantly exchanging information with the “cloud”, period. But I am old, and my feelings and computer use patterns are probably not typical these days – perhaps even more so in the case of netbooks.
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I must admit I’ve been very frustrated at times. And sometimes, I still am. But there is something about this tiny machine that makes you love it, no matter what. It’s very sturdy, although a foot has fallen off and I reconnected the rubber USB protection several times. I reset it, yanked the battery out of it, reinserted the mini-SD card time and time again, but it kept on working. The power button has been abused a zillion times, but it doesn’t give up. It’s really a brave little machine.
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Phones
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Android
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The researchers found that 27% of people who bought a smartphone over the six months ending in June went with Android vs. 23% for iPhone. That put Android in second place, behind Blackberry with 33%.
That’s a big change from Nielsen’s previous tally for the six months that ended in March. At that point, 36% of smartphone buyers went with Blackberry, 27% got iPhones, and just 17% allied with Android.
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Tablets
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One Laptop per Child applauds Minister Kapil Sibal for promoting a $35 tablet. Education is the primary solution to eliminating poverty, saving the environment and creating world peace. Access to a connected laptop or tablet is the fastest way to enable universal learning. We agree with you completely.
Please consider this open letter OLPC’s pledge to provide India with free and open access to all of our technology, and our experience with 2 million laptops, in over 40 countries, in over 25 languages. As a humanitarian and charitable organization, we do not compete. We collaborate, and invite you to do so, too.
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The Android OS isn’t just powering high end smartphones, it also runs barebones tablets sold at Kmart for the price of an iPod nano.
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The open source Greenstone digital library software suite was developed by the University of Waikato in New Zealand, in cooperation with UNESCO and the Belgian NGO Human Info. Greenstone is a user-friendly, multilingual, multi-platform package for assembling electronic documents into digital collections and for publishing these collections on the web or on CD-ROM. It accepts documents in a wide range of proprietary and standard formats, supports numerous standards for document and metadata exchange.
Since its creation in 1997, Greenstone software has spread to 90 countries and has been translated into 45 languages, which makes it a key tool for the development of knowledge societies and a promoter of social development at the international level. Greenstone is being distributed under GNU General Public License.
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The hold up problem is particularly severe in the IT sector. Building an Internet company on a foundation consisting of proprietary software owned by others is akin to building a house without owning the land under it. When software is sold in binary form, the buyer is subject to hold up by the vendor; if the software needs to be changed in the future, such changes can only be done with the cooperation of the original vendor at the price that the original vendor demands. By relying on open source, a company can invest in developing its product without fear of being held up down the road. Therefore, open source is an economically powerful solution to the hold up problem.
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Lightspark, one of the newest free software projects designed to provide an open-source implementation of Adobe’s Flash/SWF specification, has been progressing at a rather expedited pace. Lightspark continues to pickup new features with each new release, which as of late have been occurring frequently. Less than a month ago, Lightspark 0.4.2 was released and version 0.4.3 is already approaching with the first release candidate having been released this weekend.
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There is a lot of free software available and much of it rivals the quality of software that you have to pay good money for. Here is a list, in no particular order, of some of the best software currently available for free.
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Next thing we know, along come a host of similar devices, many of them based upon Android which is free software, even if it is often locked down by the hardware manufacturers. It’s a similar tale with tablets, how many rumours of “Linux based” iPad wannabes do we have to endure before we actually see one?
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Never has this been more apparent to me than at the 2010 Mozilla Summit. I couldn’t help but notice that every session I visited, every reception I attended, and every conversation I had was dominated by male hacker stereotypes. The game room was full of obscure board games, first person shooters, caffeine and candy. Group conversations inevitably drifted towards the finer details of an API or a technical discussion of the merits of one platform or another. I had many short-lived and terse conversations with shy and introverted but incredibly proud geeks like myself.
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CMS
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The idea of a plugin is that it can be added to any WordPress site and I will release it as open source code when it is finished. It is still in alpha development and I expect it will be several months before the plugin is ready for public release via the WordPress repository. It is also a very big plugin with a couple of thousand files and will probably be 20Mb or more when it is finished.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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A new model of data sharing and openness is emerging in the scientific community that replaces traditional ways of thinking about research findings as the private property of the primary investigator. Large granting agencies, including the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, have embraced the new model of more-open access to research data. Later this year, the NSF will start requiring scientists seeking research grants to include a data-management plan in their applications, describing how and when their data will be shared.
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Although the open availability of scientific data is fundamental to the modern scientific enterprise, the sharing of data has not always been accomplished with the speed or regularity that traditional norms of scientific conduct would dictate. A group of scientists and policy-makers met in 1996 to develop principles for rapid pre-publication release of genomic data to enable better coordination of the massive human genome project and to accelerate the progress of science in general. The resulting Bermuda Principles, requiring the release of all genomic sequence data to public databases within twenty-four hours after generation, were revolutionary in their scope and lasting in their effect.
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Childs defended his actions during a long court trial, saying that he was only doing his job, and that his supervisor, Department of Technology and Information Services Chief Operations Officer Richard Robinson, was unqualified to have access to the passwords. Childs eventually handed over the passwords to San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom.
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Larry recently set up the Program on Liberation Technology at Stanford University together with colleagues Joshua Cohen and Terry Winograd to catalyze more rigorous, applied research on the role of technology in repressive environments—both in terms of liberation and repression. This explains why I’ll be joining the group as a Visiting Fellow this year. The program focuses on the core questions I’m exploring in my dissertation research and ties in technologies like Ushahidi which I’m directly working on.
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Books
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There has been a lot of talk, lately, about the death of books due to the e-reader market. While I firmly believe that book sales are going to take a staggering loss, I’m fairly certain that we’re not ready for the eulogy. The saviors of paper and ink publishing will come in two forms: the purists and the poorest.
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By “dead,” he of course doesn’t mean completely dead. But he means that digital books are going to replace physical books as the dominant form. His argument is related to his One Laptop per Child Foundation. On those laptops, he can include hundreds or thousands of books. If you think about trying to ship that many physical books to the emerging world for each child, it would be impossible, he reasons.
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Science
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Jetlir is a high school student from Cologne. He could easily be a character in one of the many newspaper stories about the “Internet generation” that is allegedly in grave danger of losing itself in the virtual world.
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Health
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Big insurers are struggling for the freedom to keep spending less and less on medical care, because every dollar they don’t spend on medical claims means more dollars paid to shareholders and CEOs. Insurance companies are pulling out all the stops, Wendell says, including trying to manipulate the very definition of the term “medical care.” They are pressuring the NAIC to let them shift a lot of what the companies now count as administrative expenses into their “medical expense” category. If that happens, the insurance companies will look like they’re spending more on medical care, without really changing any thing at all, and that meets their goal of assuring no real change occurs at all.
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Security/Aggression
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Footage captured on a police dashboard camera shows one officer striking the driver’s seat window with a baton up to 15 times and another officer jumping on the bonnet of the car and kicking the windscreen in an apparent attempt to crack it.
Police pulled over Robert Whatley, 70, for not wearing a seat belt as he drove through country lanes in South Wales. The 8-mile chase started after officers tried to give Mr Whatley a fixed penalty notice but he drove off.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The lawsuit was filed against Serge Galipeau and his wife Christine Landry, of Cantley, Que., just north of Ottawa, after they complained about the smell of hydrogen sulphide gas emanating from the landfill.
Justice Pierre Dallaire ruled that the $1.25-million defamation suit, if allowed, would interfere with the public’s right to free speech.
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Academy Award-winning actress and New Orleans resident Sandra Bullock has severed her involvement in a campaign to call attention to the BP spill, after learning from ThinkProgress that it was a greenwashing effort by the oil industry. Bullock is prominently featured in the Restore the Gulf campaign, run by Women of the Storm and sponsored by America’s Wetland Foundation.
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Suddenly BP’s oil disaster is getting an unusually high amount of positive publicity. Media reports are concluding that most of the oil has disappeared. The static kill has been successful at holding back the oil pressure, and the U.S. government issued a scientific report suggesting that 75 percent of the 4.9 million barrels of oil that gushed into the Gulf as been burned, dispersed or evaporated. But even if you assume that all of the dispersed oil has been degraded, there are still an estimated 1.3 million barrels out in the environment — five times the amount of oil released during the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989.
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Finance
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The Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission have broad powers to root out and punish financial fraud. The Interagency Financial Fraud Task Force, formed last November, is an Obama-era innovation that enhances the government’s ability to track down financial criminals. As we look back on the last two years’ revelations about Wall Street misbehavior, then, it seems reasonable to ask the question:
What’s a banker gotta do to get arrested in this town?
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Congress used to know how to investigate. In response to events ranging from war profiteering to Wall Street excesses to espionage transgressions, Congress formed special committees. Directed by powerful lawmakers, well-staffed and armed with subpoena power, these panels provided the public valuable information about government activities and spurred important legislation.
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The nation’s economic recovery continued to sputter in July as employers kept shedding jobs and 181,000 discouraged workers dropped out of the labor force, according to a government report released Friday.
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Let’s brush past the pain of joblessness and take the issue right to corporate terms: People who don’t have jobs don’t make good consumers. But business is unmoved.
Nonfinancial companies are hoarding cash. They’re sitting on a reported cash pile $1.8 trillion high, about a quarter more than at the start of the recession. But they’re not hiring. One recent survey of CFOs says most don’t expect unemployment to drop back to pre-recession levels until 2012 or later — even though they foresee rising corporate earnings.
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After the recession and the financial crisis, Mr. Gross came around to the view that something structural in the economy had been altered and that the debt-fueled boom led by consumers over the past two decades was over.
Last week only provided more ammunition for his argument. On Tuesday, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner warned that unemployment could go up before it goes down, and on Friday, the jobs report showed that the economy lost 131,000 jobs last month.
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The public sector employers in particular are planning cuts, with 36% of them looking to lose staff.
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Previously Goldman saw 2011 growth rising from 2.5% in the first quarter to 3.5% in the second half of 2011. Now the firm pegs growth at 1.5% in the first quarter to 3% in the fourth quarter. On an average annual basis Goldman’s view of 2011 GDP growth drops to 1.9% from 2.4%. “As a result of this downgrade, we now expect the jobless rate to rise to 10% by early 2011 and remain there for the rest of the year,” Goldman wrote.
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The Obama administration on Friday acknowledged it had underestimated the number of homeowners who fell seriously behind on their mortgage payments even after getting government help.
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Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz said the U.S. economy faces an “anemic recovery” and the government will need to enact another round of “better designed” stimulus measures.
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The U.S. economic recovery has lost so much momentum that the Federal Reserve reportedly will be forced to return to “unconventional” monetary easing, which could result in a $1 trillion emergency rescue, as early as next week.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc., whose economists also cut their forecasts for U.S. economic growth in 2011, said these measures could involve more asset purchases, such as Treasuries, or a more “ironclad” commitment to low short-term policy rates, according to Bloomberg.
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Under the new Dodd-Frank financial regulations, Goldman must break up its principal strategies group, the wildly successful trading unit that has helped power the bank’s profits. Goldman is considering several options, including moving the traders to another division or shutting the unit altogether, according to people briefed on the matter.
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If you’re a fan of colorful financial metaphors and aren’t satisfied with Matt Taibbi’s “vampire squid” comparison, you’ll want to check out Adgrok’s blog, which has an interesting blog by an ex-Goldman Sachs employee. (Hat tip to The Business Insider.)
The blog is the work of Antonio Garcia-Martinez, a former “quant” at the bank, who quickly became disillusioned with Wall Street’s “Boschian” culture . The title ‘Why founding a three-person startup with zero revenue is better than working for Goldman Sachs,” pretty much says it all.
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A former quant on what it was like to work under the traders at Goldman Sachs: “we’re basically the trader’s little bitches.”
Quants typically earn much less than the traders who use their algorithms.
Just recently it seems, quants have started to revolt. There is evidence that quants are leaving some firms and joining others that will pay them more.
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Was Deutsche Bank guilty of Goldman Sachs-style conflicts of interest during the mortgage boom? That’s the question posed by a Wall Street Journal piece this morning that delves into a potentially sticky position the bank seems to have put itself in with mortgage securities it sold to clients in the pre-crisis era.
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Bank of America’s Merrill Lynch unit filed a claim at London’s high court on July 13, and UBS submitted its claim on July 21, court papers show. The banks are seeking to confirm that contracts with the region are valid and that they met their obligations, according to three people familiar with the claims who declined to be identified because the dispute is private. The London claims make it tougher for Lombardy to pursue the banks locally, lawyers said.
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Fannie and Freddie amplified the housing boom by buying mortgages from lenders, allowing them to originate even more loans. They grew into behemoths because they lobbied aggressively and played the Washington political game to a T. But after both companies bought boatloads of risky mortgages, they required a federal rescue.
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Paul Skidmore’s office is shuttered, his job gone, his 18-month job search fruitless and his unemployment benefits exhausted. So at 63, he plans to file this week for Social Security benefits, three years earlier than planned.
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Now Mr. Greenspan is wading into the most fierce economic policy debate in Washington — what to do with the tax cuts adopted, in large part because of his implicit backing, under President George W. Bush — with a position not only contrary to Republican orthodoxy, but decidedly to the left of President Obama.
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The AFL-CIO will begin a series of rallies, phone-banks and letters thanking House members who voted for the legislation. In contrast, union members will campaign against candidates — likely primarily GOP ones — who voted against the bill and “put their political interests ahead of 900,000 jobs,” according to a union official.
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One Bankster subscriber said: “the legislation is basically a Trojan horse that is a ‘gift’ for the people on the surface, but actually contains the seeds of a future defeat.”
These concerns are shared by the only Democratic senator to vote against the bill, Russ Feingold (D-WI). You remember Feingold, he was the one vote against the Patriot Act at the height of the 9-11 hysteria. He also voted right on every banking bill in the last 17 years: voting against the interstate banking act which allowed the big banks consolidate strength and spread out across the nation; voting against the repeal of Glass-Steagall which encouraged big banks to gamble on Wall Street; and voting against the bill that prohibited Brooksley Born from regulating derivatives.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Bernstein cites the round-the-clock demand for news, fewer reporters due to falling ad revenue and the growing popularity of sensationalism in news as exacerbating the declining quality of news reporting in the U.S. He urges news consumers to hold news producers accountable for adhering to the journalistic Code of Ethics to ensure the quality of their reporting.
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San Francisco, under its “green mayor” Gavin Newsom, has since 2007 perpetrated a greenwashing scam upon city gardeners. The city, known for its environmentally sound practices and commitment to a precautionary principle approach to dealing with environmental hazards, has deceptively and fraudulently been giving away free “organic Biosolids compost,” that is actually nothing but toxic sewage sludge from San Francisco and eight other counties, “composted” by the giant waste handler Synagro.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Bottom line: Mr. Eckersley determined Mr. Burney’s location (the small town of Avon, Colo.) and his Nielsen demographic segment (“God’s Country”) together offered about 26.5 bits of information that could be used to identify Mr. Burney individually.
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Saudi Arabia and the makers of the BlackBerry smartphone have reached a deal on accessing users’ data that will avert a ban on the phone’s messenger service, a Saudi official said Saturday.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Wilkinson says that just because the plants are genetically modified, doesn’t mean they’ll be more successful than wild plants. In this particular case, herbicide resistance will provide little edge to plants growing in areas that, almost by definition, don’t receive many herbicides. “It’s very difficult for either of these transgene types to give much of an advantage, if any, in the habitats that they’re in,” he says, referring to the genetically modified canola.
Linda Hall, a researcher at the University of Alberta in Canada, agrees. She’s studied colonies of genetically modified canola in that country for years, but says that they haven’t spread far beyond the roads. “It’s pretty spoiled — it’s used to growing in well-fertilized, clean seedbeds without competition, so it does not do well if it is having to compete with other plants,” she says.
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Reader n4djs notes that Monsanto has been known to sue farmers for patent infringement when their crops unintentionally contain genetically modified plants.
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Copyrights
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After years of doing comparatively little to protect copyright, in recent months authorities in Bulgaria came down hard on file-sharing sites. While two of the country’s biggest BitTorrent sites continue to function, the previous owner of one – Zamunda.net – will face court this year charged with crimes against copyright. The authorities are hoping for Pirate Bay-style levels of punishment.
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TorrentReactor, listed among the five most popular torrent sites on the Internet, has surprised friends and foes by acquiring a small town in central Russia. The town formerly known as Gar has reportedly been bought for the equivalent of $148,000 and was quickly renamed after the Russian-based torrent site.
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The bill, currently before the commerce select committee, requires internet service providers to issue up to three infringement notices to alleged offenders at the request of copyright holders.
It enables the Copyright Tribunal to hear complaints and award penalties of up to $15,000, and allows copyright owners to seek suspension of an internet account for up to six months through the district court.
Computer Chronicles: Overview on BSD
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