11.04.11
Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, OpenSUSE at 4:20 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: With OpenSUSE’s latest imminent release comes another call for GNU/Linux users to help (for free)
The ‘community’ version of Microsoft Linux is approaching another release, which stimulates another call for marketing for Microsoft Linux (by volunteers). They want PR and parties to celebrate this milestone while many of the old SUSE users — myself included — long ago dumped the distribution. People are still dumping SUSE based on this new anecdote. To quote:
So goodbye OpenSuse, the first Linux distribution I ever tried (don’t feel too bad, it’s still running on the kitchen computer, MediumHeadBoy), and hello Ubuntu.
This distribution has lost a lot of users to other distribution and that is a good thing. █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Novell at 4:03 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Groklaw brings out another old example where Microsoft used the boot sequence anti-competitively
Michael Reed is the latest person to write about “restricted boot” (or UEFI) in a major GNU/Linux Web site. Matthew Garrett, who started a lot of the outcry, calls it a bug and Groklaw helps remind us that “Microsoft’s license provision [was] prohibiting OEMs from modifying the initial boot sequence…”
From the latest article published by Pamela Jones:
Novell v. Microsoft — What’s It All About? ~ by pj
[...]
These are not allegations; they are findings from the DOJ case against Microsoft, and now Novell is asking the court to rule that they are established for this case as well. It’s an awful list, but two absolutely leap off the page in 2011, the one “Microsoft’s license provision prohibiting OEMs from modifying the initial boot sequence…” and the one “Microsoft’s intellectual property rights did not confer a privilege to violate the antitrust laws, id. at 63, and Microsoft could not justify these license restrictions on the grounds that it was simply exercising its rights as the holder of valid copyrights…” Presumably the latter is also true of patents. And on the booting question, it’s creepy to realize that right now, Microsoft is requiring OEMs to use a “Secure Boot” feature if they ship Windows 8 that has the potential to block competing operating systems, like Linux, from being put on a machine with Windows 8.
We gave several other examples of Microsoft sabotaging Linux adoption through booting complexity [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] . The worst thing one can do is assume good faith from Microsoft. The people who run the company are extremely anti-competitive. Don’t blame Microsoft; it’s in their nature. █
“Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
–George Santayana
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Posted in Apple, Intellectual Monopoly at 4:28 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Words you cannot use when Apple’s police is out hunting
WE often criticise intellectual monopolies for impeding knowledge, but what about language? Apple is going far too far with its brand-bullying campaigns. What brand does Apple claim to own anyway? Just the name of a fruit. And it goes after small shops that actually serve fruit because Apple is all about branding and if the brand gets ‘diluted’, then Apple can be finished as a brand. The problem is, apple is a common English word. Had the small businesses been able to take this the court, they would have won easily. Cost of litigation is high though. Perhaps this is why Apple tends to crush small businesses, this time a “tiny restaurant in Luxembourg” based on a report which says: [via Walt]
The mighty international Apple Inc. fears consumers worldwide will be confused by a tiny restaurant in Luxembourg named AppleADay. Their slogan? “Balanced Fast Food.” Apple’s response? Threaten to sue.
Can you get a better David vs Goliath story? Three young people in Luxembourg worked with a dietician to create a bistro menu of fast food that’s healthy. “We wanted to return to the original taste of the food,” said one of the owners. Local authorities gave the name their approval of the name suggested by the bistro’s communications company. The logo looks much more like a Georgia Peach logo than the Apple computer logo, but that’s before the lawyers got involved.
The insane nature of intellectual monopolies is made ever more crazy when you add proprietary software vendors to it. Microsoft claims to own the word “windows”, “lindows”, and even someone’s name (Mike Rowe). █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Mono, Ubuntu at 4:24 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Almost no Mono applications (or none) in Ubuntu 12.04?
Source: “Mono, the Trojan” (reused with permission)
Summary: The long term support release of Ubuntu (next release) may come with almost no Mono applications (or none) and there is discussion about getting rid of Mono altogether
Banshee coverage at Phoronix was mentioned here the other day, but we now see some reports that almost contradict it. “Apparently,” tells us Viper550, “Ubuntu devs are proposing a switch back to Rhythmbox”
Ryan insists that he “said that last night, EST… (to the tune of that Get a Mac ad) Problems? Too darned many. Patches? Not enough. Banshee has issues, it’s so glitchy, they’re leaving it, for Rhythmbox… ”
Viper550 explains the reasons as: “Banshee = not GTK3, glitchy on ARM, removing it could allow the removal of Mono from the main repository, etc.”
“I doubt Mono will be removed from the repository,” Ryan adds, “getting it removed from the supported system and into Universe would be good though… they wasted time and effort coding all their Ubuntu One crap in C# for a dead end (Mono), while complaining Rhythmbox isn’t up to their standards, instead of improving Rhythmbox”
“[T]hey said it could also save some space on the ISOs,” replies Viper550, but Ryan insists that “Red Hat has ported Rhythmbox to GTK+ 3 and gotten it in good shape, they’re thinking about doubling back and using it in Ubuntu again which means rewriting all their Ubuntu One crap that they spent man hours writing for Banshee… Ubuntu just takes leftovers… once some other outfit gets something working, Ubuntu swipes it and takes credit for installing it in the default system, which they call “integration work”…”
Having searching for some references on this matter, we got this (Viper550 says it “was discussed at UDS”).
- Rhythmbox / Banshee :
This subject was a bit of surprise for me, I didn’t expect such discussion will happen. However, the 2 applications have problems :
- Banshee : Problem on ARM (doesn’t work), no GTK3 support, and removing Banshee will remove Mono from the CD (good for the space) and probably from main (which make Security team happy, not having to maintain Mono stack for 5 years)
- RB : U1 store need to be updated, Music lense needs to be updated, it needs a release from upstream.
A quick vote on usage of both applications in the room makes approximately a 50 / 50 result (maybe a bit more for RB).
Conclusion, RB will probably be back on the CD, if no problem is raised by the other teams not present during the session. The decision was not easy, but IMO it makes sense in the context of an LTS. And, well, Banshee will still be available in the archive, will at least the same level of integration than in 11.10.
So “basically,” explains Viper550, “cliffsnotes version: Banshee may be dropped because its not a native GTK 3 application, doesn’t work well on ARM, and dropping that and Mono could save some disk space (which make Security team happy, not having to maintain Mono stack for 5 years)”
Other sites appear to have already reported about this too, so we’ll quote:
Rhythmbox Might Replace Banshee In Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin, More News
[...]
As for the second session, most people who have attended the default applications session today at UDS-P have agreed to replace Banshee with Rhythmbox by default. However, decision is not final as there are a few things that need to be checked first (like Unity Music Lens integration, etc.).
This is great news and a step in the right direction. █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, GPL, Microsoft, Samba at 4:07 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: How and why Microsoft is ‘embracing’ Samba
“O
n 10 October 2011,” writes The H, “a Microsoft developer contributed a GPL licensed patch to the Samba project. The patch, which was part of a proof of concept for extended protection for NTLM and presented by Stephen A. Zarko of Microsoft’s Open Source Technology Center, has now been noted as the passing of a milestone by Chris Hertel of the Samba team. Samba provides tools and servers which enable interoperability with Windows’ SMB and CIFS networking on Linux and Unix based systems.”
The reactions to this move were mixed. Proponents of the monopolist (who advertise with Microsoft) make it look wonderful (identical headline from SJVN), but members of Techrights are a lot more cautious.
“I’m not sure what the real role of the Microsoft team working with Samba is,” noted one person, “but the developers should not lose sight of the whole picture that is Microsoft. Just because one small department is helpful for one group, for right now does not mean that the greater threat has diminished or gone away. In some ways it the threat is greater because it gets the Samba team and others to let their guard down.
“It’s not unlike a vendor buying them a meal or beer for them, or providing swag. It’s not done for their benefit.
“This is a little more advanced than simply buying someone off with swag or free beer, but it’s the same principle. One rogue department doesn’t set policy for the whole beast.”
Microsoft also gave code to Mono (MS-PL-licensed). At the same time Microsoft asserted that it can sue over it.
“It’s working,” noted one of us. “One problem with Allison’s statement is that he is blind to how Microsoft makes its money. It does not make it’s money from Windows and Office, that’s just a tiny fraction of the money. The big money comes from the monopoly rents on both products.
“Microsoft was trying to leverage that monopoly to get into the server room when Samba took on M$ and defeated it in court. Microsoft is still going to protect its core money-makers, the two monopolies even if Samba does now get thrown a bone.”
Microsoft has already got its former employees from Likewise paying Microsoft for patents on Samba-like functionality (with Samba code). This is not good.
Sam Varghese points out that “Samba is one of the free software projects that has moved in toto to the GPL version 3.” Muktware’s take is that: “As Linux is gaining popularity Microsoft seems to have increased its contribution to ensure their products will work well with Linux. The recent patch submission to the Linux kernel was an indicator.”
What do readers think? █
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Posted in Australia, Patents at 3:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The Pirate Party of Australia uses its influence to keep software patents out of Australia (although Australia is already not too resistant to software patenting)
EARLIER THIS year the Pirate Party of New Zealand pointed its finger at Microsoft for pro-software patents lobbying and the famous founder of the original pirate party (who had worked for Microsoft) attacked patents even more broadly a few months ago.
We now find that the Pirate Party of Australia also gets involved:
It seems anger about software patents is really coming to a head.
The Pirate Party published its submission to the government’s Review of the Innovation Patent System.
The system was introduced in 2001 to help innovation in Australian small to medium-sized businesses, enabling them to protect low-level innovation by lowering the threshold of inventiveness required for patent protection.
However, the government decided to hold a review of the system after concerns were raised about it; for example, it was simply being used as a placeholder while companies sought a real patent, or that it was difficult to prove that such patents weren’t original, instead taking advantage of someone else’s work. Software is currently included in the type of products that can be awarded an innovation patent.
These patents currently include software. One of the questions raised by the review was whether software ought to be excluded from being awarded an innovation patent.
The Pirate Party said that an expansion of the patent system such as the innovation patent, which provides easy patentability of incremental innovations, was “no solution to the plague of issues that the patent system causes”.
Indeed, the party did not limit itself to criticism of the innovation patent, but launched into a set of arguments as to why software ought to be left out of the patent system altogether.
It is important to build strong opposition to software patents, especially in nations that have not caught the software patents bug. Companies like Intel and Microsoft keep working hard to turn other countries’ laws into enemies of those countries’ own people, for the benefit of multinationals with massive patent portfolios. █
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11.03.11
Posted in News Roundup at 7:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Dominating the consumer desktop has not been a point of focus for the Linux community for years. Red Hat, a huge public company focused on Linux, doesn’t even make it a priority. At least Gualtieri concedes that over 60 percent of servers on the Internet run Linux, but he doesn’t even discuss embedded Linux, or technologies that have flourished as offshoots of Linux.
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Server
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Deutsche Borse, the German stock exchange based in Frankfurt, has implemented 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches from supplier Juniper Networks on its Linux-based trading platforms.
The stock exchange said the new switches will be resilient and will help slash trading round trip messaging latency and process market data for co-locating traders on its Eurex derivatives and Xetra cash markets.
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Kernel Space
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Canonical added a couple of days ago a selection of games from the MumboJumbo software publisher, available for purchase only via Ubuntu Software Center.
The games from MumboJumbo include 7 Wonders: Magical Mystery Tour (jewel game), Chainz Galazy (link-matching game), Unlikely Suspects (mystery game), and Midnight Mysteries 3 Devil on the Mississippi (adventure game).
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Desktop Environments
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A prominent physicist and skeptic of global warming spent two years trying to find out if mainstream climate scientists were wrong. In the end, he determined they were right: Temperatures really are rising rapidly.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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One year since the last update, the Trinity Project has released version 3.5.13 of its desktop environment. Trinity is a fork of the last stable snapshot of the 3.5.x branch of the K Desktop Environment (KDE), KDE 3.5.10 from August 2008, that has been enhanced with additional features and is intended to be compatible with more recent hardware.
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Up for viewing today are benchmarks of Scientific Linux 6.1, openSUSE 11.4, Ubuntu 10.04.3 LTS, and Ubuntu 11.10. This is the latest in the series of Ubuntu 11.10 benchmarks after looking at the power consumption, boot speed, performance relative to Sabayon 7, and virtualization performance.
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New Releases
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Scientific Linux Live CD/DVD 5.7 can now be downloaded for 32 and 64 bit:
ftp://ftp.scientificlinux.org/linux/scientific/livecd/57/i386
ftp://ftp.scientificlinux.org/linux/scientific/livecd/57/x86_64
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The IPFire project has released version 2.11 of its open source firewall. IPFire is a Linux server distribution that can be booted from a CD or USB drive, or installed to a computer’s internal drive.
According to Project Leader and developer Michael Tremer, IPFire 2.11 is a major update that includes a new option to create net-to-net virtual private networks (VPNs) using OpenVPN. Previously, it was only possible to create “roadwarrior networks” using OpenVPN. Recently updated documentation about OpenVPN on IPFire can be found on the project’s wiki.
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Red Hat Family
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The second was a comparison of Unity, and to an extent GNOME 3, to the Edsel; comparing those desktop environment releases to how Ford had built up an enormous curiosity around this new “E-car” in 1957 — a car of the future — they were developing amid a shroud of secrecy before revealing to the world, well, the Edsel — which nearly everyone hated once they saw what Ford’s idea for the “future” was.
I wish I could remember the third one. It didn’t get far and it was just kind of ramblin’ — that’s R-A-M-B-L-I-N-apostrophe.
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While the latest bold attempt by Ubuntu is to put it on TVs and phones in the next two years, this new social effort isn’t to build a full-blown social network to compete with (or replace) the likes of Google+ and Facebook. What this new community/social effort is about is just making it easy to find Ubuntu users and Ubuntu events within your geographic area. The idea has been brewing for over one year, but due to devoting resources towards designing the Unity desktop, this idea was largely postponed until now.
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Flavours and Variants
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A few weeks ago, we took a look at Ubuntu 11.10 and observed that its default desktop, Unity, was much improved in this popular Linux distribution.
Regardless, it seems that some people still dislike the Unity. Well, dislike is a bit mild — some readers wrote in stating that absolutely hate it and that sentiment has gained some traction here and there on the Internet. It seems that Canonical — the organization responsible for Ubuntu Linux — aren’t ones to shy away from controversy.
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The cheap Linux-based computer for schools, Raspberry Pi, looks to be getting closer to reality with the news that the foundation behind it has ordered sufficient parts to make the first 10,000 units.
The Foundation reacted to premature reports that it had produced 10,000 completed Raspberry Pi computers by making clear that what had been ordered were “parts kits,” not complete devices.
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Epiq Solutions announced what it claims is the world’s smallest commercially available software defined radio (SDR). The 4.6 x 2.2 x 0.9-inch, four-ounce Matchstiq incorporates a broadband (28MHz) RF transceiver supporting 300MHz to 3.8GHz frequencies, an onboard GPS receiver, and an Iveia Atlas-I-LPe module integrating a Texas Instruments DM3730 processor and a Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA.
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Phones
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Android
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I originally wrote this after Paul Thurrott wrote a ridiculous article (http://www.windowsitpro.com/content1?topic=android-140400&catpath=google1) about all that is wrong with Android. After writing it, I felt better but I realized he isn’t the only one with this messed up perception of corporate life. I have been consulting and supporting companies in the area of IT operations for my entire 16 year career. I have worked for a vary diverse set of companies from GE and Chrysler to an Internet Startup to Mom and Pop companies and everything in between. While they all have their own issues and odd behaviors, they always have a few things in common. IT is always a drain on resources that no one wants to fund. The IT staff always has to do more with less than they had last year. Finally, they are all expected to figure out how to do the next big thing.
[...]
So the next time Mr. Thurrott or anyone in the press wants to talk about life as an IT Professional he or she should try being one for a while. For now though, go back to doing what you do best. Be a great reviewer and tell me what great things I have too look forward to from all of my favorite vendors. Leave the heavy lifting and worrying about how to protect corporate assets to the people who do that for a living.
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All Media Online (Amo) has recently released the Android market’s first app exclusively devoted to streaming multimedia to Android smartphones and tablets via Navi-X, an extensive, open source, community supported, media indexing web-service.
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Google will make its Android 4.0 dubbed “Ice Cream Sandwich” available to the open source community in the coming weeks and is designed to fuel Google’s big push in both the smartphone and tablet war against Apple. Google’s planned purchase of Motorola’s Mobility unit — the most successful Android smartphone and tablet supplier — will also likely help if it ultimately musters government approval
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The growth of the Android platform undoubtedly masks some of its shortcomings. As Chris DiBona summarized, “the only thing that really matters is how many of these we ship…There is a linear relationship between the number of phones you ship and the number of developers.”
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HTC is one of the leading smartphone manufacturers in the world. HTC phones feature amazing build-quality along with top-notch software and hardware. We reported HTC’s Q1 earnings a long time ago where we were shocked by their amazing performance, recording an almost 200% growth in revenue (thanks to Android).
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If I hadn’t read it on Microsoft’s own Bing blog, I wouldn’t have believed it. The Microsoft Bing team has just released the new Bing for Mobile app for iPhone and Android… but not for Windows Phone 7 devices.
Wow. Just wow.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Karuma announced a seven-inch Android 2.3 tablet designed for kids. The PlayBase is equipped with a 1.2GHz processor, 1GB of DDR3 RAM, 8GB of storage, and an 800 x 600-pixel capacitive screen protected by a shock-absorbent silicone cover that can be folded back to use as a stand, says the company.
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As we reported last week, rumor had it Barnes & Noble would be launching its next-generation, Android-powered Nook Color tablet e-reader on November 7. Now it’s become official, with Barnes & Noble sending out invites to the media for an event that morning in New York.
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The smaller Xoom 2 Media Edition is geared more toward entertainment. The screen offers a 178-degree viewing angle to let more than one person watch movies or videos at the same time. Motorola claims a 20 percent improvement in graphics performance and has added virtual surround sound, turning the Media Edition into a gaming device. This model can also double as a remote control for TVs and other equipment courtesy of a pre-loaded remote-control app. Battery life is rated at only around six hours per charge.
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Canonical grande fromage Mark Shuttleworth has said that the Ubuntu open source operating system will be available on tablet PCs by 2014. At this time it is also thought that Ubuntu for smartphones and “smart” televisions will also be available.
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Massive amounts of storage are becoming increasingly important to companies providing cloud-based services. For home users, networked attach storage (NAS) is available from a number of manufacturers, and gives you the option of storing all your digital content in one giant storage area accessible to all your devices over a network connection.
Choosing which NAS to invest in can be tough, though. Some use their own software that is less than great, others have limited storage and/or upgrade potential. Most of them don’t look great either, being just a plastic box and flashing LEDs you’d rather not have on display in a room.
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Events
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The ApacheCon NA 2011 conference is rapidly approaching. The event takes place November 7 to 11 at the Westin Bayshore in Vancouver, Canada. Registration for the event is now open, with discounts available. In conjuction with ApacheCon NA 2011, OStatic is running a series of guest posts from movers and shakers in the Apache community. In this latest guest post, three officials from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratories (JPL) introduce OODT (Object-Oriented Data Technology), an open source middleware suite for working with and managing data-intensive scientific applications. It’s used at JPL and overseen by the Apache Software Foundation.
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SaaS
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Hortonworks recently introduced the open-source Hortonworks Data platform to mark their entry into software space. Hortonworks is a company formed from Yahoo! this past June.
Considered a minor business move by the company, as compared to Cloudera, the provider of Apache Hadoop and mega-vendors like Oracle, EMC and also IBM which have their own plans for Hadoop, Hortonworks will need to put forth more effort and not rely on only name recognition alone.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Monday’s filings were all about how to proceed on the copyright issue. That is, proposing what determinations the court needs to make with respect to copyright protection afforded Oracle before it can assess whether Google has infringed.
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Apple and Microsoft haven’t issued press releases about LibreOffice of course. Rumors on the street are that both companies are less than happy with the progress that The Document Foundation has made.
While LibreOffice is not totally comparable to Microsoft Office, in that it doesn’t have matching applications for all functions, it does give a solid, inexpensive option. It works beautifully on Microsoft Windows, and is often used by offices which have large archives of documents saved in different versions of the Word file format, because it often is more compatible with Microsoft Office, than Microsoft Office.
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At the recent JavaOne conference, Oracle had said that it intended to open source JavaFX. Now Oracle is formally proposing that the JavaFX user interface toolkit be open sourced under the OpenJDK project and is looking for it to be incorporated into Java 9. Oracle’s Richard Bair made the proposal on the OpenJDK mailing list, saying the company had talked about it for a long time, “but finally (finally!) we’re ready to act on it”. JavaFX was originally created by Sun as a standalone technology with its own scripting language, but since Sun’s acquisition by Oracle, it has been revamped and repositioned as a general Java user interface toolkit with a modern architecture, supporting features such as hardware acceleration and CSS styling.
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Project Releases
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The Logback project has announced that its Java logging system that picks up where log4j left off has reached version 1.0.0. There are no big changes from previous releases of Logback, according to lead developer Ceki Gülcü.
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Public Services/Government
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The Cabinet Office has published an open source procurement toolkit for the public sector on its website.
It said the purpose is to ensure that there is a level playing field for open source and proprietary software and that some of the myths associated with open source are dispelled.
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It said the purpose is to ensure that there is a level playing field for open source and proprietary software and that some of the myths associated with open source are dispelled.
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A fifth document, CESG guidance on Open Source, is only available to users with a gsi.gov.uk email address, but should address the issues which caused problems, now resolved, for Bristol City Council’s open source plans. The purpose of the toolkit it to help level the playing field for public sector open source acquisition. The procurement advice note points out that procurement rules need to compare total cost of ownership (TCO), but that where that cost is the same between open source and proprietary solutions, the open source solution should be preferred. This is because of open source’s inherent flexibility, an attribute that isn’t encapsulated by TCO calculations.
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Openness/Sharing
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The second CityCamp Colorado started off with Tom Downey and Stephanie O’Malley from the City of Denver setting the stage for the day’s theme: enhancing access to government. Held at the Jefferson County Administration and Courts Facility on October 28, 2011, more than 70 people gathered to participate, learn, and advance the open government movement.
Tom Downey, Director of Excise and Licensing for the city and county of Denver, is excited about the spread of open government. He said the beauty of a movement like CityCamp is that the organization is flat, decisions are made democratically, and things can get done and move forward.
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This is the question that cancer researcher, Jay Bradner and his colleagues have focused on in their research, and they think they may have found the answer: a molecule, which they call JQ1. But unlike the corporatocracy and its minions, which operate in secrecy, Dr Bradner and his colleagues chose to do something different. Engaging in an enlightened social experiment, they shared the news of this molecule by publishing their findings — and they mailed samples to 40 other labs to work with. In short, they open-sourced the information about this molecule and they crowd-sourced the testing and research.
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From the racks to the roof, the Open Compute Project (OCP) is trying to break the mold to improve and redesign everything we take for granted as “industry standard” in the data center world. Its goal is to use open source community thinking to effect changes to the server hardware, design of the racks and even the building itself in much the same way the Linux community of developers changed the paradigm in the software realm. On Oct. 27th, the OCP held its second summit in New York City. In fact, Red Hat was there and formally announced it was joining and would be contributing to the OCP.
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Open Access/Content
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The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), and the Commonwealth educational organisation, the Commonwealth of Learning (COL), have published guidelines on the use of open educational resources in higher education. The 20-page Guidelines for Open Educational Resources (OER) in Higher EducationPDF document argues that the number of students is set to rise from the current 165 million to around 260 million in 2025, but that this will not be matched by a corresponding rise in expenditure.
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Open Hardware
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The all new BeagleBone has been dished out by the BaegleBoard.org as an open source Hardware platform, announced the organisation.
According to the developers, the new BeagleBone comes as a pretty low cost, hardware hacker oriented, and expandable variant of the original BeagleBoard. Fan boys can get their hands on the new device for $89 only.
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Programming
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Over the last months we’ve been analyzing SourceForge historical data, looking for trends and correlations. We’ve found factors that can help project administrators to get both more downloads and more visibility.
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It’s hard to believe, but it has been a decade since the Eclipse platform was first made available under an open source software license. In November 2001, IBM open sourced an internal project focused on creating a common component framework for developers (and coughed up $40 million to get the ball rolling).
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FRUIT THEMED GADGET FLOGGER Apple will release a fix soon for the
Iphone 4S battery problems that are plaguing its users.
It’s taken some time for the company to acknowledge the problems,
which as with antennagate were discovered by users and not mentioned
in all the fanfare surrounding the handset’s launch.
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Finance
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As Occupy Wall Street protesters and police face off in large cities and small towns across America, it is worth revisiting the positive policing relationship that was developed between protesters and law enforcement during the “original occupation” of the Wisconsin Capitol in the winter of 2011.
On February 11, 2011, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker introduced a bill that would limit the collective bargaining rights of public employees, require 100% voter participation in union recertification and end the state’s practice of withholding and reimbursing union dues. The bill was perceived as a death blow to public employee unions and prompted massive, sustained and peaceful protests inside and outside the Wisconsin State Capitol in the winter of 2011.
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Civil Rights
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Eighteen people were arrested Tuesday for using cameras in the Wisconsin Assembly gallery, including the editor of The Progressive magazine, Matt Rothschild.
Rothschild and others had gone to the capitol to protest a series of arrests in recent weeks of individuals who carried signs or took photos or video in defiance of an Assembly ban.
“We ought to have a right to take a picture,” Rothschild said.
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Posted in News Roundup at 6:51 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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I paraphrase for the situation: Every PC that is shipped with our booting key is a small victory; every PC that is shipped without is a small defeat. Total victory is the universal adoption of our standards by OEMs, as this is an important step towards victory for M$ itself: “A computer on every desk and in every home running M$’s software.”
Good try, Ed, but I’m not buying it. Building in anything specific to the OS of a monopolist is dangerous. M$ has shown for decades that it doesn’t do anything that doesn’t bolster the monopoly. You should know better.
On the other hand, OEMs don’t really love M$ and I expect most of them will provide some kind of kill switch for the lock-in but it will be more work to migrate more PCs to the light.
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Server
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HP launched its Redstone server range using low-power processors from both Intel and ARM vendor Calxeda. HP claims Redstone servers are designed for testing and proof-of-concept, presumably the concept that it can produce ARM-based servers.
The Calxeda Energycore processors in HP’s Redstone servers are 32-bit processors designed for massively parallel workloads with an 80Gbits/s crossbar between processors. Calxeda claims that when the chip is mated to 4GB of RAM the whole setup consumes just 5W under load and idles at 0.5W.
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Netcraft’s latest report gives some clues. The world’s most demanding hosting companies run GNU/Linux. Of the top 42 most reliable hosting companies,
* 2 run F5 Big IP,
* 5 run FreeBSD,
* 8 run that other OS, and
* 15 run GNU/Linux.
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Across the million busiest sites Apache and Microsoft each lose market share this month whilst nginx and Google see small increases.
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Kernel Space
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It’s true that secure boot can be used for horribly, horribly bad things but using that as an argument against its existence at all is I think a bit naive and not necessarily right. Because if you do things right then it’s a really good thing. I would like my own machine to have the option to not boot any kernel, or boot loader, that is not signed by this signature.
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Applications
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The Vim text editor was first released to the public on November 2, 1991—exactly 20 years ago today. Although it was originally designed as a vi clone for the Amiga, it was soon ported to other platforms and eventually grew to become the most popular vi-compatible text editor. It is still actively developed and widely used across several operating systems.
In this article, we will take a brief look back at the history of vi and its descendants, leading up to the creation of Vim. We will also explore some of the compelling technical features that continue to make Vim relevant today.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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The organizers of Humble Indie Bundle today announced a new initiative on humblebundle.com, which allows anyone to buy Voxatron, an unreleased indie game for the PC at the price that you want.
Voxatron, it’s at this time in Alpha stage, this game is a platform shooter retro-style, with more than 20 rich areas of enemies to defeat. The game is available for Windows PC, Linux and Mac, DRM-free, and with the guarantee that all future updates will be completely free.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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November 2, 2011. Today KDE released updates for its Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. These updates are the third in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.7 series. 4.7.3 updates bring many bugfixes and translation updates on top of the latest edition in the 4.7 series and are recommended updates for everyone running 4.7.0 or earlier versions. As the release only contains bugfixes and translation updates, it will be a safe and pleasant update for everyone. KDE’s software is already translated into more than 55 languages, with more to come. The October updates contain many performance improvements and bugfixes for applications using the Nepomuk semantic framework.
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While KDE 4.0 has been around for nearly four years (and most complaints regarding the initial KDE4 fallout have been addressed) and the last KDE 3.5 stable snapshot (v3.5.10) came three years ago, the Trinity Desktop Environment has issued an official release today to keep the KDE 3.5 desktop living.
The Trinity Desktop Environment is designed to pick up where KDE 3.5 left off in keeping up with the KDE 3.5 branch development. There’s been bug-fixes, new features, and other work to make KDE 3.5 more relevant in today’s world. The version released today is Trinity 3.5.13.
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Now to my actual blog post: I appreciate the idea of the Trinity developers to bring back the KDE 3.5 desktop experience to those users who really want it. This is a great offer. Personally I doubt that the Trinity project is doing the effort in the right approach. Instead of just porting Kicker and KDesktop to Qt4/KDE4 they forked everything and the kitchen sink. I rather doubt that a team which is smaller than the KWin team is able to maintain not only KWin but also every other part of KDE 3.5 and now also Qt 3.
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New Releases
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Gentoo Family
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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Since 1979 (or thereabouts), Linux and UNIX-like operating systems have followed a particular, if arcane, way of organizing files. Now the Fedora Project is proposing a plan that will drastically change the way this filesystem hierarchy stores binary applications… if they can work out the potential kinks.
Specifically, the developers in the Fedora Project are proposing to move all executable files into the /usr/bin directory and their libraries into /usr/lib or /usr/lib64, as needed.
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Debian Family
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The Debian Project, the team behind the free Debian operating system, has confirmed the dates and venue for its next annual conference, DebConf12.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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I decided to try out Ubuntu 11.10 on my Thinkpad T43. It was actually my first time using Unity, although I had used the Ubuntu Netbook Edition on a netbook, and I knew the two had similar UIs. This isn’t going to be a huge, in-depth thing because I don’t see how anyone is going to touch the Ars Technica review of 11.10 (DarkDuck’s Unity vs. GNOME3 review is also quite good).
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Canonical, which has great ambitions to extend its Ubuntu Linux to such devices as smartphones and tablets, is prepared to reach out to developers to get them to build the applications necessary to make the platform successful. But the company will have its work cut out for it, given that established providers on the market have a substantial head start.
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Flavours and Variants
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Earlier this year British games pioneer David Braben surprised many people with the first appearance of the Raspberry Pi, a low-cost, open source computer aimed at children that he was helping to develop.
Now, six months on from that initial blitz of publicity, he says that it’s almost ready to go on sale for the first time. A finished version is due by the end of 2011, he told GigaOM, specifically aimed at programmers.
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Phones
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Android
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VizuaLogic announced a rear seat entertainment (RSE) touchscreen computer that runs Android 2.3. Integrated into a car’s front headrest, the “SmartLogic Android Rear Seat Entertainment Package” is equipped with a 1GHz processor, 512MB of RAM, a seven-inch capacitive touchscreen, plus Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, IR, USB, microSD, and HDMI connections.
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Equalis supports all these needs by providing a complete Scilab support programs including: training, deployment, real-time support and consulting. Equalis also drives the Scilab product development roadmap to meet customer needs by accelerating bug fixes and including feedback on the strategic product roadmap. Additionally, Equalis also develops and supports exclusive premier software features and application modules to augment the baseline platform to meet its customers’ specialized needs.
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SaaS
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Semi-Open Source
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Messaging and collaboration specialist Zarafa is set to unveil a new web meeting plug-in for its groupware product. According to the company, the free plug-in for the Zarafa Collaboration Platform (ZCP) currently supports up to three users, works regardless of each user’s email client or platform (Windows, Mac OS X and Linux), and does not require registration.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the GNU Project today announced the opening of nominations for the 14th annual Free Software Awards.
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Programming
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It is just a decade since IBM released the Eclipse project under an open source licence and the Eclipse Consortium, consisting of IBM, Borland,Rational, Suse, TogetherSoft, was announced.
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Standards/Consortia
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I read with interest the recent announcement by AppMobi that they are producing a browser for Apple iOS and eventually Android that will go beyond the basic HTML5 capabilities.
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According to the StatCounter analysis Windows 7 overtook XP in the United States in April 2011 and in Europe in July. However, in Asia Windows XP still retains a clear lead at 55% in October compared to 36% for Windows 7.
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StatCounter Global Stats are based on aggregate data collected on a sample of over 15 billion page views per month (4 billion in the US) from their network of more than three million websites. NetMarketShare data collection network has over 40,000 websites, and counts unique visitors once for visit for day. In summary, NetMarketShare’s data is compiled from approximately 160 million unique visits per month.
What that means is that StatCounter counts all page views while NetMarketShare looks at single site visits. That in turn imples that very active users of a particular operating system would weigh more heavily on StatCounter’s numbers.
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Finance
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A new show on WBAI starts this Wednesday: OCCUPY WALL STREET RADIO. From the streets to airwaves, the movement that began five weeks ago as a Day Of Rage takes to the airwaves on the only station that broadcasts the voice of the 99%. The initial Occupy Wall Street Radio airs Wednesday October 26th, from 6:30 to 8 PM. Going forward, the show can be heard Monday through Friday from 6:30 to 7 PM. The show will offer a regular check in for the latest breaking news from the streets. Hear the voices, the heart, the soul of this 99% growing and now global movement.
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Taking their inspiration from the Bertrand Russell public trials of U.S. government officials held during the Vietnam War, the proceedings will include expert analysis by Cornell West and Chris Hedges, as well as testimony from individuals directly affected by Goldman Sachs’ policies.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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While nearly every CIO should worry about IP issues, there are exceptions. Andrew “Andy” Updegrove, a founding partner of top technology law firm Gesmer Updegrove, explains that if you’re CIO of, say, a government agency, there is “little, if anything” to get worked up over. Such a CIO likely never has to worry about her agency being sued by anyone, nor will she be selling products to others.
That’s also the case for CIOs of most non-profits, or at least smaller ones. “Having some degree of oversight by a lawyer should cover just about everything they would need to know, because their exposure to the outside world might be limited to a Web site,” says Updegrove. “As long as they ensure that all proprietary software has been paid for and is not being used in violation of its terms, there should be little exposure and therefore no need for much knowledge.”
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