04.21.10
Posted in Corel, Deals, Debian, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Scalix, Xandros at 4:09 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: “It should be widely known by now. No matter why, when and where, join MS and you will be dead.” –Abe
Richard Hillesley has just published “The lost world of the Xandros desktop,” which is an article that looks at Xandros’ past and present. To quote some bits from this long article:
The latest release of the Xandros Linux desktop edition was in June 2006, which is several lifetimes in the history of Linux. Is this the end of the line for the Xandros desktop?
[...]
The ‘patent covenant’ with Microsoft has had a detrimental effect on Xandros’ ongoing relationships with the Linux user and developer communities. Ostensibly the purpose of the deal with Microsoft was to license protocols to enable Xandros’ BridgeWays and Scalix products to work with Microsoft networks.
Actually, Scalix came later. Xandros bought Scalix in July 2007 (July 9th to be precise), whereas Xandros sold out to Microsoft on June 4th.
We have found some new comments on the subject, including one in Tux Machines:
Xandros propaganda for smartphones ? giving up on netbooks ?
Netbooks were born for children. But had a future for enterprise applications because of HDTV(broadcasting news or training film) 16:9 video format(DVD player format). So, Asus sold more XP(sp3). But for individuals, dual boot with Ubuntu maybe a choice, until Firefox shot itself in the foot(not flash9 compatible).
In the comment titled “Join MS”, Abe from Linux Today writes:
Those who forget history are bound to repeat it.
It should be widely known by now. No matter why, when and where, join MS and you will be dead.
Those who ignore the warnings can’t blame but themselves.
We have a detailed list of companies that lost their GNU/Linux focus after signing Microsoft deals. Xandros of one of those companies. It’s "Microsoft's touch of death". █
“I once preached peaceful coexistence with Windows. You may laugh at my expense — I deserve it.”
–Be’s CEO Jean-Louis Gassée
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, IBM, ISO, Microsoft, Office Suites, Open XML, OpenDocument, OpenOffice, Oracle, Patents, SUN at 3:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Oracle’s attitude toward (or dedication to) ODF compares badly to that of Sun, IBM, and probably even Red Hat
LAST year was a fascinating year for Sun Microsystems. It was almost acquired by IBM, but the negotiations fell through at some stage. IBM’s hardware business, office suite, and many other software products (Eclipse comes to mind) nicely complement Sun’s portfolio and even IBM’s commitment to MySQL would have been better and more natural than Oracle’s.
“OpenOffice.org and many other office suites support ODF free of charge.”IBM is not perfect. Heck, IBM is far from perfect and the word “perfect” is rather silly to bring up. As the TurboHercules vs IBM case reminds us, IBM is not a friend when it comes to software patents* (malice from TurboHercules withstanding), but IBM is a big proponent of ODF, for example. It’s one of those areas where an IBM-Sun merger would be suitable. The FSF is strongly in favour of ODF as it probably should be.
Oracle has rightly come under some fire for putting a price tag on an important enabler of ODF. This is bad move in general (not prioritising ODF), but maybe it would give reasons to just abandon Microsoft Office altogether. OpenOffice.org and many other office suites support ODF free of charge. Microsoft does not support real ODF [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] or even OOXML, it only pretends.
Oracle start charging for Sun’s Office ODF plug-in
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According to Oracle, the support cost is in line with Oracle’s support policy of approximately 22% of the license fee and is not mandatory. But the $90 per user license fee is required. As the plug-in was never open source, Oracle has not gone back on any open source assurances it gave. Oracle would not comment on the fact that the plug-in is almost as expensive as the cheapest edition of Microsoft’s MS Office suite.
Maybe if Oracle bought Novell (which is up for sale), then it would also charge $90 to download Mono. That would be nice.
Walt Hucks says: “I saw that coming back when Sun itself started requiring an account and mktg info to download the plugin.”
In better news regarding ODF, IBM’s Rob Weir points to ODF Fuzzer, which seems like a new tool that’s all about ODF.
ODF Fuzzer is a file format fuzzer developed to test star writer of Open Office.org. This will attempt to find security vulnerabilities, bugs and code flaw errors of the star writer. It uses byte mutation and insertion methods to create fuzzed files. ODF Fuzzer have a simple built in module to execute the star writer with the fuzzed files and monitor it’s behaviour.
There are also signs that Documents To Go will implement ODF support. The Product Manager says: [via Rob Weir]
Rest assured that many of the features you’ve mentioned (PDF, Google Docs integration, swirl zoom, localization, ODF support, etc) are being evaluated by our developers as we speak.
Here is what IBM’s Arnaud Le Hors wrote about Alex Brown’s [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21] attempt to pretend that he did not expect Microsoft to disobey ISO [1, 2, 3, 4].
Well, let me give you a link to a prediction I made! In my post What Microsoft’s track record tells us about OOXML’s future of March 25, 2008 I wrote:
They can, and I predict will, ignore all these additions which are optional and stick to what they have. The only reason they were added was to remove reasons for National Bodies to vote against OOXML.
So, here we are. Two years later, Microsoft has done exactly that and Alex Brown is finally seeing the light.
One can only hope that the standards community will have at least learned a lesson from this sad story: you simply cannot take control away from a vendor who has a monopoly and isn’t willing to give it up through a mere standardization process.
One area where IBM has been helpful is ODF. It’s a shame that Oracle is not so serious about it, not based on its actions anyway. OpenSolaris comes to mind in relation to this strategy. █
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* Here is another new analysis of the TurboHercules vs IBM case and more lobbying from Florian Müller, who criticises multimedia codecs with patents in them (he does not seem fond even of Ogg) and has harsh words for the film “Patent Absurdity” [1, 2]. From Müller’s new blog (for which he has just created a Twitter account):
I regret having had to say all of the above and I can only hope that someone else will do something better at some time, maybe with a more realistic goal, maybe with a bigger budget. But realistically, software patents won’t go away until the call for abolition is supported by some of the major players in the industry. Theoretically it could also work with small and medium-sized businesses but in my experience that just doesn’t work because those SMEs who oppose software patents don’t want to spend any significant amount of time and money on it. As long as it looks to politicians like mostly a cause for the FOSS community without major economic interests behind it, it’s hard to see how change could be brought about. Watching “Patent Absurdity” just reaffirms that view. Unfortunately.
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Posted in Antitrust, Europe, Microsoft, Security, Windows at 2:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Poor man’s ballot?
Summary: Microsoft makes it difficult to install a Web browser other than its already-installed and already-flawed Internet Explorer 8
THE BROWSER BALLOT has already been through many changes since it was first introduced. Microsoft kept cheating or simply left some self-serving bugs in tact. We wrote about the subject in:
- Browser Ballot Critique
- Microsoft’s Fake “Choice” Campaign is Back
- Microsoft Claimed to be Cheating in Web Browsers Ballot
- Microsoft Loses Impact in the Web Despite Unfair Ballot Placements
- Given Choice, Customers Reject Microsoft
- Microsoft is Still Cheating in Browser Ballot — Claim
Rob Weir from IBM shows that Microsoft’s ballot, which it was forced to implement in order to avoid fines (a lot of the press still gets it wrong by characterising it as Microsoft fairness), is simply broken. See the screenshots in Weir’s blog as they are self explanatory.
A few weeks ago I wrote about Microsoft’s “browser choice” ballot page in Europe, which in its debut used a flawed algorithm when attempting to perform a “random shuffle” of the browser choices, a feature specifically called for in their agreement with the EU. This bug was fixed soon after it was reported. But I recently received an email from a correspondent going by the name “Skoon” who reported a more serious bug, but one that is seen only in the Polish-language translation of the ballot choice screen.
In other news, there is a major new flaw in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8. [via]
The cross-site scripting filter that ships with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 browser can be abused by attackers to launch cross-site scripting attacks on websites and web pages that would otherwise be immune to this threat.
According to a presentation at this year’s Black Hat Europe conference, the issue introduces security problems at several high-profile websites, including Microsoft’s own Bing.com (screenshot), Google.com, Wikipedia.org, Twitter.com (screenshot) and just about any site that lets IE 8 users create profiles.
Yes, Microsoft’s browser is still lagging when it comes to security due to negligence and incompetence [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12]. But it’s not entirely surprising that while 4 governments encouraged their citizens to abandon Internet Explorer this year, the MSBBC continues to produce Microsoft adverts, including the many Internet Explorer endorsements that we find in the MSBBC [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] on a regular basis (and occasionally report those for scrutiny). Our reader ThistleWeb has more to say about the MSBBC’s latest Infomercial:
I saw this promo piece in the BBC about the launch of Microsoft’s new Fix-it service and a few things spring to mind. The first is that Microsoft have a long track record of causing more problems than they fix when applying updates. They set Windows to download and apply all critical updates without user intervention. So when a user goes to shut down their PC they have no idea if they have to hang around for 15 mins so that Windows can apply it’s updates or not. Similarly they have no idea if those updates will cause a problem when they next start up their PC.
The second is that Microsoft have a history of abusing the term “critical” and slipping in programs like the Orwellian titled WGA (Windows Genuine Advantage). This was apparently a feature a large number of their customers were screaming out for and Microsoft being a listening, concerned company felt they had no choice but to provide; if you believe Micorosoft’s PR about it. WGA checks regularly if the copy of Windows it’s running on is licensed or unlicensed. If it deems that install of Windows to be unlicensed it causes no end of hassle for the user by disabling services, rebooting, nagware messages about “please contact Microsoft to buy a Windows product key”. It’s no advantage to customers, only to Microsoft. Yet this has been defined by Microsoft as a “critical” update. To me “critical” means “your PC is at immediate risk without this update”.
We have written about this before; in fact, Microsoft marks as “critical” anything that’s critical to Microsoft, not to the user. This is probably why one in two Windows PCs is still estimated to be a zombie. █
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Posted in America, Apple, Asia, GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 2:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: How proprietary software disables freedom and discourages solidarity, based on the actions of Apple and Microsoft
LAST WEEK we highlighted a case where Apple was censoring applications based on their content and this week Apple is still receiving flak for blocking any application not written/developed with tools that Apple does endorse (because they’re Apple’s). “Steve Jobs bans all apps from iPhone (or thereabouts),” says this headline from The Register:
You could argue that the new Jobsian SDK bars developers from writing any application for the iPhone – unless they possess some sort of savant-like ability to think solely in Objective C.
The much-discussed software development kit for the upcoming iPhone OS 4.0 says that native applications must be “originally written” in Objective C, C, or C++, forbidding developers from using any sort of “translation or compatibility layer.” If you take this legalese to its logical extreme, it rules out just about anything you can think of.
With or without these compatibility layers, Apple has security problems, so the only apparent justification Apple may have here is one of control. Adobe will receive none and the same goes for Novell and Microsoft, whose MonoTouch toolset is being blocked [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] (and yet, Miguel de Icaza and his team continue to ‘help’ Apple with Microsoft APIs).
We regularly stress that Free software is about one’s freedom, independence, and control. It’s not about price, although price is also a selling point, especially in particular areas of the world. Proprietary software, which Apple and Microsoft are championing, is the very opposite of all that. GNU/Linux or BSD cannot be assessed at the same level as OS X and Windows on a purely technical basis as that would be comparing apples and oranges or comparing commercials for a toothpaste to an advisory from Greenpeace.
“Brazil used unauthorized copies of software as an excuse in the 90s to arrest activists of the landless rural workers’ movement. [...] To protect themselves, they moved to GNU/Linux. Everyone else should do that too.”
–Richard StallmanOn we move to Microsoft. Last week we wrote about Microsoft agents (whom Microsoft used to work with) shutting down free speech in Kyrgyzstan [1, 2]. Carlo from TechDirt wrote about it, but he hadn’t gotten the update about Microsoft actually being indirectly involved. Richard Stallman wrote about this too, under the heading “Microsoft lends helping hand to global authoritarianism“; he explains that “Police in Kyrgyzstan used “unauthorized copies of software” as an excuse to shut down a TV station which was broadcasting news about protestors.
“I was disappointed that the article uses the propaganda terms “pirated” and “Intellectual Property”. The latter term is so misleading that even quoting a name in which it appears spreads confusion if you don’t deconstruct the term. See here for more information.
“Also, to say that “software piracy” is a “legitimate problem” whitewashes the real problem: proprietary software which forbid redistribution.
“Brazil used unauthorized copies of software as an excuse in the 90s to arrest activists of the landless rural workers’ movement. In that case, the copies really were unauthorized, but that didn’t alter the effect. To protect themselves, they moved to GNU/Linux. Everyone else should do that too.”
As we explained last week, the same thing happened to brave journalists in Russia. Proprietary software limits people’s expression and creativity. Nobody deserves this type of treatment. It is often being said the people come to realise what “freedom” really means only when they lose it; otherwise it’s taken for granted. █
“‘Free software’ is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of ‘free’ as in ‘free speech,’ not as in ‘free beer’.”
–Richard Stallman
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04.20.10
Posted in News Roundup at 7:27 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Garrett Heaton has been struggling for months to get his bank to open up its deposit@home feature to Linux and Unix. As he and a few other savvy users have figured out, there’s no real technical barrier. All Linux users have to do is pretend to be a Mac. For nine months, the bank has been declining Heaton’s persistent, polite and helpful requests — and, amazingly, he is still a very loyal customer.
[...]
The bank does not currently support Linux for its Deposit@Home service, company spokesperson Lisa Carr confirmed, though she added that “we’re always considering ways to expand the services we offer to additional platforms.”
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Robots and beer-brewing computer programs are just two of the things to check out at LinuxFest Northwest this weekend.
This is the 11th year for the tech event, which will feature a variety of demonstrations and speakers. Sessions are geared toward computer novices and pros interested in open source software and Linux, a free computer operating system that is an alternative to for-profit operating systems such as Microsoft Windows and Vista.
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Desktop
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I honestly asked myself the other day, “do I really need to use Windows?”
And then that’s when hit me, Ubuntu linux was now pretty up to par with Windows counterparts, there’s so much support and improvements happening, there was not many reasons I would need to continue using Windows.
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Server
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Turquoise, the London Stock Exchange’s large volume ‘dark pool’ trading platform, will go live on a new Linux-based platform in August or September.
The move will be an ambitious “big bang” approach instead of a soft migration, according to a technical note the LSE sent to customers yesterday.The quick changeover is a response to “participant feedback”, the LSE said. Services across the Integrated and Dark Midpoint order books will commence trading on the same day.
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Kernel Space
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The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced The Planet as its newest member. The Planet is a global leader in IT hosting and will participate in community initiatives and projects that support enterprise Linux.
The emergence of cloud computing and virtualized environments in the Web hosting industry has opened the door the Linux community to gain important competitive advantages. The Planet leverages Linux platforms to provide these services across its global customer base.
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The last two years have seen a large number of file systems added to the kernel with many of them maturing to the point where they are useful, reliable, and in production in some cases. In the run up to the 2.6.34 kernel, Linus recently added the Ceph client. What is unique about Ceph is that it is a distributed parallel file system promising scalability and performance, something that NFS lacks.
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Graphics Stack
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Last night it was reported on VirtualBox not being convinced about Gallium3D and what it could provide its virtualization stack not only in terms of better OpenGL acceleration for the guest virtual machines, but also for accelerating other APIs like OpenVG and OpenCL. This is coming a year after VMware rolled out its own Gallium3D driver (called “SVGA”) that allowed Gallium3D to work on its virtualization platform. But there’s also another virtualized Gallium3D driver out there.
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Applications
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I wrote about Klibido quite a while ago and whilst its a KDE app (being run in a Gnome environment on my rig) I have to say that I found it a good choice. Despite issues surrounding the apparent lack of development for a few years and it has no facility for .par checking, its a solid enough package that never let me down.
After receiving a recommendation for another KDE binary newsgroup reader I decided to investigate what else was available (since Im using gpar2 for my .par needs)
Since Im not a fan of KDE (Xfce is my DE of choice) I extended my search to Gnome aswell and one thing struck me, lack of choice. The Xfce desktop has a distinct lack of choice in respect of binary readers which is a shame (and I’ll go into that later)
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Proprietary
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Instructionals
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Samba is essential for many SMBs. Not only does it work like a champ as a file server, it does so at zero software cost. The biggest hurdle to adoption is what most people consider to be complicated setup and administration. Like many assumptions about the Linux operating system, that’s a myth. Samba does not have to be a challenge to configure or administer. In fact, it can be downright simple. Here are some tips to make your Samba life is as painless as possible.
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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For a long time KDE has come with an assortment of games. Collectively, this suite of games is simply called “KDE Games“. With the advent of KDE 4, all of the KDE games were given face lifts and a standard set of features that make moving from game to game a seamless exercise.
The games are two dimensional and do not run inside of a separate layer like SDL. Instead they run inside a normal KDE window, utilizing the standard QT interface. Nevertheless, the rendering of of the graphics is amazingly impressive because of the use of SVG vector graphics. With SVG, the animations are smooth and the images are scalable. You can play in a small window or maximize it without losing any of its quality.
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I’m glad to make available a fresh new Plasma animation: WaterAnimation. This animations uses the ripple effect to produce a liquefied behavior on the target widget. An example of the animation behavior can be seen below, enjoy! 
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In my “quest” to update KDE-related Wikipedia articles, I had to do more research than I expected and I needed to fix things I didn’t expect. But that research was fun, too. It brought me back in time when I was still a teen who tried to get some ancient Linux distribution working and fiddled around with KDE 1.
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Grantlee version 0.1.0 has been released by the Grantlee team. For those not in the know, Django is a high-level Python Web framework. It can be used to develop websites, and offers numerous features to make such a task easier.
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The freedom of gamers as it is now is limited by the game industry’s old fashioned insistence on limiting the distribution of games. Gluon aims at breaking this by providing both the makers of games and the players of games with a new platform for sharing the experience of playing games, and for providing feedback to each other – both in the form of comments and ratings, but also through a donation based payment system. So: There’s a revolution coming where the freedom of gaming is at the center.
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The winner: Slitaz 9/10
We hope you’ve seen that the world of light distros is more exciting than you may have imagined. Choosing the right one depends on the hardware you want to run it on and what you want to use it for.
The Ubuntu-based distros are interesting, particularly the nascent Lubuntu, mainly because they have a tiny footprint but offer the promise of installing anything from the vast Ubuntu multiverse. However, we were looking for a a distro to work painlessly in a cramped hardware environment.
Honourable mentions must go to DSL and Tiny Core at this point, which have clambered into the territory of the minuscule. It’s amazing how usable a system can be that takes up less space on your drive than your holiday pictures. Puppy Linux and Unity were both easy to use, although the latter was a bit more polished (and bigger).
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Peppermint
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A new cloud-focused Linux flavor launched recently; known as Peppermint, the operating system has entered a small, private beta and will open up to more testers over the next two to four weeks.
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The Peppermint distro is being developed by Kendall Weaver, the maintainer for the Linux Mint Fluxbox and LXDE Editions, and Shane Remington, who works alongside Weaver as a developer at their day job at Astral IX Media in Asheville, N.C.
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Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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PCLinuxOS should definitely be at the top of anybody’s desktop distro list. There’s a version of it for pretty much everybody, from desktop eye-candy addicts to extreme minimalists that want total control over what applications go on their system. It provides a great alternative to Ubuntu, Fedora and some of the other prominent desktop distros.
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Red Hat Family
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GH: Red Hat has been supporting the federal government in cloud computing in a number of ways.
First, on a basic technology level, much of the innovation that’s going on in cloud computing and virtualization has been happening in the open source world, specifically, in the open source Linux project.
Red Hat is best known as a vendor of Linux services and support and our engineers have been working for many years on virtualization technology, and doing what it is that we’ve always done with the open source community, which is creating an enabling layer that sits between your hardware and your applciations and actually gives your applications access to some of the really interesting innovations that are going on down in the hardware. So, in the role as a hypervisor — in the role as a software that hosts virtual guests in a cloud computing environment, we’ve been working in that space for some time.
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Fedora
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Fedora’s selection of Zarafa as an open source groupware component in Fedora 13 is very interesting.
The beta of Fedora 13, code named “Goddard,” was made available on April 13. The final version is expected in mid May.
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The Fedora 13 beta contains more enhancements that many users will ever know. That is not necessarily undesirable, because users will still benefit and many do not care to know.
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Debian Family
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My impression is that Debian values stability and functionality over looks and release schedules. You can look at this alpha version as a preview of Debian’s next stable release, or you could simply run Debian Testing as a constantly-updated “rolling release.” Despite the “testing” moniker, it’s a pretty good balance between the stablity of Debian Stable and the more up-to-date applications in Debian Unstable. It’s also got a huge repository of over 25,000 available packages and an excellent package management system going for it.
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Ubuntu
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Linux distribution vendor Canonical will soon release an updated version of its production-ready server operating system, the company announced Monday.
Ubuntu 10.04 Long Term Support (LTS) Server Edition will be ready for downloading, for no charge, beginning on April 29, along with the desktop edition of 10.04.
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This blog post is about the recent work done in aptdaemon – the backend used by Ubuntu’s software-center to install/remove packages.
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Print test pages, for those that don’t know, is essentially a lot of coloured blocks in a row that allow users to check if a printer is printing graphics and colours correctly.
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The UbuntuOne Music store no longer accepts Click&Buy as a payment method because Ubuntu/Canonical, who, given the Store is in Beta, are still experimenting with functionality “including the offered payment methods” according to a 7Digital spokesmen.
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It’s a rugged robot based on the surveyor open source robot. It can be remote controlled over the internet or programmed for autonomous missions.
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Z3 is shipping a Linux-based multi-format video encoder that’s said to support 1080p H.264 HD encoding with latency as low as 70 milliseconds. The Z3-MVE-01 Multi-format Video Encoder is based on a separately available, Linux-ready DM368-RPS design kit, which includes a DM368-MOD module that incorporates Texas Instruments’ new DM368 DaVinci system-on-chip.
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Timesys announced that its LinuxLink development framework for custom embedded Linux devices now supports the recently announced Texas Instruments (TI) TMS320DM368 DaVinci video processor. The LinuxLink for DM368 service offers Linux development tools and a pre-integrated build environment for the ARM-based chip, the company says.
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Via announced a tiny PC for do-it-yourselfers, available in a barebones configuration with room for a 2.5-inch hard disk drive. The Linux-ready Artigo A1100 has a 1.3GHz Via Nano processor, accepts 2GB of RAM, sports HDMI and VGA video outputs, and has five USB ports, the company says.
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Android
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Pantech’s Sky cellphone division announced a 1GHz Snapdragon-based Android smartphone in Korea. The Sirius IM-A600S is equipped with an 8GB flash card, WiFi, T-DMB mobile TV, an HDMI port, and a 3.7 inch, 800×480 AMOLED display, says the Korea-based Sky.
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The steady rain of leaks about HTC’s Incredible smartphone has turned into a downpour, and the buzz has become a steady drone. If the Incredible is Verizon’s next launch, the company is making a smart move, said 451 Group analyst Chris Hazelton. It will give consumers their first opportunity to actually handle a phone that is expected to be strikingly similar to the much-ballyhooed Nexus One.
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Sub-notebooks
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Linux computer builders System76 have added a new netbook to their lineup. The System76 Starling EduBook is basically a rebadged Intel Classmate PC with a 10.1 inch, 1024 x 600 pixel display and 1.66GHz Intel Atom N450 processor.
But while most Classmate PC models are sold with Windows XP or Windows 7, the Starling EduBook will ship with Ubuntu 10.04 Education Edition Netbook Remix.
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Tablets
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In contrast to Android, the wireless works right out of the box, using good old NetworkManager. I couldn’t get Bluetooth tethering to fly, though; they use a rather odd setup for this. They have Blueman for controlling Bluetooth, and you’re supposed to use Blueman to set up a DUN link with the phone and then run gnome-ppp which somehow transforms it into an actual connection. I got this to work once in ten tries, for about five minutes. So I’ve given up and am just using my phone’s wifi router functionality, which eats battery life but works simply. Hopefully a future version of the Linux implementation (they do release updates fairly frequently) will come with the newer gnome-bluetooth and NetworkManager builds that allow much smoother Bluetooth tethering.
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I want to create. And because of that, for me, the list of negatives greatly outweighs the list of positives. Of course, if this device is truly doing what you want and need, that’s great. That’s what’s important. But I’m willing to wait for something better. Something meant for sharing. Something more open.
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Don’t act, just absorb.
Pretty different from giving the same kid a laptop or a netbook, isn’t it? With one of those, a kid can respond, can experiment, can act in the very way the human species most efficiently assimilates new skills and information: learn by doing. By the way, in case you hadn’t noticed, the netbook costs less. Even the laptop often does.
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Events
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The live feed for this week’s keynote sessions will be broadcast via Brightcove’s blog post, the DrupalVolCon site, the Drupal UK site, the official Drupalcon San Francisco site, and any other site that uses the embed code available through the player.
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Databases
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The rise of the NoSQL movement has brought debate back to the database space as the traditional relational model’s applicability to all problems has been questioned, not just in theory, but in practical code. At the heart of NoSQL is not a rejection of SQL itself; some have said NoSQL, rather than standing in opposition to SQL as “No SQL”, really stands for “Not Only SQL”. It more represents a deeper desire to explore database models which have, in the past and for various reasons, been left to languish in obscurity.
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CMS
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Drupal, the popular open source Web content management system, will sacrifice speed for scalability in the upcoming Drupal 7 upgrade, the founder of the project said on Monday afternoon.
The upgrade to Drupal, meanwhile, could be available perhaps in the June timeframe or as late as September, said Drupal project founder Dries Buytaert in a presentation at the Drupalcon SF conference in San Francisco. Ideally, version 7 would be available this month, he said.
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Business
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Talend, which offers open source data management software and solutions, announced this morning that it has secured $8 million in Series D financing. Previous investors Balderton Capital, AGF Private Equity and Galileo Partners, all participated in the round. With the new $8 million investment, Talend has now raised a cumulative $28 million.
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Among open source related projects funded under the sixth Framework Program, at least four of them – namely FLOSSMetrics, QualiPSo, QUALOSS and SQO-OSS – have been found overlapping around open source software development and quality.
SQO-OSS – Source Quality Observatory for Open Source Software – similarly to FLOSSMetrics was aimed at massive collection of data from thousands of projects, though with different goals.
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Releases
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Bugzilla deserves props for enabling so many free software projects, but the ubiquitous bug tracking system has not been without its flaws. Namely, Bugzilla is known for being difficult to navigate and use, particularly for new contributors who have little experience working with bug ticketing systems. The 3.6 release sands off some of the rough edges following a usability study from Carnegie Mellon University. The list of bugs stemming from the research are not all closed, but the project has made significant progress.
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Programming
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Some GNOME developers have gathered in Boston for for a Python GNOME hackfest that is hosted by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. The primary goals behind the hackfest include establishing a strategy for delivering Python 3.0 compatibility for the GNOME platform and advancing the Python GObject introspection project.
The Gtk+ toolkit, which provides the underlying widget system of the GNOME desktop environment, is an important part of the desktop Linux ecosystem. Although the toolkit itself is built with C, it can also be used with other programming languages—including Python, Ruby, JavaScript, C#, Java, and Scheme. Python is widely used by Gtk+ application developers and is important to the GNOME community. OLPC, the host of the hackfest, uses Python in conjunction with Gtk+ for its Sugar environment—the core user experience and activity collection that is shipped on its XO laptops.
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On 7 April 2010, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the federal agency charged “… to protect investors, maintain fair, orderly, and efficient markets, and facilitate capital formation”, proposed new rules covering “Asset-Backed Securities” [warning: 667-page PDF]. Administratively, this is a reaction to the trillion-dollar financial atrocities of the last few years, as well as a natural manifestation of the Obama administration’s commitment to enhance procedural transparency. Shockingly, “… Python, a commonly used open source interpretive programming language …” shows up on page 1 of the description. What is that about?
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Standards/Consortia
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Another chapter in the “what will HTML5 support” soap opera opened last week with rumors that Google will open source the VP8 video codec. Many outlets were reporting that VP8 is the video codec that runs YouTube. But that is not true. VP8 is actually the code behind On2 Technologies, another web video play which Google acquired just a few months ago. The story goes that Google will support VP8 in You Tube as soon as the open source announcement is made. This would make it an instant standard.
First of all, it seems that everyone has already concluded that HTML5 will indeed be the savior of web video. I am not sure web video needs a savior. Steve Job is perhaps looking for a savior from Flash and the millions of iPhone users and now hundreds of thousands of iPad users sure would like to view the web with video. I don’t think Adobe thinks that video support in HTML5 is that important.
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A Kalamazoo towing company that has received multiple complaints to the Better Business Bureau is suing the Western Michigan University student who started a Facebook page against the company.
The four-page lawsuit filed by T&J Towing against Justin Kurtz claims defamation of character and libel. It asks for $750,000 from Kurtz, who received the papers Friday.
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A federal judge on Friday issued an injunction preventing a rival liquor company from using a dripping wax seal on its tequilas sold in the United States, ending a seven year legal battle over the bottle topper.
The ruling by U.S. District Judge John G. Heyburn II comes in a long-running lawsuit between Maker’s Mark and competitors Diageo and Casa Cuervo over the Fortune Brands trademark on the wax seal. Fortune owns Maker’s Mark.
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Americans’ trust in government and its institutions has plummeted to a near-historic low, according to a sobering new survey by the Pew Research Center.
Only 22 percent of Americans surveyed by Pew say they can trust government in Washington “almost always or most of the time” — among the lowest measures in the half-century since pollsters have been asking the question.
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Sure, newspapers are hard up, but exploiting bereaved families with exorbitantly priced death notices seems to be a distasteful and strategically inept way to try to make ends meet.
I stumbled across the problem this week when I tried to buy a death notice in my local paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, which proposed charging $450 for the one-day run of a crappy-looking, 182-word death notice.
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Security/Aggression
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In the Blaydon constituency, home to the biometric passport makers, Labour’s candidate Dave Anderson, pictured, has asked his LibDem opponent Neil Bradbury to clarify his position on his party leader’s plans.
It was last June that De La Rue Systems announced they could take on an extra 80 employees after winning a 10-year £400m contract to produce the UK biometric passport from the Government.
Dave Anderson, who lobbied hard for the contract to come to Blaydon in the first place, said: “Scrapping these passports is part of the price Clegg demands to fund his gimmick giveaway of raising tax thresholds, which would disproportionately benefit well-off people.
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Tens of thousands of nightclub bouncers and private security guards could be given sweeping police-style powers.
Senior police officers have ordered a dramatic expansion of a controversial scheme that allows authorised civilians to issue fines for littering and other minor offences.
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Although records will continue to be uploaded in some early adopter areas, Government plans to roll out the scheme across the country have been effectively halted.
The Department of Health said that uploading of data would begin again only when public awareness had been raised.
Information about more than 1.25 million patients have already gone on to the database, which eventually could hold up to 50 million records.
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As a means of transportation it left something to be desired in terms of comfort and street cred.
And when police asked the driver to pull over, the Barbie car, with its top speed of 4mph, was hopeless as a getaway vehicle.
Paul Hutton, 40, is regretting his impromptu roadtrip after he was arrested for drink-driving when he tried to take the battery- operated child’s toy to a friend’s house.
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Stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before. The Washington Post reports that the National Security Agency has halted domestic collection of some type of communications metadata—the details are predictably fuzzy, though I’ve got a guess—in order to allay the concerns of the secret FISA Court that the NSA’s activity might not be technically permissible under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
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A suburban Philadelphia school district secretly captured thousands of images of students in their homes, sometimes as they slept or were partially undressed, according to documents filed in federal court.
Using a system to track lost or stolen laptops, officials from the Lower Merion School District also covertly surveilled students as they used their school-issued Macs, logging online chats and taking screenshots of websites they visited, according to the documents.
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A woman was caught on camera running a red in Collier County. But after her husband fought the ticket, it was thrown out. Now officials say there may be other drivers who were wrongly ticketed as well.
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Finance
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There’s some curious things about that SEC case, like who’s actually charged with what. There’s no Jonathan Egol, Fabrice Tourre’s partner at Goldman, no hedge funder John Paulson, no Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein. Instead, the only person the SEC names -far as I’ve seen- is Fabrice Tourre, who, at the time the Abacus deal involved played, was all of 28 years old.
That age thing keeps on itching me. It somehow points to the degree of involvement of the likes of Blankfein, Goldman president Gary Cohn and CFO David Viniar. These guys don’t let a mere kid play with billions of their capital without keeping a close watch. They were all down there on the trade floor for extended periods of time, figuring out what exactly transpired, as can be proven.
Moreover, the then (2006-7) 28-year old Tourre was claiming something that was the 180 degree opposite of what other traders at Goldman had a lot of the firms’ money invested in, namely the continued upward growth of the housing market. Tourre’s contrary claims were nothing short of revolutionary, certainly in the eyes of the older, and more bullish, traders. So it should not come as a surprise that the highest echelons of the firm spent a lot of time with Tourre and other traders. They would have been mad not to. That also means, however, that claiming they didn’t know what was going on is not believable.
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Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner appealed on Monday to the centrist Republican senators from Maine for their support of legislation to tighten regulation of the nation’s financial system but came up empty-handed, leaving Democrats and Republicans on an apparent collision course.
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Behind Iceland’s superficially booming financial markets in the mid noughties lay a financial system shot through with corruption and regulatory negligence that led inexorably to a dramatic economic meltdown 18 months ago, according to a damning truth commission report.
The 2,300-page forensic investigation, presented to Iceland’s parliament yesterday, reserves its deepest criticisms for the island’s three largest banks – Kaupthing, Glitnir and Landsbanki – which failed in quick succession in October 2008. The long-delayed report, produced after interviews with about 300 key players, found these banks had effectively been captured by some of their powerful majority shareholders and that the true extent of their financial vulnerability had been deliberately masked.
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One of the most salient analogies of the financial meltdown was offered by Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission chair Phil Angelides when he grilled Goldman Sachs CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, over the firm’s unsavory proprietary trading. Angelides was questioning Goldman’s practice of minting toxic, mortgage-backed securities and badgering credit-rating companies for the highest rating for those securities, while betting in the market that those securities would later fail.
Angelides likened this business practice to “selling someone a car with faulty brakes and then taking out an insurance policy on the driver.” With Friday’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing of civil fraud charges against Goldman Sachs, we learned more about those faulty vehicles. We learned that Goldman had cut the brakes.
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Goldman Sachs is launching an aggressive response to its political and legal challenges with an unlikely ally at its side — President Barack Obama’s former White House counsel, Gregory Craig.
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Richard Fuld, whose October 2008 appearance before lawmakers was marked by protesters with signs reading “shame” and “cap greed”, returns to Washington D.C. on Tuesday to answer questions about the accounting gimmicks alleged by a court-appointed examiner.
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Foreclosure filings were at historic highs in March — 367,056 — an increase of nearly 19 percent from the previous month, and the highest monthly total since 2005, according to RealtyTrac. Almost two years after the onset of the financial crisis with unemployment at historic highs, nothing is being done to put a stop to this on-going tragedy.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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On its Web site, Ayres McHenry is open about its Republican leanings. It identifies itself as a Republican-affiliated firm. Its founder, Whit Ayres, belongs to the National Association of Republican Campaign Professionals, and the Web site says that Whit Ayres is a member of the Association’s Board of Directors.
Media outlets broadcasting information about the Chamber’s polls and their conclusions would do well to research Ayres McHenry and its reputation, and inform readers know about the firm’s — and the Chamber’s — recent history of bias and poor poll quality.
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The PR proposal obtained by Politico was written by Joe Wierzbicki, a principal at Russo Marsh & Rogers. In it, Wierzbicki suggests essentially taking over the Tea Party movement by rushing in with campaign-style event planning and advance work. He suggests obtaining a “proper luxury coach wrapped in ‘tea party’-themed graphical design,” and sending it out to “cross the nation, stopping in cities to conduct ‘tea parties.’ ” Wierzbicki suggests inviting local Tea Party leaders, talk radio hosts and fiscally-conservative political candidates to speak at each stop. Wierzbicki says a major fundraising effort would be needed “to ‘do this ‘right’ (have an awesome looking tour bus, getting the word out, having slick/persuasive/compelling advertising, paying for permits/insurance hotels, food, etc… ). He suggests that, to raise the money, “the bus tour rallies focus not on asking for funds to support the tour, but on the ” ‘Defeat Harry Reid’ or ‘Defeat Chris Dodd’ or ‘Defeat Arlen Specter’ political components to this effort.” In other words, Wierzbicki suggests exploiting the real Tea Partiers’ emotions to raise money, and take the focus off the PR project itself. He also suggests renting email lists from conservative news outlets like Newsmax, Human Events, WorldNetDaily, etc. to begin direct fundraising — again, not a cheap endeavor.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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The US Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down a federal law that criminalized photographs and other depictions of animal cruelty, saying the law violated free speech rights protected by the First Amendment.
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Unfortunately, for me, the filter didn’t work. But because no two people share the same standard, here’s a short exercise so you can judge for yourself. You need a computer, a browser and a live Internet connection.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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An important High Court decision today allowing Eircom proceed with cutting off internet access to illegal music downloaders, mainly peer-to-peer music sharing groups, has major implications for all other internet service providers.
Legal sources predict the judgment by Mr Justice Peter Charleton may compel other internet service providers to cut off services to illegal downloaders who fail to heed warnings to desist what the judge described as “theft”.
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The two American lawyers who were illegally wiretapped by the Bush administration asked a federal judge Friday to order the government to pay $612,000 in damages, plus legal fees for their attorneys.
The demand (.pdf) comes two weeks after U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker said the former administration wiretapped the lawyers’ telephone conversations (.pdf) without a warrant, in violation of federal law.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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For more than a decade the music industry has claimed that digital piracy is the main cause for the gradual decline in revenues. However, looking at the sales data of the music industry itself shows that the disappointing income might be better explained by a third factor that is systematically ignored.
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Submit brief to govt “anti-piracy czar” Victoria A. Espinel bemoaning industry losses, and outlining a plan to crackdown on online copyright infringement. Among the proposals are website filtering, search engine keyword blocking, a crackdown on domain name registrars and proxy services, monitoring of social networks for promotion of infringing websites, bandwidth throttling, and “consumer tools” installed on home PCs that detect and delete illegally obtained copyrighted material.
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Copyrights
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Rock band Keane have said that the Conservative Party did not seek their permission to use one of their hits at their election manifesto launch.
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That said, OK Go left EMI amicably, and Kulash is quite appreciative of the music labels. He calls them “risk aggregators” and commends them for funding the initial monetary investment necessary to get his band off the ground. However, with the costs of music production plummeting in recent years, the days of needing huge advances just to cut an album are numbered.
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ACTA
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That or the massive public rebuke the USTR has been receiving from almost every quarter on this particular agreement. The full document gets “released” on Wednesday, and we expect it to be… well, pretty much like what was leaked last month.
SourceCode Season 1: Episode 7 (2004)
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Posted in Google, Microsoft, Search, Ubuntu at 10:34 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft’s Blake Irving becomes the chief technology officer of Yahoo! (latest among several Microsoft proponents who run the ‘new’ Yahoo!)
WHENEVER people depart from Microsoft they may actually become more of a problem than when they were inside Microsoft. The Microsoft influence grows wings and moves on to other companies, sometimes competitors.
It’s a good thing that Canonical abandoned Yahoo! right before the release of Ubuntu 10.04. As we have shown in recent weeks, Yahoo! is fast becoming just a department of Microsoft [1, 2, 3], having been hijacked through proxy agents like Carl Icahn.
The latest news is that Microsoft’s Blake Irving, whom we named as a rumoured candidate for a top position at Yahoo!, is now confirmed to be in. He will become Yahoo’s chief technology officer.
As it promised, Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) has moved very quickly to replace CTO and EVP of products Ari Balogh, who said earlier this month that he was leaving for “personal reasons.” The company says Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) veteran Blake Irving will be its new chief product officer. Irving had been a long-time executive at Microsoft, who—among other roles—led the back-end of its Windows Live platform, but “retired” three years ago, shortly before a major reorganization of Microsoft’s online operations. He’s worked since as a professor at Pepperdine’s business school.
One reader of ours cites this article and says that “Yahoo will finally stop pretending to be an independent company and take up its new role as the search arm of Microsoft. Not being totally merged so as to escape the monopolies commission…” █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Mono, Novell, Patents, Ubuntu at 9:34 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Photo by Simon Law
Summary: Canonical’s chief technology officer talks about the problem with Microsoft controlling Mono
IN a new interview with Canonical’s CTO, Matt Zimmerman, he says “Free software” rather than “Open Source”, which is a good sign [1, 2]. For example:
UT: What are the targets and the plans of Ubuntu project in five years?
MZ: [Matt Zimmerman] Ubuntu is a vehicle for the expression of free software in people’s lives, so to some extent, the goals of Ubuntu are the goals of free software.
I think that free software must synthesize people’s experience of the web and the desktop. The divide between these two technological realms is limiting free software innovation by fragmenting the ecosystem. Along the way, we will need to resolve questions of freedom and autonomy on the web, and enable the community to embrace the web in ways which have not been possible yet.
The interview as a whole is very good, including the part where he talks about Mono and explains why it is further down in the list of priorities. The Source has already summarised the key points raised by Zimmerman:
There are risks in choosing the .NET platform to develop free software. And I am pleased that Mr. Zimmerman realizes that is exactly what Mono is: the .NET platform (albeit a gimped and tail-lights chasing stepchild implementation).
I also greatly appreciate Mr. Zimmerman’s points:
* Microsoft is in “ultimate control” (despite Team Apologista’s desperate protestations)
* Microsoft has multiple ways to wield .NET offensively
* It would be logical for them to do so
* they have acted similarly in the past
* they have said they would act similarly the future.
As the FSF has already stated quite formally, Mono or C# should not be treated as frameworks of choice. It’s nothing to do with “hate”; it’s simply a logical consideration. █
“[...] we know that Microsoft is getting patents on some features of C#. So I think it’s dangerous to use C#, and it may be dangerous to use Mono.”
–Richard Stallman, 2006
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