• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

The Linux Box to Market Ubuntu to U.S. Enterprise Users

Launched in October 2004, Ubuntu is one of the most highly regarded Linux distributions in the world with more than 10 million users. With users in homes, schools, businesses and governments around the world, Ubuntu is a powerful and secure open source operating system for desktops, laptops, netbooks and servers. Ubuntu contains all the applications you need and will always be free of charge. With the values of open source software at its core, Ubuntu costs nothing to download or update.

The Linux Box to Market Ubuntu OS in the U.S.

The Linux Box announces a partnership with Canonical whereby it will market the Ubuntu Linux operating system in the U.S.

The Linux Box has announced a partnership with Canonical whereby it will market the Ubuntu Linux operating system in the United States.

Linux desktops: you say no

Freeform Dynamics’s new survey “of 1,275 IT professionals from the UK, USA, and other geographies” has just been published. Two-thirds of respondents said that cutting costs was a prime mover behind their decisions to switch to Linux on the desktop but that user acceptance was a key consideration in the decision to do so.

Using Linux to back out a Windows XP patch

As of this writing (Tuesday Feb 16th) there don’t seem to be any new suggestions from Microsoft to assist XP users whose systems were rendered un-bootable after installing the February 9th patches. For example, the last entry on The Microsoft Security Response Center blog is four days old.

So let me offer a suggestion: boot to Linux and move some files around.

The Incredible Story of Scott Kveton: Linux, Firefox, Bacon & iPhones

When Kveton was 31 years old he founded the Open Source Lab at Oregon State University in Corvallis. After working at various big tech companies for a few years, he had joined the University and cut its hardware budget by 75% the previous year – just by buying open source Linux servers. The school decided to put the budget surplus back into the paradigm that made the difference. Then Google, IBM and other big companies started giving the new Lab money to host open source projects they were working on. Soon Kveton had a staff of 25 students and contacts all over the Open Source world. That was 6 years ago and those contacts have been invaluable throughout the rest of his career.

[...]

After continued success hosting other open source projects (like Drupal) at the Lab, Kveton decided he wanted to try something entrepreneurial.

The Disposable PC.

I am pretty sure that if Microsoft wanted to invest the time and money to create the most secure and stable operating system, they could. They don’t have idiots working for them. I think it is that “if you scratch my back, I will scratch yours mentality.” It also doesn’t help that whenever a call is placed to a support center or when a PC is brought into a repair shop, the solution usually given by the technician is to re-image Windows. If I have a virus, why can’t you just remove the virus and I will be on my way?

I, as many of my readers, on the other hand know better and choose to rely on something a lot more stable and secure with (insert flavor of Linux or UNIX here). Why be bothered with constantly having to maintain or repair your OS. Sometimes you just need things to work. Maybe that is why you read stories about how repair shops such as Best Buy’s will refuse the repair of a computing device if you are not running a version of Windows. They probably don’t see any money it.

Linux Professional Institute at CeBIT 2010, Hanover, Germany

(Kassel, Germany: February 11, 2010) The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world’s premier Linux certification organization (http://www.lpi.org), announced that its affiliate, LPI Central Europe (http://www.lpice.eu) will host a full program of activities at CeBIT 2010 in Hanover, Germany. Open Source will be a top theme at this years edition of one of the world’s leading trade fairs for the ICT industry (http://www.cebit.de/opensource_e).

GraphOn Announces Free GO-Global Personal Edition Software

Similarly, GO-Global for UNIX Personal Edition publishes UNIX or Linux applications onto the Internet or network for remote access from any PC, Mac, or Web browser.

JoikuSpot Goes Linux

The new JoikuSpot Linux Edition contains enriched features such as Speed Measurement to allow users to accurately see their mobile internet connection speed. Users see exactly the mobile data speed they get with their mobile broadband subscription.

Comcast Tech Support vs Linux user

It appears that Comcast has no idea how to handle someone with an IQ over 30. This individual just wants setup fancast to watch hbo programming on his computer. Clearly Comcastic doesn’t know how to handle such a complicated question and the madness begins.

The below is a cut and paste of the IM discussion with Comcast this individual has.

Server

• Linux Server Discounts From Lenovo, Red Hat and Tech Data

  Call it a rare triple play in the open source server market. Lenovo, Red Hat and Tech Data are partnering to give resellers discounts on select Lenovo ThinkServers with Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced. Here are the details — and the implications for open source solutions providers.

• Samsonite to adopt Polaris’ Linux based retail store management solution

  Polaris claims that the Linux based system can potentially bring down the set-up and running cost of retail store software by 50 percent

• Sybase Delivers Top Performance Results for Data Warehousing and Analytics on TPC-H(TM) Benchmark

  The new TPC-H benchmark result of 102,375 queries per hour (QphH) was recorded using Sybase IQ 15.1 with the HP ProLiant DL785 G6 server and running the Red Hat(R) Enterprise Linux 5.3 platform, achieving a price/performance of $3.63 per transaction(1). The benchmark represents the best result among Linux and x86 vendors in the non-clustered marketplace at this scale factor(2) and is further proof of Sybase IQ’s ability to deliver maximum performance by utilizing available assets while reducing the cost of ownership for mid-tier organizations.

Kernel Space

• Kernel Log: Coming in 2.6.33 (Part 5) – Drivers

  Enhancements to the ALSA code for HD audio codecs, a V4L/DVB driver for the Mantis TV chip, drivers for MSI laptops and drivers for newer AMD CPUs are just some of the improvements to Linux hardware support. Android drivers have now been escorted from the staging area, while Ramzswap (formerly Compcache) framework for compressing RAM has been added.

• Graphics Stack

  • Fifth Stable Update Ends Out X Server 1.7 Series

    X Server 1.7.5 doesn’t have much to offer beyond the 1.7.5 release candidates from weeks ago, but mostly smaller changes scattered throughout the X Server code-base.

  • Benchmarks Of Nouveau’s Gallium3D OpenGL Driver

    To benchmark the Gallium3D driver in Fedora 13 for Nouveau we fired up the Phoronix Test Suite and ran the OpenArena, World of Padman, Urban Terror, Unreal Tournament 2004, and Warsow test profiles. We tested each of these OpenGL games at five different resolutions: 800 x 600, 1024 x 768, 1280 x 1024, 1680 x 1050, and 1920 x 1080.

  • AMD Reveals Upcoming Catalyst Driver Changes

    In other words, there really isn’t much to get excited about if you are a Linux user when reading today’s press release. There are, however, other significant changes — for better or worse — coming to the Catalyst Linux driver this month or next. When we are allowed to share, you can be sure that we will. Maybe X Server 1.7 support will finally come too.

Applications

• 8 Of The Best Linux Dockapps

  How much functionality can you pack into a 64×64 square? That’s the basic question behind many dockapps – utilities that can be run on the “dock” of many popular desktop environments. While most of them are designed for Step-type window managers such as Windowmaker, these dockapps can also run in things like XFCE, Fluxbox and Openbox. They include system monitors, volume controls, program launchers, email checkers and more. Today we’ll check out some of the more useful dockapps out there, and each will include screen shots, descriptions, and any little notes that might help when it comes to usage.

• Dolphin File Manager

  Getting to know KDE shows me nifty things about Dolphin as a file manager. I mean, I’ve read about the features but it’s not the same as really getting around to using it on a more regular basis.

• Gnome VLC player gets new name, PPA

  A few weeks back we blogged about ‘GNOME VLC Player’ – a native GTK+ spin of VLC with the mission to have a “simple” interface inside a gtk+ body.

  That project has since been re-named ‘GNOME Media Player’ and has gotten its very own PPA – thus making installation a snap.

• 8 Of The Best Linux Dockapps

  How much functionality can you pack into a 64×64 square? That’s the basic question behind many dockapps – utilities that can be run on the “dock” of many popular desktop environments. While most of them are designed for Step-type window managers such as Windowmaker, these dockapps can also run in things like XFCE, Fluxbox and Openbox. They include system monitors, volume controls, program launchers, email checkers and more. Today we’ll check out some of the more useful dockapps out there, and each will include screen shots, descriptions, and any little notes that might help when it comes to usage.

• Instalinux launches “Designer Pro” for Extreme Customization

• Instructionals

  • Linux Training Week: Software Availability

  • Why Should You Compile Your Kernel and How

  • How to get useful backtraces almost for free?

  • Space is being consumed too fast? Find where!

  • Upgrade WordPress Using Subversion and Shell Script

  • Yoper Linux step by step installation instructions

  • Use Live USB Creator to install Fedora 12 from a USB stick

  • Useful command line little tricks (part 2)

  • Skype green video on linux?

  • Manage TTF fonts with fonty python

  • How to Protect Linux Users from Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI) with Workrave

  • dpkg-paranoia – Simple scripts to control installing process

  • Using Templates in digiKam

  • Weird Usage Of “select” in perl

  • Click Next Next Next Finish

  • Dumping WYSIWYG: Building Android User Interfaces at Run Time

  • Grub2 Worms Into Ubuntu (part 1)

Desktop Environments

• Choosing Linux Desktop Environments

  Linux users have the unique privilege and challenge of picking the distribution that fits them best. Most start out their Linux-experience with a major distribution like Ubuntu, Fedora, or openSUSE, and for some, that’s as far as they go. Others, curious or eager to try the variety of Linus Torvald-”flavors” available, start trying to find out what differences exist between “smaller” distributions like Elive or Crunchbang and the bigger ones.

• K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

  • KDE Review: KDE 4.4 Comes in from the Cold

    Between radical changes and limited functionality, the KDE 4 series got off to a rough start. However, with each release, KDE 4 has improved steadily and silenced more critics. Now, with the KDE 4.4 release, the series has reached first maturity.

    Those who expect everything to behave exactly as it did in the KDE 3 series may still struggle with 4.4. But, for those willing to accept change, 4.4 has no shortage of new features to offer, ranging from the implementation of several long-term directions to enhanced usability on the desktop — including Plasma Netbook, a new interface designed specifically for netbook computers.

    [...]

    But, by far the greatest desktop innovation in KDE 4.4 is one that is also the simplest — the ability to group windows by tabs. This feature is implemented by a single item added to each window’s menu. Yet the implications for easing users’ workflow is immense.

  • Five useful KDE 4.4 widgets

    With the rise of KDE 4.4 comes a new crop of desktop widgets (or Plasmoids). Earlier renditions of KDE 4.x saw the Plasmoids less than useful. The latest workings, however, have become quite useful, productive even.

    In this article I will introduce you to five of those Plasmoids that can help your productivity in one way or another. I will also show you how the Plasmoids are now installed.

  • Installing KDE 4.4 in Ubuntu, openSUSE, Fedora And ArchLinux

  • KDE SC 4.4: A Worthy (though not perfect) Upgrade

  • Missing Features – Feeling Brian Proffitt’s Pain

Distributions

• Which is the Best Linux Distribution for your Desktop?

  Some Linux distributions are light-weight (they’ll run just fine on your old laptop), some are targeted at people who just want to try out Linux without replacing their main OS while other desktop distros (say Ubuntu) include a more comprehensive collection of software applications and also support a wide variety of hardware devices.

  [...]

  Arch Linux is a recommended distro for power (experienced) users as it allows them to create a customized Linux installation built from the ground up. It does not have a graphical install interface.

  [...]

  Slackware is another distro that deserves mention in this context. As compared to Arch Linux, Slackware Linux provides more stable packages and is thus more conservative. However, Arch Linux provides a more usable package management system that takes care of dependencies.

• New Releases

  • Calculate Linux Desktop 10.2 released

  • Calculate Linux 10.2 Has Support for Canon Printers

    The Russian developer Alexander Tratsevskiy proudly announced last week, on the Linux Questions forum, the availability of Calculate Linux 10.2, which includes all its derivatives: Calculate Linux Desktop, Calculate Linux Server, Calculate Linux Scratch and Calculate Linux XFCE.

  • Element v1.0 final release

  • PLoP Linux 4.0.3 released

    added: ddrescue 1.11, testdisk photorec 6.11, lzip 1.8, rsync 3.0.6, dbus 1.2.14, netcat 1.10, LVM 2.2.02.58
    update: kernel 2.6.32.8, usbutils 0.84, fsarchiver 0.6.7, ntfs-3g 2010.1.16AR.1, nmap 5.21, partimage 0.6.8, mutt 1.5.20, groff 1.20.1, findutils 4.4.2

  • MilaX 0.5 released

    Based on OpenSolaris snv128a.
    JWM as WM, system monitor – conky, keyboard layout switcher – SCIM.
    Now with fastest browser Midori – Twitter, Facebook and other sites is working well.
    Fast start: boot LiveCD (LiveUSB), configure network (Menu ->Setup->Net Setup),
    run zfsinstall (~pfexec zfsinstall), reboot and enjoy.

• Red Hat Family

  • Morgan Stanley Maintains Red Hat at Equal-Weight, Sees Revenue Acceleration in 2011 (RHT)

  • Savvytek Lands the First Red-Hat Linux Virtualization Implementation Project at MEPS

    In partnership with Red Hat and Oracle; and in their endeavor to lead the market towards a more proficient, secure and better performing infrastructural solutions; Savvytek was chosen by Middle East Payment Services (MEPS) to implement their new core application – RS2 – based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Oracle technologies. This technology migration project comes to support MEPS direction in building a Highly Available, Cost-Effective–Ready Data center that hosts and supports their mission-critical, dynamic operation.

  • Fedora

    • Bring on the skins.

      Did you know that you can use Fedora trademarks to create skins, application themes, Firefox personas, and other such application sprucer-uppers, pursuant to our trademark guidelines? You can find this change, along with complete usage guidelines, through our trademark guidelines page on the Fedora wiki.

• Debian Family

  • Celebrate Presidents Day with SimplyMEPIS 8.5 beta5

    MEPIS has announced SimplyMEPIS 8.4.97, the fifth beta of MEPIS 8.5, now available from MEPIS and public mirrors. The ISO files for 32 and 64 bit processors are SimplyMEPIS-CD_8.4.97-b5_32.iso and SimplyMEPIS-CD_8.4.97-b5_64.iso respectively. Deltas, requested by the MEPIS community, are also available.

  • SimplyMEPIS 8.5 Beta 5 Is Ready for Testing

  • Securing the Debian zones

    The plan is to introduce DNSSEC in several steps so that we can react to issues that arise without breaking everything at once.

  • Ubuntu

    • Lucid Gets New Icons For Rhythmbox, UbuntuOne, MeMenu, More!

    • Ubuntu single sign on service launched

      We are pleased to announce the launch of the brand new Ubuntu single sign on service. The goal of this service is to provide a single, central login service for all Ubuntu-related sites, thus making it more convenient for Ubuntu users and community members to access information, communicate, and contribute. This service will replace the existing Launchpad login service that is currently in use for many Ubuntu-related sites, although existing Launchpad accounts will continue to work in the new service.

    • Autonomic Resources Approved to Offer Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux and Landscape Through GSA Advantage

      Autonomic Resources, an IT and service integration firm serving the U.S. federal government, announced today that the General Services Administration (GSA) has approved the company to offer Canonical’s Ubuntu and Landscape to government customers.

    • Lubuntu: Not Just for Lusers

      For a long time, the Ubuntu family has had three members–Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Xubuntu (sorry Edubuntu; we’re not counting you). But that may change, with a new project, Lubuntu, vying for official endorsement by Canonical. Here’s a look at Lubuntu, and thoughts on what its future may hold.

      The Lubuntu project, which was established a year ago as a community endeavor, aims to create a lightweight Linux distribution based on Ubuntu. Towards this end, it uses the LXDE desktop environment in combination with the Openbox window manager to keep the demand on system resources low.

    • Security Expert Releases New Linux Distribution for Ethical Hacking and Penetration Testing

      As a derivative of Ubuntu this ‘Live CD’ runs directly from the CD and doesn’t need installing on your hard-drive. Once booted you can use the included tools to perform penetration tests and ethically hack on your own network to ensure that it is secure from outside intruders. As well as the standard Linux networking tools the Live Hacking CD has tools for DNS enumeration and reconnaissance as well as utilities for foot-printing, password cracking and network sniffing. It also has programs for spoofing and a set of wireless networking utilities.

    • Mint

      • Bordering on blasphemy?

        I came across this interesting article today and it brings up some very good arguments regarding the usability of Mint over Ubuntu for new Linux users.

        [...]

        In my mind, Mint is not really a Linux derivative but more of a highly customized Ubuntu install. Most of the modifications in Mint I find I make in Ubuntu. Mint cannot survive without Ubuntu.

Devices/Embedded

• Wipro Tech in pact with TI

  Wipro Technologies on Tuesday announced at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona that it has tied up with Texas Instruments (TI) to offer services on TI’s OMAP processors. The services, which include Linux baseport, Android operating system porting on hardware platforms, middleware, third-party component integration, application development, and operator customisation, aim to address the commercialisation requirements for OEMs designing on Android, ensuring fast time to market.

• RoweBots Releases Ultra-Tiny Embedded-Linux RTOS for Renesas Technology’s SH-2A Microcontrollers

  RoweBots Research, Inc., a supplier of tiny embedded POSIX RTOS products, today announced the launch and release of Unison™ Version 5 and the open-source version of Unison Version 4. These two ultra-tiny embedded-Linux™ and POSIX compatible RTOSs open Renesas Technology Corp.’s SH-2A microcontroller (MCU) family to Linux and POSIX compatible development for the first time.

• Porting Android 2.x to Sony Xperia — Psh. Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 — Now we’re talkin’

  One of the greatest things about a more open platform for smartphones I believe, is the ability to (if you choose) customize it until you’re hearts content. From personal experience, I swap ROM’s every couple of days on my DROID trying out the updates and newcomers to the custom DROID ROM scene alike. But porting various ROM’s developed for your phone, or at the very least, the phone’s operating system, are rather easy all things considered. Especially so when comparing a simple ROM port from one Android device to the next against porting a full blown desktop OS to a Sony Xperia X1. Oh yeah, it’s real.

• ARM and Global Foundries push mobile chip development

  The joint SoC platform is based on the Cortex A9 processor and ARM’s physical IP, but taps GloFo’s experience with 28nm High-K Metal Gate process to create a proven reference design for manufacturers of smartphones, smartbooks, tablets and a host of other mobile devices.

• Two-bay NAS device can expand to seven bays

  Synology America announced a two-bay member of its DiskStation network-attached storage (NAS) family that can expand via an optional seven-bay expansion enclosure from 4TB to up to 14TB. Aimed at small-to-medium businesses, the DiskStation DS710+ runs Linux on an Intel Atom D410, and supplies gigabit Ethernet and USB connectivity.

  [...]

  Like the DS210j, the DS1010+, and other Synology NAS devices, the DS710+ runs version 2.2 of Synology’s Linux-based, DNLA-compliant Disk Station Manager software, which is compatible with Linux, Windows, and Mac workstations. DSM 2.2 enables automated backup features, remote file sharing, iSCSI target support, and multimedia streaming, says the company.

• Phones

  • Telstra to launch an Android phone

  • Android

    • Tiny handsets run Android

      Sony Ericsson announced two compact, scaled-down members of its Xperia X10 Android smartphone line. The Xperia X10 Mini and the QWERTY-keyboard equipped X10 Mini Pro both offer Qualcomm processors clocked to 600MHz with 2.5-inch QVGA touchscreens, five-megapixel cameras, HSPA, WiFi, Bluetooth, aGPS, and Android 1.6, says the company.

    • Acer updates Liquid, adds three more Android phones

      Acer announced three new Android smartphones, as well as an Android 2.1 version of its Liquid phone. Acer’s BeTouch e400 and BeTouch E110 fall into the mid- and low-end range, while the Acer “Liquid e” and Formula One styled Acer Ferrari smartphone both appear to target the upper ranges of Android phones.

    • Motorola’s latest Android handset offers multi-touch

      In its Cliq XT incarnation, the Quench appears to be intended as the next-generation version of Motorola’s first Android phone, the T-Mobile-sold Cliq. However, the company did not list which global carrier(s) would pick up the Quench version.

    • Freescale’s Cortex-A8 SoC jumps into Android phones

      Lumigon Corp. announced three Android 2.1 phones — the T1, S1, and E1 — touted as the first smartphones to use Freescale’s 1GHz i.MX51 system-on-chip. Meanwhile, the company also reported contributing to Ulysse Nardin’s Chairman, an Android handset that will start at over $13,000, and Freescale announced an Android evaluation kit for the i.MX51.

    • HTC working on app store tech and studying tablets

      High Tech Computer (HTC), the world’s biggest maker of Windows Mobile and Google Android OS smartphones, is working on technologies for applications used in handsets and application stores and plans to put this software to use but not until a later time.

    • HTC unveils update to Nexus One and HTC Legend

      The similarity is no big surprise considering HTC built Nexus One for Google.

    • Android Market should stimulate Open Source Apps

      For Google this is also good because with open source multiple people can start contributing to apps such that they can improve faster. Furthermore people can start new projects by simply reusing open source code of other Open Source Android applications. All in all it will spur innovation and improve quality of applications and in the end that’s good for Google because the platform will become more popular.

      Furthermore it fits in the Google policy that they stimulate Open Source.

    • Mobile World Congress: Content plans reveal likely mobile winners and losers

      2. Google’s Android platform gained critical mass 18 months from launch, heralding the rise of the open source OS. Juniper said. Android had been as much about as enabling search and services across different devices as capturing OS market share. This had prompted Nokia to open-source its Symbian environment and was being followed by Nokia and Intel, which combined efforts to launch the Linux-based MeeGo platform .

    • Google geared toward mobiles over desktops: CEO

      Google, which became an important player in the mobile industry with the launch of Linux-based open platform Android in 2008 and last month’s release of the first Google phone, the Nexus One, denied that it is competing against mobile carriers.

• Sub-notebooks

  • The Gdium Liberty 1000 clearly stands out from the pack

    Innovative architecture entrenched in the open-source world, elegant and sober design, yet stylish, security and mobility with the G-Key, a personal and bootable USB key, Gdium is an ultraportable computer that is one of the cornerstones of a wider environment dedicated to knowledge, communication and learning.

  • Are smartbooks and Linux meant for each other?

    Since the desktop line of Windows currently doesn’t run on ARM processors, we can exclude XP/Vista/7 from the list of likely contenders as smartbook operating systems. Windows 7 successors are currently not planned to be ported to ARM and even that wouldn’t be a complete solution since Windows applications will have to be ported as well (a very wide, close-sourced ecosystem).

    [...]

    Linux on the other hand has a very good technical background on ARM. It has no limitations for processing cores and operating memory and has targeted distributions for this architecture. Android is an outstanding example but several well-known distributions – like Ubuntu – have ARM ports in addition to their x86 base edition. Also, due to the fact that most of the Linux applications are open-source, they are at least possible to port, so we can expect the full usual complement of desktop Linux applications to show up on an ARM Linux distribution when the need becomes visible for them.

  • Top 5 Operating Systems for Netbooks

    My personal favorites are Windows 7 Home Premium and Jolicloud, thanks to the ease use. My HP Mini is currently running Windows 7 Home Premium and runs Jolicloud off of a thumbdrive when I want a different experience. I am also testing out a Sony Vaio W which comes standard with Windows 7 Starter and despite the limitations of Starter I am getting by alright so far; though I couldn’t use it every day thanks to the lack of multi-monitor support.

  • Jolicloud – A great Linux distro that blurs the line between desktop and web applications

    In the end Jolicloud manages to keep a good mixture of native and web applications, and abstracts the differences between them so you can just focus on doing your work. This is one OS to look for when it releases.

  • Tablets

    • OpenTablet 7 is Flash-friendly iPad alternative

      No one has a clue how much an OpenTablet will cost, or when it will go on sale. Considering that we’re having a hard enough time figuring out who’s going to buy a $500 JooJoo, the folks at OpenPeak better aim low if they want to make Apple sweat. Some impressive battery life estimates wouldn’t hurt their cause, either.

• MeeGo/Maemo/Moblin

  • Aava Mobile unveils world’s first fully open mobile device

    There are many open platforms for software in the tech world from operating systems to development environments for various software. We rarely see open hardware or mobile devices though. Aava Mobile has unveiled what it calls the world’s first fully open mobile device at MWC.

    [...]

    The reference design is aimed at Moblin 2.1 and Android for the OS options with plans for support of MeeGo in the future. Features include an extended touch screen, full HD video capability, micro USB port, HD video conferencing, dual mics, 3D sound and UI, GSM capable, and it has GPS, WiFi, compass, and an accelerometer.

  • Aava Mobile unveils open mobile device platform

  • Is MeeGo Linux’ Answer to iPad?

    Intel, Nokia and the MeeGo community are thinking much bigger than tablets, phones or netbooks. While MeeGo greets competition with the iPad head on, it will also compete in a variety of device categories not yet fully defined thanks to its approach to open source development and cross-device portability provided by Qt. The “killer app” is not a single device locked down with crippling DRM. The “killer app” is your content and the ability to access the Internet from anywhere: a phone, a car, a kitchen or television regardless of the device or who makes it.

    It seems clear that Jobs miss-stepped by not thinking big enough because – despite his brilliance – Apple products are being confined to the limits of his team’s imaginations, while the future is about accessing content from anywhere.

  • Nokia patches N900 firmware

    It’s the third N900 firmware update to be posted since the gadget’s November 2009 release. It’s version 3.2010.02-8 and it weighs in at a mere 16.2MB.

  • The Year of the Tablet Computer

    Next: Enter the latest addition to the touchscreen devices set to da-beau in 2010: MeeGo. In a joint effort between the Intel and Nokia companies. MeeGo, a Linux based operating system, is going to be targeted at both ARM and x86 based devices (despite the former of the two not being made by Intel). While MeeGo is still in the very preliminary stages of development, other Linux-based touchscreen-orientated operating systems, such as Android and Maemo, have shown us that the Linux platform is more than capable of functioning on such devices in an elegant manner. With backing from such large companies MeeGo is going to be hard-pressed to not get at least some publicity.

  • HALCON Embedded Runs on the Nokia N900

    The standard machine vision software HALCON Embedded runs on the mobile phone Nokia N900 (Linux-based operating system Maemo). Test runs by the manufacturer of HALCON, MVTec Software GmbH (Munich, Germany), have shown an outstanding performance.

  • MSI Wind U160 gets the Moblin Linux treatment

    Sure, the folks at Moblin recently announced that they were merging with the Maemo project to develop a new OS called MeeGo. But that hasn’t stopped PC makers from installing the latest version of the Moblin netbook operating system on their latest models and showing them off at trade shows like Mobile World Congress and CES.

Open Source Choices

Open source was Best Supporting Actor in the 2010 Intelligent Enterprise Editors’ Choice Awards. It plays an important part — in some cases, a star turn — for four of The Dozen top-category winners and for eleven of the thirty-six Ones to Watch. Noting that the awards reflect both current impact and our expectations — all forty-eight awardees, really, are “ones to watch” — clearly, in our estimation, open source has reached a new level of enterprise importance and promise.

[...]

There’s really nothing new in my points, just a reaffirmation and extension of common knowledge regarding the value open source. Intelligent Enterprise clearly sees open source as delivering ever increasing value for enterprise information management and applications. 2011 should be no exception.

Open source: dangerous to computing education?

First, let’s talk about breadth of opportunity. Mark seems to assume that every student developer has the opportunity to engage in commercial development. This is demonstrably untrue. It may be true that an elite school like Georgia Tech provides these kinds of opportunities to most of their conputing students — but what about everywhere else? For that matter, what about the kids at Georgia Tech who, for whatever reason, don’t make the cut? Unless you can guarantee 100% co-op or internship placement for every computing student on Earth (and let’s be honest, we’ll never get even close to that number), there will always be aspirant student developers who have no chance at all to see a commercial codebase, or to engage in Legitimate Peripheral Participation.

I’ve got a feeling : is Open Source at an inflexion point ?

Open source = competitive solutions

More and more, open source software is used/bought, not because it is open source/free (speech/beer) but because it is a good software (intrinsic value). The fact that this software/solution is open source is not the determining factor that make customers buy it. On a head to head competition with closed source alternative, a bunch of open source players emerges (Firefox, Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Tomcat, etc.) and are in a position to become market-leaders.

Cubeia unveils open-source game server

Technology solutions provider for the igaming industry Cubeia, has announced the release of Firebase Community Edition, a scalable, enterprise server for multiplayer games.

HighTower Launches HOST – Industry’s First Open Source Portal

Healthcare

• Project GNUmed Live started

  It all originated from the need to host GNUmed Live CDs, VMware images and so on. Nothing comes for free and there was no way we could host these images on the GNUmed servers.

• Five sites for open source healthcare

  If you’re browsing the web looking for sites about open source healthcare, here are five I found interesting. There are a ton of sites out there, and I tried to stay away from those that talked strictly about software–instead focusing on those that tackled the issues in open source ways beyond technology.

Mobile

• Smartphone Phenomenon Down to Open Source Coding

  Of course, though the fuel behind the fire, experts are also warning that there are obvious pitfalls to developers, in particular the possibility of decreasing standard as open source coding continues to become available across platforms.

• Symbian S^3 released: The open source mobile OS with fliptastic finger tricks

  Symbian’s recent mobile operating system dubbed S^3, will go down in history as the companies first entirely open source release to engage more people in creating an application environment free of restrictions.

• RIM switching to open source WebKit

  At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Research In Motion announced an overhaul of its Blackberry phone web browser. Like the iPhone and Android systems, the new browser is WebKit based and is expected to be available on Blackberry devices later this year. in interviews Mike Lazardis, co-CEO of RIM said “You’ll see how quickly it downloads, how quickly it renders and how smooth it scrolls and zooms in”.

• Faster, better browser for BlackBerry

  The use of open source WebKit browser engine by RIM would give the Canadian company parity with such other players in the market as Apple and Google.

Web Browsers

• Google Adds a Little Sparkle to Chrome for Linux

  The Linux version of Google’s Chrome browser has received a tuneup. Updates fix a handful of bugs; they also bring in better support for custom fonts and improvements in GTK theme mode. The Linux and Mac versions of Chrome still trail the Windows version in terms of development, though it’s interesting that some Chrome features are appearing in Linux before they show up in Mac.

• Mozilla

  • 10 Cool Firefox Add-Ons

    This is a must-read for Firefox fans! We’ll review 10 cool add-ons that will make your cross-platform Mozilla web browser even better. We’ll review add-ons to help fix annoyances, save time, discover advanced functionality, and stay connected.

  • Add-On Compatibility Reporter Enables Incompatible Firefox Extensions, Reports If Still Not Working

Fog Computing

• A Guide to Amazon Web Services for Corporate IT Managers

  Finally, they are becoming the industry standard and their interfaces are or will be incorporated into a variety of third party providers. One example is Linux distro vendor Ubuntu. They have an Enterprise Cloud offering that makes use of the same AWS programming interfaces, making it easier for developers to port their cloud applications to a private server running Ubuntu inside your corporate data center. Another is coming from Racemi, which plans on having tools that can import VMware virtual machines into and out of AWS later this year.

• Legal experts split over cloud effect on open source

  At the Cloud Law Summit in London on Wednesday last week, Andrew Charlesworth, director of the University of Bristol centre for IT and law, said the reasons some businesses choose open-source software — lower cost and lack of vendor lock-in — could be eroded by cloud services.

• Is open source still a recruitment tool?

  As part of its effort to find the best employees it can, Twitter has launched a directory to the open source projects it supports, with cute little icons representing the employees working on each one.

• Twitter Loves Open Source And Launches A Directory To Prove It

  In recent months, there seems to be a mad rush of companies trying to one-up each other with how open-source they are. Twitter is the latest, as they have launched a directory of all the open source projects they’re currently working on and/or contributing to.The list is fairly impressive. It includes open source projects in Ruby, Scala, Java, C/C++, and other various tools.

Sun/Oracle

• Linux MySQL distros meeting in Brussels

  When I saw Shlomi’s post on why not to use apt-get or yum for MySQL, I thought immediately that his conclusions are quite reasonable. What you get from the Linux distributions is not the same thing that you find in the official MySQL downloads page. Now, whether you value more the completeness of the server or the ease of administration through the distribution installation tools, it’s up to you and your business goals. We at the MySQL team have organized a meeting with the Linux distributions with the intent of finding out which differences and problems we may have with each other, and to solve them by improving communication. What follows is a summary of what happened in Brussels during the meeting.

• What happens to Sun’s open-source software now?

  The deal is done. Oracle now owns Sun. Oracle’s main message to Sun’s customers seems to be “Don’t worry, be happy.” That’s not easy when Oracle is not explaining in any detail what it will be doing with open-source software offerings like MySQL, OpenOffice and OpenSolaris.

• MilaX 0.5: OpenSolaris as Live-CD

  MilaX, a Live distribution of OpenSolaris, is available in version 0.5 with new software.

Business

• Talend Announces Record 2009 and Continues Growth in the New Year

  Talend, the recognized market leader in open source data integration software, today announced that 2009 was a record year for the company. For the tenth consecutive quarter, Talend achieved record performance, reflecting the company’s ability to deliver cost-optimized, high-performance data management solutions to global companies of all sizes.

• Amplifying creativity and business performance with open source

  The world of open source software—cited by Thomas Friedman as the most disruptive of the 10 forces making the world flat today—turns this notion of property on its head. The ownership society seems to be doing nothing to help—it’s sucking value out of our system by the trillions, and it acts as though its ownership is an entitlement rather than a responsibility for action.

• Seeding the Community

  For an open source company, nurturing a community around the software is as important as picking the right licence. Although developer communities tend to be more self-starting with a reasonably open development process, user communities, which are a source of valuable feedback, need more encouragement. The H went to the first meeting of the UK BIRT User Group (BUG) to see how one company was helping to create a user community.

Funding

• OpenERP raises 3 million euros

  The business suite application vendor OpenERP announces today that it raised 3 million euros. The investors are Sofinnova Partners, represented by Olivier Sichel, and the Iliad’s managers, Xavier Niel and Olivier Rosenfeld. The funds raised will allow OpenERP to achieve its ambition to be one of the leading application business suite vendors worldwide.

BSD/UNIX

• Video: Andrew Tanenbaum on Bugs and Minix’ Reincarnation Server

  Linux Pro Magazine met the author of numerous standard works in informatics and the most famous Linux critic at the Fosdem in Brussels.

• OpenSource Operating Systems

  For most of us, thinking of the University of California Berkley doesn’t bring about images of nerdy software engineers, but instead makes us think more of LSD, hippies, the children’s revolt, and Vietnam… Despite all of that, they are a prominent uni, and they did create Berkley Unix. While BSDs are usually source compatible with AIX, HPUX, and Linux there are also two API layers available, Linux and WINE. Currently, there are four main flavors: OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD, Darwin. OpenBSD is focused on security, FreeBSD is focused on being general purpose, and NetBSD is focused on running everywhere (really… everywhere like toasters, palmtop computers, servers, mainframes… you name it, NetBSD runs on it). The Berkley Software Distribution has long been considered one of the most stable, secure, and efficient platforms available.

• An Embedded Web Server on the Head of a Pin

  The Unison Operating System offers an ultra tiny embedded POSIX environment for 32 bit microcontroller (MCU) based development that is also Linux compatible.

• Open Source embedded operating system Contiki updated to 2.4

  The BSD licensed operating system is designed to be small, highly portable and work in networked, but memory constrained systems, such as sensor network nodes.

Releases

• Gnumeric 1.10 released

  Following nearly two years of development, the Gnumeric developers have announced the release of version 1.10.0 of their GNOME Office spreadsheet application. The first stable release in the 1.10.x series includes several changes, updates and improvements.

Government

• What if politicians innovated the open source way?

  I read an interesting post last week by Morton Hansen (author of Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results) entitled Obama’s Five Collaboration Mistakes. In the comments below the post, some folks interpreted his words as an attack on the Obama administration. Me? I’d probably interpret Hansen’s words more broadly. Perhaps something like:

  Politicians are pretty darned bad at collaborating a lot of the time.

• The standard is open, almost

  india’s draft policy on the software platform for e-governance has made a concession for proprietary software businesses like Microsoft. Proponents of open-source software called it a major departure from the Union government’s earlier stand, saying allowing proprietary software in the standards will limit people who can e-access the government. At the heart of this controversy is a change in the ‘Recommended Policy on Open Standards for e-governance’.

Luminaries

• Meet free software guru Richard Stallman at Pitt

  Copyrights used to expire after a few years; now some corporations want them to last forever to protect their revenue streams on copyrighted works. Stallman continues to influence this conversation with an eye toward protecting computer users’ freedom and making software more conducive to a genuine education.

  “The global corporations that profit from copyright are lobbying for draconian punishments for copyright violations and to increase their copyright powers while suppressing public access to technology,” says Stallman. “If we seriously hope to serve the only legitimate purpose of copyright– to promote progress for the benefit of the public — then we must make changes in the other direction.”

• See ‘Revolution OS’ at the Darress Theatre in Boonton

  The New Jersey Linux User’s group will present a film titled “Revolution OS” at the Darress Theatre in Boonton on Wednesday, March 31. This is a documentary detailing the roots of the Free Software and Open Source movements that resulted in Linux, as well as many other free software projects.

Openness

• Google gifts Wiki millions

  Google is giving the Wikimedia Foundation a $2m donation, meaning the online fact dump can continue to serve up instant research to hard-pressed college students and broadcast researchers.

Programming

• Gitorious or GitHub?

  Gitorious

  Pros:
  - Has the latest commits right up front, providing a good overview of what’s been happening and what’s available.
  - The wiki-type front pages are a bit easier to navigate. The whole site feels less cluttered than GitHub.
  - Much easier to see up front who’s part of a project and who’s cloned it.

  Cons:
  - Gitorious takes longer when searching for stuff; it’s also a little slower just to click through trees and links, like the Neuvoo project.
  - Business model? What business model? How are they gonna stay open on down the road?
  - Doesn’t seem to offer private repos, should I need one in the future.

• Subversion 1.7 Planned for Summer 2010 Release

• Let there be light

  So, a few days back, I started with an idea of a periodic summary of what is going on around the Vala programming language, mainly for those subscribed to the mailing list who are not that much interested in bugzilla.

Online store selling AMD’s 12-core server chip before launch

Server distributor Oakville Mehlville Computers is offering the 12-core Opteron processor code-named Magny-Cours on its eBay auction site.

Lists

• 20 Computers You WILL Own Within 5 Years

• Cloud Computing and Virtualization Resources

Security

• France: Report Says Army Exposed Troops to Radiation

  The French military deliberately exposed enlisted men to nuclear radiation in the Sahara Desert in 1961 in order to study resulting physical and psychological effects, according to a classified 1998 report published Tuesday by a French daily, Le Parisien.

• Johann Hari: Obama’s secret prisons in Afghanistan endanger us all

  He was elected in part to drag us out of this trap. Instead, he’s dragging us further in

• TSA Logo Contest Finalists

  Last month I announced a contest to redesign the TSA logo. Here are the finalists. Clicking on them will bring up a larger, and easier to read, version.

• Minister deploys ‘dodgy’ DNA case study

  Crime and policing minister David Hanson put forward five case studies to a select committee, but due to an “administrative error” one was a copy of one of the other cases with the name altered.

• Met Police sorry after disrupting Hackney funeral

  The Metropolitan Police and Hackney Council have apologised after 83 people were searched in a churchyard while a funeral was being held.

  They were taken to a marquee put up in St John’s Churchyard, in Hackney, after being arrested elsewhere as part of an operation targeting youth knife crime.

• Guaranteeing freedoms and liberties for people you don’t like is essential if you want them yourself

  I learned in my time at the Bar that it is precisely when the odds are stacked against a defendant that he most needs the benefit of a fair justice system – that it is when the evidence is apparently strongest that the rule of law is most important. Megarry J said in John v Rees [1970] that the path of the law is strewn with examples of open and shut cases whcih, somehow, were not; of unnswerable charges which, in the event, were completely answered; of inexplicable conduct which was fully explained… Coughlin is not interested in those notions – of testing evidence by due process, of a fair trial acting as a buffer between the wrath of the people and the individual.

• Women’s Institute members threatened with on-the-spot fines for handing out charity flyers

  A group of Women’s Institute members have been threatened with £80 fines for handing out flyers for a charity art exhibition.

  Grandmother Liz Day, 68, was confronted by a council litter warden who warned her and three other WI members it was illegal to hand out the charity adverts.

  The women were told they narrowly escaped an on-the-spot fixed penalty notice because the East Hertfordshire Council warden was in a ‘good mood’.

Environment

• GOP lawmaker accused of plagiarizing Washington Times’ anti-climate change rant

  Rep. Matt Wingard, who has a degree in broadcast journalism, admitted on Monday that he lifted his speech from an editorial entitled “Osama and Obama on global warming,” which sought to link Osama bin Laden’s recent declaration on global warming to the US president’s policies.

• U.S. Supports New Nuclear Reactors in Georgia

  President Obama, speaking to an enthusiastic audience of union officials in Lanham, Md., on Tuesday, underscored his embrace of nuclear power as a clean energy source, announcing that the Energy Department had approved financial help for the construction of two nuclear reactors in Georgia.

• Push to ban trade in endangered bluefin tuna

  It was one of the most expensive fish ever sold. A few weeks ago, a giant bluefin tuna achieved a price of 16.3m yen – about £111,000 – at auction in Tokyo. The rich, buttery taste of the tuna’s flesh made the 513lb fish irresistible for one group of restaurateurs. The bluefin’s fillets ended up on hundreds of sushi platters across Tokyo within hours of the sale.

Finance

• EU toughens stance on Greek bailout

  Greece’s embattled government will come under added pressure tomorrow to enforce even tougher austerity measures to combat the country’s debt at a meeting of EU finance ministers expected to focus solely on the crisis.

• Goldman Sachs’ Greek tragedy

  Has the severely PR-challenged Goldman now aided one global crisis too many?

• Brown University’s Simmons says she’ll leave Goldman Sachs board

  Simmons, 64, who has been a director since 2000, will not stand for reelection at the company’s annual shareholder meeting later this spring, according to a statement from the New York-based investment firm.

• Outrageous But Legal: EU Knew Goldman Sachs Helped Greece Use Derivatives to Conceal Deficits

• Greece’s Goldman Sachs Swaps Spawn EU Dispute on Disclosure

  A dispute is unfolding about how long European Union officials have known that Greece used derivatives to conceal its growing budget deficit.

• Goldman Sachs Takes the Rap Again, This Time for Greece

  Goldman wasn’t the only bank named, although it was clearly the villain of the piece. JPMorgan Chase had a supporting role for a round of stealth borrowing it was said to have arranged for Italy (there seems to be an inverse relationship among European nations between fiscal rectitude and olive oil production).

• The Hoi Polloi vs. Goldman Sachs

  Greece is turning into a battle royal between the global financial elites and the average worker in the industrial West. This started out as a more limited struggle, pitting the finance ministers and central banks of the European Union against the Greek unions, but the fight has unexpectedly broadened with news of the surreptitious involvement of Goldman Sachs in helping Greece avoid borrowing constraints.

  The picture painted in the Western financial press makes the unions the villain in this play. The unions are described as greedy, lazy, too quick to strike, and insensitive to the burdens they were imposing on the Greek economy. To cope with union threats and extortion, various Greek governments had no choice but to borrow excessively, and well beyond the European Union target range that allowed domestic budget deficits to be no higher than 3% of GDP. As of last year, Greece’s budget deficit was 12.7% of GDP.

  [...]

  The answer to that is a corrupt, broken, secretive, and exploitative international financial system – one that grants enormous power and wealth to a handful of private sector firms. This is the reality the citizens of Greece – not just the unions – are now facing. It is a reality that justifiably will create disgust and anger among the people of Greece, who may well reject the shock therapy being offered by the EU finance officials, thereby calling their bluff. If so, it will be the second rebuff of the international financial elites, following the rejection of austerity measures by Iceland to repay its debt.

  EU officials are still talking and acting as if they have matters under control, and their pronouncements carry the weight of law. They may be about to find out otherwise, and if so, the global financial system and global markets are in for an economic version of shock and awe.

• Elders of Wall St. Favor More Regulation

  While the younger generation, very visibly led by Lloyd C. Blankfein, chief executive of Goldman Sachs, lobbies Congress against such regulation, their spiritual elders support the reform proposed by Paul A. Volcker and, surprisingly, even more restrictions. “I am a believer that the system has gone badly awry and needs massive reform,” said Mr. Bogle, the 80-year-old founder and for many years chief executive of the Vanguard Group, the huge mutual fund company.

• Making a Living in MakerCulture

  If you weren’t making things 100 years ago, you’d be dead. Your home, your food, your clothes and even your toys were all made by you or someone you knew. Somewhere along the way, humans seem to have forgotten that we were makers, and instead became consumers.

  Now, when some people build, sew and bake they are making a conscious choice to return to our maker roots. This movement is MakerCulture. Today, makers challenge the mainstream and make instead of buy.

• Congress’ Phony Price Tags

  With the federal government, massive cost overruns are the rule, not the exception. The $700 billion cost of the war in Iraq dwarfs the $50 billion to $60 billion that Mitch Daniels, then director of the Office of Management and Budget, predicted at the outset. In 1967 long-run forecasts estimated that Medicare would cost about $12 billion by 1990. In reality, it cost more than $98 billion that year. Today it costs $500 billion.

• Gord Hill: Why protest Vancouver’s 2010 Olympics?

  Due to massive construction projects associated with the Olympics, from venues to infrastructure, there is both widespread environmental destruction, as well as huge public debts. As part of security operations, police, military, and intelligence agencies receive millions of dollars for new personnel, equipment, weapons, et cetera—strengthening the creeping police states we see around the world (and south of the border) and further eroding our alleged “freedoms” and civil liberties.

• Vancouver’s poor protest against Olympic largesse

  PROTEST ORGANISER: You know, you probably heard these base rumours that they spent $6, $7 billion on the Olympics, the OWElympics, O.W.E lympics. We are the Poverty Olympics – our budget wasn’t quite that – they’re probably looking at $6 billion, we’re $6. Look what we’re doing; what we’re doing on six bucks that’s so great.

  LISA MILLAR: A loose coalition of anti-Olympic, anti-global, anti-poverty protesters are threatening to derail the Games.

  Today was the first taste of what they say will be weeks of noisy rallies, street marches and attempts to block spectators and competitors.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Obama wants a social notworking guru

  The lucky hire, who will have to run the White House’s Twitter, Facebook and Myspace accounts, should have, “Excellent writing and editing skills with strong attention to detail; your writing is strong, sharp, and personable,” which makes us wonder what blogs, tweets and Facebook pages he has been looking at as comparisons.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Google and Yahoo! join Oz protests

  Google and Yahoo! have joined a pressure group which seeks to stop Communications Minister Stephen Conroy’s doomed attempt to filter Aussie web traffic.

  [...]

  It is also concerned that Conroy’s mandatory filer will include content that is educational or social. Trials last year did wrongly blacklist websites promoting a Queensland dentist, a photographer and a travel agent.

  Finally, the group warned that sites like YouTube, which is bound to have some pages on the filter blacklist, would effectively overload the filter and create bottlenecks.

• Google and Yahoo raise doubts over planned net filters

• Facebook hit with class action over privacy changes

  A class action lawsuit has been filed against Facebook over changes that the social networking site made to its privacy settings last November and December.

• Any use of this article without the NFL’s express written consent is prohibited

  With the Super Bowl just concluded and baseball’s spring training only weeks away, a question occurred to us: whatever happened to the push for copyright holders to tone down their copyright notices?

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• Net Neutrality: A simple guide

  Google’s recently announced plan to set up trial fiber optic networks in the US with ultra-high speed Internet connections puts the long running national debate over Net Neutrality back into high gear.

  A hot topic of discussion and debate in government and telecom circles since at least 2003, Net Neutrality, actually involves a broad array of topics, technologies and players

• Net Throttling Hasn’t Stopped

  Canadian Internet service providers fall short on net neutrality rules, testing CRTC’s patience.

• Ridiculous Arguments: Net Neutrality Would Mean No iPhones

  I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I’m very much against enforcing net neutrality through legislation (too many unintended consequences) but I’m stunned at the ridiculous and totally bogus reasons given by those fighting against those regulations in support of their claims. The latest on this front is Stephen Titch, a policy analyst at the Reason Foundation (a group whose work I usually think is quite good), coming out with a policy brief making the ludicrous argument that network neutrality would mean no more iPhones.

Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights

• Redbox Caves To Warner Bros., Will Delay New Movie Releases From Kiosks

  The whole thing makes no sense at all. Warner Bros. mistakenly thinks that if people can’t rent a particular DVD in the first four weeks of release, they’re more likely to shell out money to actually buy the DVD. This is Warner Bros. pretending that it can influence customer behavior by denying them what they want.

• Viacom CEO: We Need To Pay Less For Music In Videogames

  Lower licensing fees and more selective video game companies could be bad news for some music companies. Video games have provided a boost to licensing revenues and overall awareness for many artists. But sales are down sharply. An analyst with Wedbush Securities estimated, that two-thirds of December’s 12% year-over-year decline in video game sales came from the music category.

• Public Knowledge Proposes New Copyright Reform Act

  The general topics for copyright change are to:

  1) strengthen fair use, including reforming outrageously high statutory damages, which deter innovation and creativity; 2) reform the DMCA to permit circumvention of digital locks for lawful purposes; 3) update the limitations and exceptions to copyright protection to better conform with how digital technologies work; 4) provide recourse for people and companies who are recklessly accused of copyright infringement and who are recklessly sent improper DMCA take-down notices; and 5) streamline arcane music licensing laws to encourage new and better business models for selling music.

• New Anti-Piracy Task Force Set To Pressure File-Sharers

  In order to step up the pressure on illicit file-sharers and others that violate intellectual property laws, Swedish police and prosecutors are heading up a new specialist team of investigators to deal with infringements. Team members will be designated their own areas but will also be able to operate nationally.

• Project Postcard: design chosen!

• US citizens: Let the USTR know today that you oppose draconian copyright

  There’s only a few hours left to submit your comments to the US Trade Representative opposing export of draconian copyright restrictions to other countries.

• My Comments To The USTR On Special 301 Report On Foreign Copyright Issues

  A lot of people have been incorrectly claiming that these comments are about ACTA, but they’re not. The Special 301 report basically just tries to determine which countries the US should put more pressure on to “get with the program,” diplomatically speaking, when it comes to copyright issues. In the past, it’s been used to bully countries like Canada and Israel — both of which have strong copyright that is very much in compliance with international obligations.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Pros and Cons of the Major Operating Systems

Dean Walden is an avid internet user, watcher, promoter, website builder and researcher. The Ubuntu version of the Linux operating system is easy to use if you can use Windows.

Should You Switch From Microsoft To Linux?

4. Usability

Another of the keys of your future success is the fact than many issues are already resolved due to the widespread use of desktop environments KDE and GNOME. There are other options in this segment, of course, but both alternatives have proved to be very valid in this field.

5. Price

Of course, this is a key to the implementation of Linux in an enterprise. Although there are free versions, often corporate usage imposes a charge that is associated with a contract for tech support and such.

Vacuum

Some expect the end of monopoly to be a catastrophic implosion but M$ has so many locked-in so firmly that it will be many years before the decrease in revenue bites. As long as they get paid for doing little, the shareholders will get their dividends and success will be guaranteed. When the money does shrink seriously as it did in the year of GNU/Linux (2009) the monopoly will collapse with a whimper, not a bang. They just have too many customers fooled and too much money to disappear quickly. The world could be a very different place for IT in a couple of years, however. “7″ is not going to give them earth-shaking results and that was their best shot. It will take a couple of years for some to realize M$ no longer has anything to offer except licences to use its same old software. That they tried to increase prices and failed in a down-turned economy is proof that they are not only losing it but that they are nearly irrelevant.

Growth in Hard Times

Last year, 2009, was good for GNU/Linux but many businesses had to fight hard to stay even. SJVN reports that a bunch of the regular FLOSS apps were in demand by businesses looking to the future. The thing that may be surprising to some is that Java servery is hot in commercial users of FLOSS.

The Dating Game, Linux-Style

It’s not often that geeks wax philosophical about the World of Amour, but HeliOS’s Ken Starks was recently brave enough to venture into those treacherous waters — and treacherous they were.

“When Linux nerds choose mates from the Windows herd” is the title of Starks’ post, and he paints a grim picture of the dating scene on the FOSS side of the fence.

“You come to realize that there is more to life than bash scripts and LAN parties with other Linux Geeks,” Starks writes. “So you decide to put yourself back on the dating market. Where do you start?”

Free Software Foundation Europe says I ♥ Free Software

It might be a day too late for Valentine’s Day, but it’s never too late to show your love for Free Software. The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) asked users to show their love for Free Software on Valentine’s Day — but there’s no reason why that can’t run all year long.

Kernel Space

• MeeGo: Maemo and Moblin merged by Linux Foundation

  The Linux Foundation has announced MeeGo, a merger of Intel’s Moblin and Nokia’s Maemo projects as a single project under the leadership of the Foundation. The news came in a posting by Linux Foundation’s CEO Jim Zemlin who called MeeGo “a next generation mobile operating system designed for the next generation of mobile devices”.

• Intel, Nokia aim to unify mobile Linux ecosystem with MeeGo

  Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin shared his thoughts about MeeGo in a statement on his blog.

• Bringing the Magic to Linux with MeeGo

• Industry Analysts, Pundits and Developers React to MeeGo

  The mobile technology world is buzzing today about the merger of Moblin and Maemo, the two Linux-based mobile initiatives that have been backed by Intel and Nokia respectively. Together, they have formed MeeGo, which is being hosted by the Linux Foundation.

  We reached out to industry experts for their reactions to today’s news. The theme that surfaces among industry pundits most is the one of mobile OS unification and the hope for a platform that can support a broad range of devices by using common technologies and developer tools.

• Graphics Stack

  • Radeon KMS Gets Faster X-Video Support

    If using the latest ATI open-source driver Git code for kernel mode-setting, there may be slightly better X-Video support without any visual slowdowns/problems.

Applications

• App Of Jaq

  In the continued mission to inspire and encourage opportunistic developers to write cool little apps that scratch an itch, no matter how specific and niche, I have started work on App Of Jaq: a desktop app that scratches my itch to build the Shot Of Jaq experience right into the desktop. The first cut of the app will:

  * Provide simple and easy access to listening to the latest shot, using GStreamer to play back the shot.

• YouAmp – Yet another music player for Linux

  YouAmp is yet another music player for Linux. But it is different than the other players ,if you are convinced by these outstanding features you can give it a try here. Do not be afraid if nothing happens on first startup as it will index your whole home directory which takes a while.

• Themes

  • Homosapien Metacity Online Customizer

  • Collection of GTK themes for Ubuntu/Gnome| Week7

  • Animated wallpaper pack for Ubuntu

• Instructionals

  • Updating your BIOS without Windows or a USB stick

  • Linux Training Week: Setup and Compatibility

  • Mistelix, a DVD authoring and Slideshow creating application for Linux

  • GDM2 Setup – A login interface management utility for the new GDM

  • How To Secure your SSH Server

  • Let’s Learn LaTex: Part 1

  • Configure KDE 4 to work with Compiz

  • Tech Tip: Fun With Gawk

  • Accessing French taxes account

  • View All Filetype like 3gp / Avi / Jpeg / pdf / ttf in Ubuntu Linux with Gloobus

  • Regular Expressions In grep

  • Skyhook Wireless: Wifi-Based Location Detection (and the handy API)

  • How to lock your cursor in place

  • ECS Elitegroup H55H-M

  • Installing Cherokee With PHP5 And MySQL Support On Ubuntu 9.10

  • Rock and roll, my friends.

  • How to Import / Export OR Backup / Restore MySQL Database in Ubuntu Linux with mysqldump

• Games

  • PlayOnLinux 3.7.3 has been released

K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

• Hands-on: semantic desktop starts to show in KDE SC 4.4

  Last week, the KDE community officially released KDE Software Compilation 4.4, a significant update of the open source desktop environment and its associated application stack. The new version delivers some user interface improvements, enhanced usability, new features, additional software, and a number of important bug fixes.

  [...]

  KDE has come a very long way since the initial 4.0 release in 2008. It’s a very modern desktop with a lot of rich and impressive features. KDE enthusiasts will find a whole lot to like in 4.4, and users who were put off by the instability and missing functionality of previous releases might want to give it another look.

Distributions

• Arch Linux smokes all others. My Arch Review.

  I’ll continue to use Arch Linux as my main O.S. at work and we’ll see how it adds up in the Long run.

• 5 operating systems that can set you free

  Pardus

  Pardus is a Linux based operating system, which does not require much knowledge to operate. Its name was taken from the Latin name for the Anatolian leopard. Pardus 2009 is the latest version of Pardus. It features the OpenOffice.org office suite, internet tools like web browser, e-mail, instant messaging, etc.

  Also, it supports various multimedia and graphics tools, games, and many other applications. Its package management system is called as PiSi (Packages installed Successfully as intended), which is written in XML and Python, and uses the LZMA Compression Algorithm.

• KolibriOS – A tiny operating system on a 1.44MB floppy

  KolibriOS is is an operating system that fits on a single 1.44MB Floppy (many applications are compressed) and runs with 8MB of Ram !!! The surprise is that the system come with a graphical environment complete with text editors, system utilities, games, browser, media players and lots of other stuff.

• So is ChromeOS a desktop winner? I think not.

  When Google announced their ChromeOS there was a flurry of comment and opinion on what this could mean for the GNU/Linux user and the future of free software. Our esteemed editor, Tony Mobily made a bold statement (albeit framed as a question) at the time that Google’s ChromeOS could turn GNU/Linux into a “desktop winner”. I’m not sure that it’s true.

  Whatever happens of course the fact is that when somebody of Google’s size and impact enters a market, there will be winners and losers, losses and gains. Now that the dust has well and truly settled let’s have another look at the potential impact of ChromeOS.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Announces Fourth Annual Innovation Awards

    Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the launch of its fourth annual Red Hat Innovation awards to be presented at the 2010 Red Hat Summit and JBoss World, co-located in Boston, June 22-25, 2010. The Innovation Awards recognize and honor the creative use of Red Hat and JBoss solutions by customers, partners and the community.

  • Fedora

    • Available Now: Fedora 12 Re-Spins

      Fedora Linux 12 was officially released on November 17th, 2009 and it introduced Linux kernel 2.6.31, KDE SC 4.3 and GNOME 2.28, support for Moblin, as well as improved power management and webcam support, audio/video codec support and many more!

• Debian Family

  • Debian to start deploying DNSSEC

  • Ubuntu

    • Five Ubuntu Features You Didn’t Know About

      The quest to discover something new and fresh about Ubuntu, which is arguably the world’s most popular and best documented Linux distribution, is an almost ridiculous one to accept and an almost impossible one to fulfill. I felt like the Mission Impossible character, Jim Phelps, as I read the request from my editor. I expected to see the words, “This is your mission, Ken, should you choose to accept it. This email will self-destruct in five seconds” at the end of that message.

      I felt no less trepidation at the request than I imagine that Mr. Phelps did at the beginning of every one of his assignments. I accepted the assignment, and here is, submitted for your approval, the result of that quest: Five Ubuntu features you didn’t know about.

Devices/Embedded

• DaniWeb Review: Pogoplug – Your Own Personal Pink Linux Data Cloud

  What’s small and pink, incorporates a Linux kernel and an embedded ARM compatible processor, and let’s you set up your own personal cloud? The answer is the latest Pogoplug device from Cloud Engines Inc. Combine this insanely easy to set up bit of kit with a free iPhone app and you have a secure environment for privately viewing and sharing content anywhere on the Internet – and all without changing your network configuration, firewall settings or fiddling with anything more complicated than plugging a box into your router, a USB drive or four into the box and activating it all through a web browser interface.

• Aava Mobile Debuts World’s First Fully ‘Open’ Mobile Device

  Functioning Aava Mobile devices measure 64mm by 125mm and only 11.7 millimeters thin—making them the world’s thinnest x86 based smartphone devices. The reference design provides support for Linux-based Moblin 2.1 and Android OSs today, with plans to support MeeGo in the future. Earlier this week, Intel and Nokia announced MeeGo, a merger of the Linux-based Moblin and Maemo software platforms with a goal to enable an open software environment for rapid development of exciting new user experiences.

• TI touts OMAP4 with do-it-all development platform

  Texas Instruments (TI) says it is now sampling its OMAP4 mobile application processors, using dual-core versions of ARM’s high-end Cortex-A9. The chipmaker is also showing off the Linux- and Android-compatible Blaze, a development platform that sports a pico projector, dual 3.7-inch displays, three cameras, an HDMI output, a compass, plus a barometer and a bevy of other sensors.

• Android

  • MWC 2010: Android everywhere

    At this year’s Mobile World Congress(MWC) in Barcelona, while Microsoft announced its Windows Phone 7 Series this week, a number of other companies are announcing their new Android-based devices. The open source Android OS devices, which range from mobile phones and notebooks, to tablets and Internet Devices, include updates to popular well known handsets and several new mobiles.

  • ST-Ericsson and ARM Enable Support for Android on Next-Generation Multicore Mobile Platforms

    This joint optimization from the ST-Ericsson and ARM effort will be fed back into the Android Open Source community for all to use.

  • Huawei SmaKit S7

    If you thought the Dell Mini 5 (5-inch screen) was big for a phone, you haven’t seen the Huawei SmaKit S7 (7-inch screen)! In all due fairness, the device is considered a MID with 3G voice capabilities, and with Bluetooth you’ll probably be using a headset to talk more often than not. Either way, it looks like another winning announcement from Huawei.

  • Sony Ericsson shows love for Android

    Executives from Sony Ericsson, the struggling European handset maker working hard to make a turnaround in 2010, said most of its new phones introduced this coming year will sport the Google Android operating system.

  • Bug

    • Google’s Android to Run Bug Labs Devices, Expand Beyond Phones

      Google Inc.’s Android open-source operating system will run on Bug Labs Inc. devices, expanding its hardware lineup and developer community beyond mobile phones and netbooks.

    • Bug Labs Unveils The BUG 2.0 Platform, Support For Android Development

    • Versatile Bug Labs Embraces Android

    • Bug Labs Unveils BUG 2.0 platform, Adds Support for Android and OMAP™ 3 Platform from Texas Instruments

  • Larger Devices

    • Dell’s Mini 5 will run on unreleased Android

      THE RUMOUR MILL is saying that Dell’s upcoming Mini 5 tablet will run on a currently unreleased version of Google’s Linux-based Android operating system.

      According to Engadget, the tablet device will run on a new version the increasingly popular Android OS that has never been seen in the wild before.

    • Compaq’s Android-based Airlife 100 Announced

      HP has announced a partnership with Telefonica for their brand spankin’ new Airlife 100. The smartbook (half smart phone, half netbook) is will offered with carrier subsidy in Europe and Latin America as part their mobile broadband service. Naturally, this thing has Android under the hood, or we wouldn’t be talking about it.

• Sub-notebooks

  • Review: Moblin 2.1

    Conclusions: I liked Moblin quite a bit. It was easy to use and generally intuitive. I didn’t try to customize it very much, but look forward to a long-term test drive on my laptop to see how flexible it is in extended everyday use. The project has a lot of potential to improve Linux’s reputation in terms of usability and polish, and has already attracted corporate sponsors who could put badly-needed marketing muscle behind it.

  • ARM SMP

    We are only a few weeks into 2010 and there is word that ARM will be doing the SMP/multi-core thing and still run 12 hours on a charge. Are we there yet? Yes. These devices have all the power normal users need, in a phone handset. Imagine what ARM can put in a desktop or notebook. The reign of x86-64 is nearing an end.

  • OLPC

    • Big corporates add muscle to One Laptop Per Child

      The Commonwealth Bank’s chief information officer will visit Darwin tomorrow for meetings with Aboriginal elders to garner additional support for the One Laptop Per Child programme in advance of the roll out of the next version of the machine and Telstra’s official sponsorship of the programme starting next month.

    • Using XS School Server Could Send You to Jail

      It breaks my heart and makes me sick to have to address this. But it needs to be addressed. Bitfrost is extremely secure. However, no amount of security can protect kids from themselves. Or teachers and admins from children’s actions in the USA school system.

      99.999% of the time, XOs are used for innocuous pursuits. What bothers me in the extreme are the ramifications of that other potential 0.001% or whatever infinitesimal number. Now this is the sort of thing that I do not want to even think about, let alone write about. But it only takes a single incident to ruin lives.

• Tablets

  • EXCLUSIVE: Notion Ink ADAM (Specs, Pics)

  • Notion Ink Adam tablet debuts

    With all the buzz and speculation that surrounded the months leading up to the official unveiling of the Apple iPad, most of us expected to see a rush of similar tablet computers hit the market. One of the newest tablets to be unveiled in the wake of the iPad is the Notion Ink Adam tablet. The Adam tablet has features that sound a lot like a netbook at first glance.

When and how can Free Software really save public money?

A few days ago, during an email conversation about efficient public services and waste of money in Public Administrations, I had to answer a couple of questions. Since those answers may interest many other people, here they are.

(note for newcomers: the “Free Software” discussed here is software like Ubuntu (a distribution of Linux) or OpenOffice: software that can be legally copied and installed without license costs, supported by politicians of all parties, even in the European Union)

First question: in my opinion, people saying that Free Software saves money overlooks the fact that those who use it on their job, for example a public employee, may need some training to use all its features. If you consider this, Free Software saves money only in the long run, doesn’t it?

Of course, in medium and big organizations, the costs of software licenses are only a small part of the total costs of using and maintaining that same software (even if, only in Italy, the total amount of software licensing costs in local and national PAs is hundreds millions of Euros every year), but let’s look at the whole picture. If you only consider the cost of software licenses, it’s easy: Free Software wins.

Faux Free Software & Open Source Articles

Another possibility is that he is simply writing something attacking Redhat based upon some very loose research. His “Who am I” page mentions being very close to Microsoft, even enough to have had actual meetings with Bill Gates.

OggCamp 10

At the end of the first OggCamp we all loved it so much we decided to do it again. The conversation went something like: “Lets do another one, we will book out a hotel so we are all staying together, somewhere not so far north, maybe Southampton.” some of the details changed since that conversation (it is in Liverpool and not in a hotel) but the important bit remains: we are doing it again and it will be awesome!

Indian Kids Most Active Downloader of Open Source Technology [Youth Survey]

Is It Plugged In?

That is so sad. The idea that GNU/Linux threatens jobs is nonsense. M$ has the whole world working for them for free. It’s pretty easy to see that FLOSS creates a lot of jobs all over the world, not just in Redmond. There may be fewer fixit jobs in the fallout but hardware still needs to be fixed and there are lots of opportunities to network systems.

miRoamer Joins Industry Consortium to Further Develop Open Source In-vehicle Infotainment Platform

In my happy place: reading list of 3.2 upgrades

Welcome to SHARE web site

It has been great to share ideas and opinion about the OSS in the Critical Software UK experience.

Open source software

Copyright in open source software. Applying basic principles of copyright law, open source software is protected by copyright law.

Open source will spur VoIP development

The possibility of tailor-made VoIP phones took a step closer today with the announcement of the launch of the Symbian^3 (S^3) platform, a new, entirely open source operating system by the Symbian Foundation.

op5 Monitor, an important tool in Amnesty’s work for human rights

- Amnesty has adopted the policy of using Open Source solutions whenever possible. In the light of this, they were running a small project of investigating Open Source alternatives for monitoring systems. They came across solutions like Nagios but also heard about op5 as a Nagios value-added implementation.

Global brands to benefit from major UK Open Source release

A UK-based Open Source company today announced a major upgrade of its award winning systems monitoring platform to meet the demands of its growing enterprise install base. Opsview Enterprise is already in use by global brands like Harvard University, Allianz and Electronic Arts.

SaaS

• Software as a service is set to grow global

  On the other hand, Open Source continues to upset packaged software business models. Major open source projects have expanded across nearly all layers of the stack, including web browsers (Mozilla Firefox), application servers (JBoss, JOnAS, Geronimo), web servers (Apache, Tomcat), mail servers (Sendmail, QMail), databases (MySQL, MaxDB), operating systems (Linux, BSD, RTOS), and programming languages (Perl, PHP, Smalltalk, Java).

• Mulesoft Debuts ‘Cloudcat,’ or Tomcat in the Cloud

  i/OS developers are among those who can benefit from MuleSoft’s launch last week of Cloudcat, a hosted version of Apache’s Tomcat Web application server. By hosting Tomcat in the cloud, Mulesoft aims to make it easier for developers and quality assurance professionals to test their Java-based Tomcat applications prior to making them live.

Mozilla/Browser/Share

• Starting the Discussion: How to Make Mozilla’s Websites Better

  As noted yesterday, there are many good things about Mozilla’s various websites, but the big picture of how they’re organized and work together leaves a lot of room for improvement. Entering our web universe can be really confusing for users, and the current setup limits the ways we can spread the word about all the stuff that’s happening around the organization and community.

• Where does Mozilla go when the monopoly witch is dead?

  That one (point 5) seems to be where Baker is at at the moment, although she’s fairly guarded about it. Speaking earlier at a session at DLD in Munich, (video) Baker had described Firefox as the “first necessary step”, a mechanism for breaking the monopoly.

  This was a process of disruption, and “we still intend to continue disruption… not based so much on cost, because we’ve now moved into a phase where everything is free of charge to consumers. For Mozilla and Firefox the key to disruption is the control point, so our original disruption of the first monopoly was to actually build an industry and to crack the control point open to get to the stage… of creating value.”

• 20 Percent Of TechCrunch Readers Are Already Browsing With Chrome

  Google’s Chrome browser is quickly gaining market share, with one estimate putting it at about 5 percent of total usage, while Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is seeing a drop in overall share. But among TechCrunch readers Chrome is already beating every browser except for Firefox.

• Statistics

  46% That other OS, 42% GNU/Linux and 5.9% MacOS

Databases

• Latest Release of Oracle(R) Database Lite Now Available

  New Support for Synchronizing Open Source SQLite Database and Oracle Database

• Lustre future assured

  Mark Hamilton, former Sun employee and now Vice President, HPC Sales Support, at Oracle, has assured users of the Lustre open source distributed file system, that Oracle plans to continue to invest in engineering, sales and support.

CMS

• Matt Mullenweg, WordPress founder: Why it pays to stay faithful to open source

  As an open source project, WordPress is licensed under the General Public License (GPL). The code for WordPress is created both by Automattic developers as well as a community of hundreds of third-party developers. The open source nature of the product means it can be used by anyone and for anything without paying a licence fee.

• Iwiccle Cms Community Builder – The New Website Building Powerhouses For Business Start-Ups.

  Wiccle Limited proudly announces the official release of its first new Open Source “Content Management System”, iWiccle CMS Community Builder.

Literature

• New Drupal Book – Drupal 6 Performance Tips

  Drupal 6 Performance Tips, by Trevor James and T J Holowaychuk, is a newly-published title from Packt Publishing aimed at Drupal beginners, developers, designers, and webmasters who utilize the Drupal content management system to create robust websites. It provides crucial performance-related information for Drupal users of all experience levels, including module contributors, webmasters who simply configure and maintain Drupal websites, and even themers.

• Book Review: Crafting Digital Media by Daniel James

  Daniel James is the director of the Studio 64 GNU/Linux distribution, which serves as a basis for professional music studio mixing installations, as well as an experienced writer and editor. Thus it is not surprising that he should create an excellent book on music mixing. What did surprise me was how well he covered visual arts as well — photography, drawing, animation, and video production.

Government

• ES: Galician government launches a promotion campaign on open source

  The government of Galicia, one of Spain’s autonomous regions, wants to boost the use of free and open source software by its public administrations and citizens. The regional ministry for Modernisation and Innovation aims to bring together its previous initiatives on open source, it explains in a statement published on 27 January.

Openness

• Open data on international development: let us know what you think!

  Last autumn we released the first draft of a working paper on opening up data related to international development. The report covers how to legally and technically open up aid data, as well as recommendations for how to make aid data easier to find and reuse.

• Humanoid robots to gain advanced social skills

  Led by Radu Horaud, Director of Research at INRIA, the three-year project, which has attracted 2.6m euros in European Commission funding, builds on the POP project (see Wired’s December report), which provided proof-of-concept for the idea that combining auditory and visual information improves a bot’s ability to pick identify human speakers in the midst of background noise.

• MWC: Sony Ericsson pushes for open source, mobile content creation – based around social communities

  The entire thing will be based around open source content, or so claims Christopher David.

Open Access

• The OA Interviews: Sciyo’s Aleksandar Lazinica

  In their efforts to derail the onward march of Open Access (OA) opponents have conjured up a number of bogeymen about Open Access publishing. First, they maintain, asking authors to pay to publish could turn scholarly publishing into a vanity press. Second, they say, OA publishing will in any case inevitably lead to lax or even non-existent peer review. Third, they argue, OA publishing is not financially sustainable. I felt the breath of all three bogeymen on the back of my neck recently, as I conducted an email interview with the CEO of OA publisher Sciyo, Aleksandar Lazinica — an interview that led the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) to ask Sciyo to remove OASPA’s logo from its web site.

  At the heart of the criticism deployed against OA publishing is the claim that levying an article processing charge (APC) on authors will inevitably corrupt the age-old process of scholarly publishing, and the independent peer review system on which it is based.

• The BOAI is eight

  Happy birthday to the Budapest Open Access Initiative, which is eight years old today.

Standards/Consortia

• Introducing HTML 5

  It’s been a decade since the last HTML specification was released. In this article, the first of a two-part series, David Chisnall looks at what is in store for the next version.

• Standardize This! 10 Technology Messes That Need Fixing

  For the past four years, the OpenDocument Format Alliance has been promoting an XML-based format that makes Office Suite documents accessible across platforms and applications. ODF enjoys endorsements from international governments and support in products like Google Docs and Open Office. But until Microsoft beefs up its support for ODF, that movement isn’t going anywhere.

12 Mobile Operators Join Forces To Launch A Mobile App Store (and Dethrone Apple).

According to The Times, Orange, Telefonica, AT&T and nine other operators will work together with a view to building an open tech platform that will produce apps for all mobile phone users. If successful, developers should gradually see it become easier to develop applications for the scope of devices out there.

Chinese electronics tycoon charged in bribery case

The former chairman of one of China’s largest electronics companies, Gome Electrical Appliances Holding, has been charged with operating illegal businesses, insider stock trading and bribery, according to the government’s China Daily newspaper.

Effort to trace ‘conflict minerals’ in electronics

Hewlett-Packard’s efforts to be more socially and environmentally sustainable have taken it to an unexpected–and uncomfortable–place: the war-ravaged Democratic Republic of Congo.

[...]

Proceeds from illegal mining operations, which are controlled by military factions, are helping fuel a complex conflict that crosses between the Democratic Republic of Congo and neighboring Rwanda.

Canadian aid groups told to keep quiet on policy issues

Aid groups say the federal government is casting a chill over advocacy work that takes positions on policy or political issues – and one claims a senior Conservative aide warned them against such activities.

An official with a mainstream non-governmental aid group said that Keith Fountain, policy director for International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda, gave a verbal warning that the organization’s policy positions were under scrutiny: “Be careful about your advocacy.”

Health

• 1 in 3 chance of developing asthma: study

  Researchers followed the medical histories of more than nine million Ontarians for 16 years, between April 1991 and March 2007. A study of the data found the lifetime risk of developing asthma was 33.9 per cent.

• Report: France ‘deliberately’ used soldiers as ‘nuclear guinea pigs’

  France used soldiers as guinea pigs in nuclear tests in the 1960s, deliberately exposing them to radiation from atomic blasts to test the effects, according to a report revealed on Tuesday.

  The secret military report, obtained by AFP, said that between 1960 and 1966 France sent troops onto Algerian desert test sites “to study the physiological and psychological effects caused on humans by an atomic weapon.”

Security

• Report: Prosecutors charging DNA evidence with crimes

  In their effort to beat the statutes of limitations that prevent people from being charged with a crime after a certain amount of time has passed, prosecutors in some parts of the US are trying a new tactic: They’re charging half-eaten food, saliva-crusted glasses or other inanimate objects with the crime.

• A French judge has issued a national arrest warrant for U.S. cyclist Floyd Landis on hacking charges.

  The warrant was issued January 28 after French anti-doping authorities accused Landis of hacking into one of their laboratory computers, Pierre Boudry, the president of France’s anti-doping agency, the Agence Francaise de Lutte contre le Dopage, told Reuters on Monday.

• Demolish the myth that safety, in and of itself, is an absolute good

  In arguing against airport body scanners, I’ve been met with variations on an increasingly prevalent fallacy: “if it makes us a little safer, it’s worth it”; “if it saves one life, stops one crime…” What a specious argument that is. It would “save one child” to ban the car, but we don’t, because it would be disproportionate and we have to get on with normal life, even if we incur a slightly higher element of risk in doing so. Safety, in and of itself, is not an absolute good.

• Man refused bus ride in Dorset over tin of fence paint

  A bus driver told a passenger he could not board his vehicle because he was carrying a tin of fence paint.

  Brian Wakley, from Sandford in Dorset, was 10 miles (16km) from home when told he could not board the 1B Bournemouth to Poole Transdev Yellow Buses service.

• Surveillance drone grounded days after ‘success’

  People already feel that there is excessive surveillance in the UK without the police flying around CCTV cameras to catch us littering or parking in the wrong place.

• Terrorism Act 2006 section 3 Internet Censorship powers have *never* been invoked

  Before the Terrorism Act 2006, UK based internet and telecommunications companies always cooperated voluntarily with the Police, and they appear to have done so since.

• TSA forces travelling policeman to remove his disabled four-year-old son’s leg-braces

  Philadelphia TSA screeners forced the developmentally delayed, four-year-old son of a Camden, PA police officer to remove his leg-braces and wobble through a checkpoint, despite the fact that their procedure calls for such a case to be handled through a swabbing in a private room. When the police officer complained, the supervising TSA screener turned around and walked away. Then a Philadelphia police officer asked what was wrong and “suggested he calm down and enjoy his vacation.”

• Pro-torture, anti-civilisation

  Anderson happily admits that he could not think his way round this. “I have come to the conclusion that there is only one answer to Sydney’s question. Torture the wife and children. It is a disgusting idea. It is almost a tragedy that we even have to discuss it, let alone think of acting upon it.”

  So Anderson appears to recommends torturing innocent women and children to make a man talk. Perhaps we should probe the hypothesis a bit further because for one thing, it makes the assumption that the authorities know for certain that the suspect has definite knowledge about an imminent attack. How? By intelligence produced from other torture sessions, in which men say anything to stop the pain? And where does the collateral torture stop? Would Anderson torture the suspect’s parents and friends? Perhaps he would round up entire communities of people who are deemed to have some slight knowledge of the ticking bomb, or whose screams might induce the suspect to talk?

• Computer-savvy activists launch attacks to punch holes in online shields of authoritative regimes

  Jacob Appelbaum, a San Francisco programmer with the longtime open source Tor Project, a cloaking program used by corporations and free speech activists alike, said closed systems like Haystack concern him. He said it has no peer review the way the Tor Project does, which has been created and vetted by programmers around the world over many years.

  “He has not opened it up for research,” Appelbaum said. “No one has seen a copy of his specifications. There is no way we can understand if the claims that are made (by Haystack) are true.”

  At worst, a faulty program could put its users in Iran at risk, he said. “That very much concerns me,” Appelbaum added. “When people’s lives are at risk, it’s not a good idea to be arrogant.”

Environment

• Anti-whaling activists face trial in Japan

  Two Greenpeace activists who were arrested after attempting to expose embezzlement in Japan’s whaling fleet will go on trial tomorrow in a case campaigners hope will spark a domestic backlash against the heavily-subsidised industry.

• IPCC errors: facts and spin

  Currently, a few errors –and supposed errors– in the last IPCC report (“AR4″) are making the media rounds – together with a lot of distortion and professional spin by parties interested in discrediting climate science. Time for us to sort the wheat from the chaff: which of these putative errors are real, and which not? And what does it all mean, for the IPCC in particular, and for climate science more broadly?

  [...]

  Overall then, the IPCC assessment reports reflect the state of scientific knowledge very well. There have been a few isolated errors, and these have been acknowledged and corrected. What is seriously amiss is something else: the public perception of the IPCC, and of climate science in general, has been massively distorted by the recent media storm. All of these various “gates” – Climategate, Amazongate, Seagate, Africagate, etc., do not represent scandals of the IPCC or of climate science. Rather, they are the embarrassing battle-cries of a media scandal, in which a few journalists have misled the public with grossly overblown or entirely fabricated pseudogates, and many others have naively and willingly followed along without seeing through the scam.

Finance

• Did Goldman Sachs help Britain hide its debts too?

  Much noise this morning surrounding the news that Goldman Sachs (and a number of other banks) allegedly helped Greece to hide the full scale of its ballooning government debts through financial jiggery-pokery over the past decade or so. Eurostat has now demanded an explanation from the Greeks for $1bn of currency swaps it says it was unaware of (though Greece seems to be insisting the authorities did know).

  The original story about Goldman’s involvement appeared in Der Spiegel last week (though the theme has been the subject of investigation by the excellent euro blog A Fistful of Euros for some time), and over the weekend the New York Times produced an excellent feature filling in the gaps. One of the more intriguing lines from that latter piece says: “Instruments developed by Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and a wide range of other banks enabled politicians to mask additional borrowing in Greece, Italy and possibly elsewhere.”

• Goldman Sachs Helped Greece Cover Up Its Huge Debt

  Bottom line: It appears that Goldman Sachs has turned many governments throughout the world into Super-Enrons, with off-balance sheet shenanigans, financial sleight of hand and convoluted accounting. Governments generally don’t need help in this kind of maneuvering, but Goldman with its collection of whiz kid derivative designers has taken the entire process to a new level. A new level so unique that it could very will collapse the financial structure of the manipulated world.

• Volcker to Goldman Sachs: give up banking

  At the time, Goldman said no way. They plan to remain in the banking biz — despite the fact that the company only became a bank to save itself during the financial collapse.

• Will Europe throw out Goldman Sachs?

  Talking to friends over the weekend about the revelations of Goldman Sachs involvement in Greek “fantasy accounting”, I said the EU should throw Goldman out and refuse to do any further business with the bank, but that I didn’t think they would given Goldman’s power in the financial markets. Late last night, former IMF man Simon Johnson wrote that he thinks the EU will indeed ban Goldman. Well, it would certainly would be a good step. Don’t kick Greece out of the EU, but Goldman Sachs.

• Goldman Goes Rogue – Special European Audit To Follow

  We now learn – from Der Spiegel last week and today’s NYT – that Goldman Sachs has not only helped or encouraged some European governments to hide a large part of their debts, but it also endeavored to do so for Greece as recently as last November. These actions are fundamentally destabilizing to the global financial system, as they undermine: the eurozone area; all attempts to bring greater transparency to government accounting; and the most basic principles that underlie well-functioning markets. When the data are all lies, the outcomes are all bad – see the subprime mortgage crisis for further detail.

• Goldman Sachs Shorted Greek Debt After It Arranged Those Shady Swaps

  Goldman Sachs arranged swaps that effectively allowed Greece to borrow 1 billion Euros without adding to its official public debt. While it arranged the swaps, Goldman also sought to buy insurance on Greek debt and engage in other trades to protect itself against the risk of a default on those swaps. Eventually, Goldman sold the swaps to the national bank of Greece.

• Greece (not Grease) and Goldman Sachs

  The New York Times is reporting that Goldman Sachs helped Greece pull the old ’sheist and stall’ made famous by American Bankers.

• Goldman Sachs in new storm over secret deal to mask Greek debts

  Greece’s vast deficits caused it to fail the criteria for joining the single European currency in 1999, but it succeeded in 2001.

  Member nations had to reduce their budget deficit to less than 3 per cent of gross domestic product and trim national debt to less than 60 per cent of GDP.

• Goldman Sachs Hid Greece’s Debt

• Bombshell: Goldman Sachs Helped Greece Cover Up Its Huge Debt

• Greece’s Goldman Sachs Swaps Spawn EU Dispute on Disclosure

  A dispute is unfolding about how long European Union officials have known that Greece used derivatives to conceal its growing budget deficit.

  Greece turned to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. in 2002, just after adopting the euro, to get $1 billion in funding through a swap on $10 billion of debt, Christoforos Sardelis, head of Greece’s Public Debt Management Agency at the time, said in an interview last week. Eurostat, the EU’s statistics office, was aware of the plan, he said. Risk Magazine also reported on the swap in July 2003.

• Goldman Sachs again?

  How come Goldman Sachs is part of so many catastrophic economic scenes? The latest? Greece! Greece is on the edge and it turns out that the country is up to it’s eyeballs in deals that mislead investors and regulators.

• Greek Probe Uncovers ‘Long-Term Damage’ From Swaps Agreements

  A Greek government inquiry uncovered a series of swaps agreements with securities firms that may have allowed it to mask its growing debts.

  Greece used the swaps to defer interest repayments by several years, according to a Feb. 1 report commissioned by the Finance Ministry in Athens. The document didn’t identify the securities firms Greece used. The government turned to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. in 2002 to obtain $1 billion through a swap agreement, Christoforos Sardelis, head of Greece’s Public Debt Management Agency between 1999 and 2004, said in an interview last week.

• Financial Crises: Is Goldman Sachs Ubiquitous?

  Now Goldman Sachs (GS) is being painted into the center of the emerging picture of the Greek crisis. An article in Satuday’s New York Times by Louise Story, Landon Thomas Jr. and Nelson D. Schwartz describes how Goldman designed vehicles to transfer current obligations of the Greek government far into the future. This helped Greece to appear to be satisfying the fiscal requirements of the EU (European Union) by practicing deception.

• Goldman Sachs faces ‘Robin Hood tax’ vote-rigging claims

  The Robin Hood Tax campaign alleged that a Goldman computer was one of two computers that allegedly “spammed” the internet poll with more than 4,600 “no” votes in less than 20 minutes on Thursday.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• ALIA join forces with Inspire Foundation, Google and Yahoo to battle Senator Conroy’s internet filter

  Senator Conroy’s internet filter has been the cause of much news and action from local residents and the world at large, most recently sparking attacks on government websites.

• Do Smart Phones Thwart Public Records Laws?

  State leaders in Florida are in a battle with technology: new forms of communications that make it difficult for public officials to follow the law.

  The state has one of the best government public record laws in the country. Virtually every public document is accessible to the public. And though the state is embracing the perks of advanced technology — the Legislature just started piloting the use of electronic meeting packets, instead of printing them on paper — the use of cell phones and BlackBerrys is causing concern. It’s simply too difficult to archive all communications.

• Tyranny of the Olympics

  In the run up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) defended its choice of China by arguing that the Games could contribute to the democratisation of an authoritarian regime, making a closed society more open and bringing the force of international law to bear on the hosts. As we now know, the record proved less impressive than the claims. In fact, there is a stronger case to be made for the obverse—that the Olympics can contribute to the coarsening of democracy. The 2010 Winter Olympic Games, which start on 12th February in Vancouver, is a case in point.

• WikiLeaks editor: why I’m excited about Iceland’s plans for journalism

  In my role as WikiLeaks editor, I’ve been involved in fighting off more than 100 legal attacks over the past three years. To do that, and keep our sources safe, we have had to spread assets, encrypt everything, and move telecommunications and people around the world to activate protective laws in different national jurisdictions.

  We’ve become good at it, and never lost a case, or a source, but we can’t expect everyone to make such extraordinary efforts. Large newspapers, including the Guardian, are forced to remove or water down investigative stories rather than risk legal costs. Even internet-only publishers writing about corruption find themselves disconnected by their ISPs after legal threats. Should these publications not relent, they are hounded, like the Turks & Caicos Islands Journal, from one jurisdiction to other. There’s a new type of refugee – “publishers” – and a new type of internet business developing, “refugee hosting”. Malaysia Today is no longer published in Malaysia. Even the American Homeowners Association has moved its servers to Stockholm after relentless legal attacks in the United States.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• Incumbents Blocking Broadband Stimulus Efforts Because They Don’t Like Competition

  The last thing the government wanted to do in the middle of a recession was help fund an innovative startup that would disrupt a big employer. But there was one interesting aspect of the stimulus package: it suggested that anyone taking the government money would have to share access to infrastructure — something that makes a lot of sense, if you’re encouraging competition.

• EU Council Presidency: Spain pushes for flawed Net policies

  Last week, the Spanish Presidency of the EU Council came up with a new draft resolution1 in response to the Commission’s communication on enhancing the enforcement of intellectual property rights (IPR) in the internal market.

Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights

• Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead

  ODDLY ENOUGH, THE Dead’s influence on the business world may turn out to be a significant part of its legacy. Without intending to–while intending, in fact, to do just the opposite–the band pioneered ideas and practices that were subsequently embraced by corporate America. One was to focus intensely on its most loyal fans. It established a telephone hotline to alert them to its touring schedule ahead of any public announcement, reserved for them some of the best seats in the house, and capped the price of tickets, which the band distributed through its own mail-order house. If you lived in New York and wanted to see a show in Seattle, you didn’t have to travel there to get tickets–and you could get really good tickets, without even camping out. “The Dead were masters of creating and delivering superior customer value,” Barry Barnes, a business professor at the H. Wayne Huizenga School of Business and Entrepreneurship at Nova Southeastern University, in Florida, told me. Treating customers well may sound like common sense. But it represented a break from the top-down ethos of many organizations in the 1960s and ’70s. Only in the 1980s, faced with competition from Japan, did American CEOs and management theorists widely adopt a customer-first orientation.

• My Take on the NY Times Pay Wall

  The main problem of this approach is that over the years of free access, the New York Times has trained its readers for years that the right price (or the Anchor) is $0 — and since this is the starting point it is very hard to change it….

  Because we’re not very good at figuring out what we are willing to pay for different products and services, the initial prices that new products are presented with can have a long term effect on how much we are willing to pay for them. We basically can’t figure out how much pleasure the New York Times gives us in terms of $ — so we go back and pay the same price we have paid before. This means that getting people to pay for something that was free for a long time will be very challenging, but it also means that if the New York Times were to offer some new service at the same time that they start charging, they might be more likely to pull it off.

• France’s Le Fig Unveils Paid Features, But ‘News Will Be Free Forever’

  Another week, and another newspaper opts for a paid-content model: French daily Le Figaro has now announced price tiers for its delayed, previously announced offering, which will go live on Monday…

  But, instead of hoisting up a paywall around all its news conent, Le Fig is going for a freemium model, charging only for extras like newsletters, a digital copy of its printed edition, social media features – and booking you a dinner table. The new features come in three tiers, but spokesperson Antoine Daccord tells paidContent:UK: “News will be free forever…”

• UK Court Finds That Simply Linking To Infringing Videos Is Not Infringing

  FACT originally claimed that the site “facilitated” copyright infringement on the internet, despite that not being a part of UK law. Eventually, the official charges were “Conspiracy to Defraud and breaches of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act,” which is quite similar to what OiNK’s admin was charged with. And just like how OiNK’s Alan Ellis was found not guilty, the court has sided with TV links, noting that it didn’t actually infringe on anyone’s copyrights directly. Of course, this still took years of having to fight it out in court and a ton of resources — some of which were frozen by a “financial restraining order” during the case itself.

• Digital Britain Minister Insists No One Is Creative If They Don’t Earn Money

  He goes on to suggest that a statement like that, so revealing in how Timms views the world, should get Timms fired, as he’s basically admitting that he’s only there to protect corporate interests, rather than actual creativity.

• Universal Music Gets A New CEO… Who Thinks CDs Are The Future

  Yeah, good luck with that. Between you and Warner Music opting-out of online streaming services, it’s as if the major record labels are simply trying to accelerate their own demise. Have they taken out life insurance policies on themselves? In the meantime, Vivendi, who’s watching over Universal Music these days?

• Friday frivolity: Beyonce’s pirated bikini

  In what has to be one of the more bizarre copyright disputes, the underwear manufacturer Triumph sued Sony because Beyoncé was wearing copyright infringing underwear in her music video “Video Phone”. Seriously.

• EMI Apparently Forgot Grey Album Disaster; Issues Takedown Of Wu Tang vs. Beatles

  And here we are today, as EMI/Capitol (who, last we saw, was trying to bootstrap a fake word of mouth viral campaign, after its suits blocked a real viral campaign) is fighting to stay alive, as it is massively in debt, with little hope of getting out of it.

• Nina Paley’s “All Creative Work is Derivative”

  This is an amazing animation by Nina Paley, “America’s Best-Loved Unknown Cartoonist.” Entitled “All Creative Work Is Derivative” (and blogged here on her blog), and concluding “All creative work builds on what came before,” the video is built from images of of statues and paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

• Draft letter to USTR on copyright extension

  This brings me to the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). It is an anti-democratic outrage, not to have published the terms of the draft agreement and suggests to the skeptical that the USTR is engaged in a shady deal which will not stand the light of public disclosure and discussion. One must assume that we are trying to browbeat our trading partners into accepting terms that they are resisting rather than examining the pluses and minuses of such an agreement for each of the concerned parties.

• EU Council signals new attacks on the ‘Net

  …dragging in healthcare, criminal sanctions, ACTA, and simple, old-fashioned, rights-holder blackmail: ” clear the net, and we’ll set up legal offers”.

  After the Telecoms Package has opened up the possibilities for restricting the Internet, the EU is trying to move in closer on copyright and IP enforcement. A new European Council document is calling for stronger penalties for IP infringement and seeks to re-open a shelved proposal for criminal measures.

  The document is an internal one drawn up by the Spanish Presidency, and is being discussed in a series of
  meetings which began last October, in parallel with Council discussions on the Anti-counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).