The demand for Linux administrators is on the rise, but CIOs have trouble finding IT pros with all of the qualities needed to run an open source environment.
There is a finite supply of developers in the world, and app developers don’t grow on trees. Specifically, I think desktop Linux application developers are soon going to be in short supply: an unintended consequence of the fact that Android and MeeGo are each Linux-based.
Sony today took quick action to shut down PS3 modders with legal action against PS Jailbreak. The console maker was granted a temporary ban on PS Jailbreak in Australia that will prevent the USB mod, which ‘unlocks’ the PS3 to allow unapproved software, from being sold in the country until a final decision from courts on whether it remains legal. The terms discovered by PS3Hax also give Sony control over current inventory and will likely see it reverse engineer the hack to patch against it as well as destroy the stock.
However, when IBM broke out data for “Critical and High Vulnerability” disclosures, Microsoft is king of the heap, with 73% of disclosures involving Windows. Linux was #216%, and Apple was #3 with 9%, as you can see in the figure below.
As the Smartphone Summer of 2010 lurches to a close, Verizon Wireless and Motorola have refreshed their product lines with the Droid 2 ($200 with a two-year contract), an update to the 10-month-old popular Droid slider phone.
The problem was discovered by Rafal Wojtczuk of Invisible Things Lab (ITL) while working on Qubes OS, ITL’s virtualization-based, security-focused operating system. ITL’s CEO Joanna Rutkowska describes the flaw on the company’s blog and Wojtczuk released a paper [PDF] on August 17 with lots more details. In that paper, he notes that he reported the problem to the X.org security team on June 17, and by June 20 the team had determined that it should be fixed in the kernel. But it took until August 13 before that actually happened.
Aluratek’s Libre e-reader comes in different colors and is priced at $169 on the company’s website. The device can open e-books in the PDF, ePub, MOBI, PRC, RTF and text electronic book formats.
Now that Hewlett-Packard has announced plans to release a webOS tablet early next year, its next big goal–in addition to building the device–is to persuade software developers to write apps for the mobile gadget. Given the early popularity of Apple’s iPad, as well as the imminent arrival of numerous tablets running Google’s Android OS, that task could prove challenging.
Since the recent HP buyout of PALM we have been waiting for what HP may have in store for us. Well HP’s CTO Phil McKinney has tweeted some pictures of 3 new devices that could be released in the near future. The picture has the devices blacked out so we can only see their outlines but 1 seems to be a tablet, other a phone, and 3rd is something on his wrist maybe a media player? The second link on his twitter status leads us to a SXSW panel that he will be speaking at about devices of the future. So these devices may be further off than we think, or he might bring the future to us now.
Early this year, the MeeGo project was introduced by Intel and Nokia and brought the market a distinctive concept of using the Linux platform in the mobile device.
While developer interest in Android is finally starting to catch up to iOS, the open-source OS is far from the most convenient system to work with. Joe Hewitt, the extremely talented developer behind the iPhone’s Facebook app, recently switched over to Android due to his frustration with the restrictive nature of App Store policies.
Dominating the front of the 7 is a resistive 16 million colour 800 x 480 7in LCD screen with a matt finish. Archos has a tradition of quality displays and the 7 Home Tablet doesn’t disappoint; it’s crisp, bright and colourful although the viewing angle is not exactly robust in the vertical plane.
I’ve written before about the challenges of making money on Android apps.
Well, Arron La, maker of the Advanced Task Manager app has released some interesting data that suggests that, even with its problems, Android can make a decent amount of money for someone. No, it’s not crazy iPhone app money, but it’s a start.
U.S.-based Android users are an active (and likely multiplying) bunch, according to new data from a mobile payment specialist called Bango. The company’s determined that, between the first and second quarters, the volume of Web browsing conducted on Android devices increased by a whopping 400 percent.
Despite recent economic improvement, 82% of organizations are facing flat or falling IT budgets in 2011, up from 78% in 2010. As a result, implementation success comes from providing strategic value while minimizing both capital and operational expenses. Alternatives such as cloud-based services and open-source derived products have the potential to reduce these costs while meeting business application requirements.
We have an awesome schedule line-up with Free talks: Jon Maddog Hall to deliver the kick-off keynote Friday September 10, Stormy Peters to answer the AM keynote question Who is stealing your desktop and closing keynote of Christopher “Monty” Montgomery on the The Digital Media Frontier.
Maybe you need some time learning Linux on the desktop skills. Even if you have always used Windows, by the end of the Ohio LinuxFest Linux Basics class, you will be savvy enough to install Linux and transfer your daily work into the GNOME desktop environment with Ubuntu. This class is a great too for anyone who wants an overview of Linux to broaden your IT knowledge. Either way, you will have a hands-on experience which will turn you into a bug-one crushing warrior.
Google OS spotted a new addition to the Chromium browser: an about:labs page. Load it up, and you’ll see experimental browser features which you can enable — like side tabs on Windows and tab expose on Mac.
Bugs are nothing new to the developers version of Chrome, which is intended to be a rougher version of the browser than the beta or stable channels. A new bug indicates that the new developers version is incompatible with streaming Netflix movies, while another appears to be affecting the rendering of extension fonts. Some users are reporting that the search function in the location bar is no longer working for them, although that doesn’t appear to be affecting all users at this time. Because these bugs are in the developers version, it’s expected that they’ll get fixed before the beta and stable versions receive updates.
Oracle MySQL end users say it’s still too early to see how Oracle will invest in the open source database platform, but they won’t hesitate to migrate to other MySQL forks if Oracle MySQL hits a dead end.
In November 2007, Jonathan Schwartz wrote on his blog “Congratulations Google, Red Hat and the Java Community!” praising Google’s use of Java in Android.
The Android build, now at version 1.3.5, has a longer change list, including: more stable preview of blog posts, a fix regarding multi-language support which made long strings of text break the interface, a patch for an issue which caused the option to turn off the Mobile Theme to randomly disappear, and another one for the occasional adding of random extra paragraph HTML tags when editing a blog post.
At VA Hospitals nationwide, the government was deploying VISTA. No, not Microsoft Windows Vista, VISTA – the open source medical records system. It keeps track of all of information concerning a patient’s care – no matter where in the country they go. Medications, pharmacies, doctor visits, dates, diagnosis.. it is all there. Nurses recommended that VISTA work with scan-able wrist bands. Now patients’ wrists are scanned prior to medicating and procedures with immediate feedback for the medical professionals who are providing the care as the care is administered. It saves lives and the government money. This is change that I can believe in.
Earlier this month, the National Archives of the United Kingdom launched legislation.gov.uk to provide public access to a primary source of legal information for citizens. Legislation.gov.uk covers more than 800 years of legal history in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
This is not the first chunk of geo code that SimpleGeo has opensourced (just go check Github). They are in the business of selling geodata and geo cloud services. By releasing these tools they make it easier for companies without geoexpertise to get hooked on their services. As SimpleGeo opens up it’s market and takes on more customers we’ll see that happening. Along the way it’s a great benefit to the mapping and mobile commmunity.
After launching just over a year ago with only 47 data sets, the “Raw Data Catalog” catalog on Data.gov now has 2,326 entries that have been collectively downloaded almost three-quarters of a million times. Of course, even these sizable download counts understate the actual impact of this data, which is being embedded in a variety of sites and apps, like those being developed for the Health 2.0 Developer Challenge.
Panvidea™, a global leader in on-demand video encoding, preparation, processing and distribution for entertainment and advertising content across any digital platform, has today announced broad and comprehensive support for Google’s new WebM project, along with Adobe, Microsoft, and more than forty other publishers, software and hardware vendors. The new WebM open web media format, based on the VP8 open source video codec, is immediately available to all users of Panvidea’s cloud based video encoding and processing service (www.panvidea.com) at no additional charge as part of the company’s already extensive list of the highest quality video and audio codecs and containers.
But if you use Google’s new, free phone-calling option (http://gmail.com/call), that figure drops to zero.
On Wednesday, the Web giant announced that American users of its Gmail Web service could call numbers in the United States and Canada for free from within their browsers. Calls elsewhere cost less than many traditional long-distance domestic calls: You pay 2 cents a minute to call Ireland, Korea, Argentina and many other countries. (Google’s rates top out at 99 cents a minute for those calling the island nation of Nauru.)
There is very little evidence, if any, that Sarah Palin hates teachers, or that Andrew Breitbart is a racist. Yet a recent flood of viral stories propagated by internet journalists allegedly catch prominent conservatives red-handed in acts of hate.
A single major error can damage a news organization. But incessant lesser ones can be more harmful. Like a cancer, they gradually destroy credibility and eventually sever the organization’s bond of trust with its audience.
Many readers say that’s happening with The Post. This summer, and especially over the past month, there has been a spike in complaints about inexcusable “little” mistakes.
[...]
Many complaints involve mistakes online, where editing sometimes seems minimal. Several readers have said inaccurate information has remained even after they alerted writers or the Web site.
What Digg may benefit from is the new seamlessness of the submission and consumption processes. Users that are looking for a curated stream alongside the popular content can do it on Digg. The majority of Digg’s userbase will likely find the new design refreshing and it very well may gain some traction among users that feel overwhelmed with the real-time news stream or the pontifications in their news feed. Better yet, Digg may attract a whole new audience looking for a place to discover news through curated sources.
The former BBC and ITV chairman Michael Grade has called for the corporation to be reduced in size, claiming it is “almost unmanageable now” and “too big”.
Grade, who was BBC chairman for two-and-a-half years from May 2004, also said he thought that some of the licence fee should be shared with Channel 4.
Already explorers have documented caved-in roofs, weakening decks, a stern perhaps on the edge of collapse, and the disappearance of Titanic’s crow’s nest—from which lookout Frederick Fleet spotted history’s most infamous iceberg. (Watch an animation of Titanic’s iceberg collision, breakup, and sinking.)
obert Moffat, once tipped for the top job at IBM, has blamed his mistress for encouraging him to give her information which she used for insider dealing.
He is facing securities fraud and conspiracy charges, and prosecutors are asking for a six month prison sentence.
Intel Corp., the world’s largest chipmaker, is close to an agreement to buy Infineon Technologies AG’s wireless business, three people with direct knowledge of the discussions said.
The former chairman and founder of Indian outsourcer Satyam Computer Services was released on bail on Wednesday by the High Court in Andhra Pradesh, state of south India.
Three people were sentenced to prison terms Thursday for their roles in a multimillion-dollar scheme targeting payments to IT and consulting services vendors from four state governments, the U.S. Department of Justice said.
Imagery from a NASA spacecraft has revealed that the Moon has shrunk significantly in recent times: indeed, instruments placed by the Apollo astronauts are thought to have recorded the rumbling, crunching sounds of lunar shrinkage carrying on in just the last few decades.
The Mars Hoax is once again showing up in emails all around the world. It states that the planet Mars will appear in the sky as large as the Moon on August 27, 2010. This will not happen! It is all a hoax! And, many of you are perpetuating this email falsehood.
A third impact of a body onto the planet Jupiter in thirteen months has been recorded by two amateur astronomers in Japan. The resulting flash is shown on a video taken by one of the Japanese astronomers.
Good news today for sufferers from jet lag, bipolar depression, interstellar or interplanetary colonists and others plagued by disorders relating to the circadian rhythm – or body clock.
Japan’s justice minister Keiko Chiba has invited the press to enter the Tokyo Detention Centre execution chamber, shortly after she personally attended the hanging of two convicted murderers.
More than 40 percent of the world’s spam is coming from a single network of computers that computer security experts continue to battle, according to new statistics from Symantec’s MessageLabs’ division.
Rustock’s use of TLS is now averages between 0.1 and 0.2 percent of all spam, peaking at 0.5 percent, a tiny fraction of the levels seen in March when it reached averages of around 25 percent with a peak of as much as 77 percent.
British Airways has apologized for telling 275 passengers en route from London to Hong Kong that their Boeing 747 was in imminent danger of crashing into the sea.
Regardless of whether Iran is developing nuclear weapons or not, nuclear programmes breed mistrust and constitute a major proliferation threat. The international community is failing to address this problem. A lasting solution to the spread of nuclear weapons should include an end to enrichment, the phase-out of nuclear power and complete disarmament by all nuclear weapon states.
Unfortunately for the Gulf’s fishing and shrimping economy, many of us will choose not to feed ourselves from its supply for a while, but the decision to stop feeding our voracious addiction to petroleum with deep sea deposits is more controversial. Even as the fishing industry, wildlife, and wetlands that were hit by the Gulf spill remain in a desperate condition, offering a bleak reality check on the consequences of our oil dependence, one can still hear “Drill Baby, Drill!” echoing through the halls of Congress.
Kristina Hill, PhD, Affiliate ASLA, is Chair of the Landscape Architecture department at the University of Virginia. Recently, the American Society of Landscape Architects interviewed her about how best to manage the effects of climate change, especially in designing cities.
U.S. energy use fell in 2009 and Americans used more wind and solar power and less electricity generated by burning coal and natural gas, according to a survey by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
A team of economists from the University of Munich recently released a study examining the effects of mandatory parking minimums on development in urban and suburban Los Angeles. The team found that parking minimums “significantly increase” the amount of land devoted to parking, to the detriment of water quality, pedestrian safety and non-automotive modes of transportation.
A group of scientists have found that up to 79% of the oil in the Gulf of Mexico may still remain, contradicting earlier findings by a U.S. government study that found nearly 75% of the oil had dissipated.
People who make an effort to be eco-friendly – for instance by recycling glass bottles, turning off lights and unplugging cellphone chargers – have no idea what they’re on about, according to a new survey. Those who don’t bother are more likely to know what actually saves energy and what doesn’t.
More than four out of five Australian IT departments have never seen their power bill – a stark example of how a lack of metrics has led to Australia falling behind the UK and US when it comes to greening ICT.
In case you’ve ever wondered just how far a Mars rover might have wandered if it had set out from your front door, or indeed the exact area covered by the Chernobyl radiation cloud, if that ill-fated nuclear facility had been built at your mum’s house, then look no further than BBC Dimensions.
Louisiana fishermen’s activist Kindra Arnesen says dock owners are asking fishermen to sign waivers that put the full responsibility for toxins found in the catch on the fishermen themselves.
Spanish fishermen who took part in a clean-up operation after the Prestige oil tanker spill in 2002 have shown symptoms of chromosomal damage and respiratory problems, a study released Tuesday said.
The study, conducted by Spanish researchers between September 2004 and February 2005 on 501 fishermen who helped clean up Europe’s worst oil spill, was published in the American review Annals of Internal Medicine.
As the housing boom began to slow in mid-2006, investors became skittish about the riskier parts of those investments. So the banks created — and ultimately provided most of the money for — new CDOs. Those new CDOs bought the hard-to-sell pieces of the original CDOs. The result was a daisy chain that solved one problem but created another: Each new CDO had its own risky pieces. Banks created yet other CDOs to buy those.
QE in 08/09 has been applied. Basically the FED prints money and buys stuff. Note that this is no different from how the modern banking system works. Banks create money out of thin air (that is the money multiplier) and PEOPLE buy stuff with it. Market centric wisdom says that markets will allocate that money to the most productive use. SO let the banks create money, lend it and let the people make the smart decisions.
That’s where the Cringely Startup Tour stopped recently to visit Maverick Software Consulting and find out where’s the beef. This Maverick (the consulting company) has come up with an amazing business model for software consulting services — one that employs American programmers yet meets or beats the cost of using programmers in India or China. But it is much more than just a price-competitive service: Maverick Software Consulting also gives prospective technical employers a newer and better way to directly recruit good programmers.
[...]
While Maverick looks only marginally profitable on paper, the business has no debt, is completely bootstrapped, is keeping dozens — eventually hundreds — of jobs in America. And if they can scale the business the way they think they can there’s nothing that says the founders won’t soon be paying themselves a bootload of money while remaining mavericks — unbranded.
Saturday was Invisible People.tv day at YouTube. InvisiblePeople.tv is a site/project that utilizes social media tools like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace to spread awareness about the growing homelessness problem.
The channel was featured on YouTube’s home page over the weekend, and YouTube discussed it in a company blog post, speaking with Founder Mark Horvath.
Sales of previously occupied homes plunged last month to the lowest level in 15 years, despite the lowest mortgage rates in decades and bargain prices in many areas.
Former UBS banker Bradley Birkenfeld hit out on Saturday against the “corrupt” US judiciary which sent him to jail even though he was the whistleblower who led to the US tax fraud case against the bank.
“The Department of Justice’s corruption is evident today — why am I the only one in prison when I had revealed everything?” the US banker asked in a French-language interview with Swiss newspaper Le Temps.
A new U.S. law that increases visa fees to pay for border security is a national issue for India rather than one that only affects Indian outsourcing companies, according to India’s National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom).
Are you a privacy lawyer? Would you take pride in working for a company with “a real soul”? Is your brain impervious to cognitive dissonance? Could you grow a brass neck?
The Australian Sex Party has charged that anti-filter corporate campaigner Google censored its lampoon advertisement “Jerk Choices,” reclassifying it as Adult Only despite the parody already having been played in prime time on free to air television.
The Greens propose spending the $40.8m the Labor Government has budgeted for cyber-safety initiatives on range of measures including mandating the supply of PC-based filtering by ISPs, further research into cyber safety risks, strengthened law enforcement, and net literacy education.
A Facebook account established by a North Korea-linked Web site was deleted by the social networking service on Friday, but a new group sprang up over the weekend to take its place.
The account belonged to Uriminzokkiri, a Web site that provides Korean-language news and propaganda from North Korea’s central news agency. The Web site appears to be run from servers in China but is ultimately controlled from Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea.
The Facebook group appeared on Thursday and carried links to articles on the Uriminzokkiri Web site and videos on the site’s YouTube channel. In its short life the Facebook group managed to attract a handful of Facebook friends before becoming unavailable during the Friday U.S. business day.
“The page in question was removed because it violated our terms of use,” said Kumiko Hidaka, a Facebook spokeswoman by e-mail.
“It is clearly a smear campaign,” Assange told Arabic news network Al-Jazeera in a live telephone interview Sunday. “… The only question is, who was involved?”
CUSTOMER DATA IN SKIPS has been PC World’s idea of secure financial information disposal and it has got the retailer into a spot of bother with the authorities.
DSG, which owns PC World, has been found in breach of the Data Protection Act by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).
Epson has been pursuing the alleged patent infringement since 2006. It has issued cease and desist demands to Medea International to no avail and now wants its day in court.
Founded in 2006 as Project Playlist, the revenue-lite operation made widgets for social network sites as Facebook and MySpace, and in its heyday boasted almost 40 million users.
The largest amount, $16.6m, is owned to Universal Music; but independent network Merlin is also owed $1.68m, with songwriters’ association ASCAP out of pocket by $377,323, according to Chapter 11 documents.
Summary: Weekly notes and links about Novell’s business, including OpenSUSE and former Novell staff
Mail
ONE of Novell’s businesses which suffered the most based on the latest report [1, 2, 3] corresponds to GroupWise. The latest gainer is usually Google, but sometimes it’s Microsoft or IBM. Here is a new example of Novell being dumped:
Yet, after appointing its first IT lead in January since opening in 1991, the museum has shifted from the ageing Novell GroupWise email platform to Microsoft Online Services – the first of many changes to come – in three months.
Novell’s business is failing and the company yearns for its legacy, the days of dominance in the area of networking. A little while ago Novell uploaded a decade-old BrainShare Pilgrimage video [1, 2]. Why does Novell spread this type of stuff in YouTube?
Fog Computing
Novell’s latest Fog Computing push continues to receive some coverage [1, 2, 3, 4]. To quote one article, “Numerous vendors are adjusting their strategies accordingly: Novell, for instance, earlier this week officially launched the Novell Cloud Security Service (NCSS), which wraps identity and security management around SaaS applications.”
Looking at OpenSUSE without paying attention to its own version of the news, there is nothing substantial. The past two weeks have been very quiet and there was even a scheduled downtime. “We will have a service outage this saturday (21 August) due to work on power supply in one of our server rooms,” said the announcement.
Several posts were published about OpenSUSE Conference 2010 [1, 2], about FrOSCon (including from Sirko Kemter, who is attending many such events [1, 2, 3, 4]), and Jos, the new community manager of OpenSUSE, who is catching up and meeting colleagues at GUADEC. From Vincent (of GNOME/Novell):
Jos, the new openSUSE community manager, happens to live just a few kilometers away from the Hague. He was still at his previous work back then, but we were able to share a dinner before the Canonical party.
But recently, we’ve been joined by two friends: Frédéric, who’s working on SUSE Meego, and Jos, the new openSUSE community manager. And guess what? We expect more!
OpenSUSE continues to improve and contribute to Firefox 4.0 on KDE and to KDE in general [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. There is also OBS packaging going on [1, 2, 3]. OpenSUSE’s dependence on Novell is still a risk.
People
“Senetas looks to boost consulting division,” says this article and Novell skills happen to be sought.
It is on the acquisition hunt to boost its consulting practice and wants to add Novell consultants to its team.
Tom Quinn isn’t the kind of entrepreneur who needs help getting his ideas in front of the right people. He’s a former president of networking software maker Novell (NOVL), and he invented the motion-controller technology behind Nintendo’s (NTDOY) Wii while running a company called Gyration, where he raised $40 million in venture capital.
Prior to Deltek, Clark was Vice President of World Product Marketing at Novell, Inc., an industry pioneer in Netware products. At Novell, Clark led company-wide efforts to establish product families, go-to-market strategies, value positions, and competitive differentiation for its diverse array of products.
Existing Novell employees were approached for a comment in Processor and IDG too:
Jason Dea, product marketing manager at Novell (www.novell.com), says now that the cost savings of virtualization have been realized and acknowledged, the focus is shifting to the promise of cloud computing, enabled by virtualization, as a better way for administrators to run workloads and potentially run new workloads that were not possible with yesterday’s technology platforms.
Paul Kangro, applied technology strategist at Novell, said security concerns coupled with the view that cloud could be a waste of money has resulted in CFOs being sceptical of what the cloud can achieve.
There is nothing too exciting here, but in case these people end up in particular companies, they might become a substantial risk. Companies are merely aggregations of individuals. █
Summary: As Kyocera decided to buy Sanyo’s mobile phones unit, the Microsoft extortion passes on to yet another brand which makes Android phones
ON a couple of occasions in the past we wrote about Sanyo’s Linux situation [1, 2]. As far as phones are concerned, it’s in Kyocera’s hands now and Kyocera Mita sold out to Microsoft. According to this new article, the “Zio M6000″ Android phone shares an identity with both Kyocera and Sanyo, whose mobile business Kyocera bought.
Kyocera’s first Android phone was announced in March under the name Zio M6000. The phone is now available under the company’s venerable Sanyo brand from no-contract mobile provider Cricket Communications, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Leap Wireless International.
This phone is taxed by Microsoft and should therefore be avoided. There are Android phones whose makers do not pay Microsoft for Linux, so their makers should be rewarded.
“M.A.D. is already hitting the market, at least in the new and lucrative smartphones business.”It is clear that software patents have gone the wrong way (not advancing innovation, just taxation), especially in mobile phones. Vivek Wadhwa wrote about this subject recently [1, 2, 3] (he cites hypePhone patents) and in his personal blog he caries on ranting about software patents. What gives his rants credibility is that he actually got some software patents in the past and he now regrets this.
M.A.D. is already hitting the market, at least in the new and lucrative smartphones business. Apple is one of the aggressors (suing Linux/Android) and Groklaw has just published this excellent overview of the HTC/Nokia/Apple lawsuits situation, in isolation (there are more patents and parties involved in this ‘nuclear war’ of patent monopolies). Pamela Jones writes:
I don’t know about you, but I’ve found it hard to follow the various patent lawsuits involving Apple, Nokia and HTC. First there are so many cases filed all over the place, it’s hard to understand the big picture. And I kept asking myself what it was all about. I mean, what’s it all about really? Because some exhibits filed by HTC have just been unsealed, we get to read Apple admitting in one of the documents that the HTC litigation is indeed about Google and Android and the Open Handset Alliance. Or as Apple puts it, “HTC’s products implicate the Android operating system developed by Google and the Open Handset Alliance.”
This article may easily give the impression that Microsoft is not part of the problem, but Microsoft is already extorting a high number of handset makers, including Kyocera/Sanyo. How big and thus destructive does this ‘nuclear war’ of patent monopolies have to get before some large monopoly like Microsoft, Apple or Nokia calls for the end of software patents? █
Summary: IDG continues to deceive people regarding “FOSS”, now with the appointment of a Microsoft person to run the “Open Source” blog; Ostatic overlooks the aspects which make Microsoft a unique foe of software freedom
IDG has had a fauxpen source blog for just under a year. From the very moment it showed up we warned about those whom IDG had assigned to run it. Editorial control determines convictions, biases, or even the level of self-censorship and funding sources of the publisher (e.g. advertisers or whitepaper clients) have a huge impact.
It was just last week that IDG seeded the "Microsoft loves open source" nonsense (yes, that’s where it originally came from) and it didn’t take long for Bort and Shimel from the fauxpen source blog to add more fuel to it. We explained both in:
Other writers in the fauxpen source blog are actually from proprietary software vendors, namely Black Duck and OpenLogic. There are almost a dozen writers there though, so Amy Vernon and others who are not in the pocket of those in the business of fear or proprietary software tend to add balance sometimes. But now they add Microsoft people, starting with the post “A FOSS project isn’t necessarily a software product.”
That’s just Microsoft’s goal in ‘taming’ its competition. It’s about perception and stereotypes and since Microsoft is a major client of IDG, why not? Maybe Greenpeace should also give a blog to Shell and BP, which now has some green colours in its logo.
“It’s about perception and stereotypes and since Microsoft is a major client of IDG, why not?”Not only “Free software” but also “FOSS” is now under threat of losing its meaning. Just consider subversion of the “FOSS” word by people like Microsoft Florian, a .NET developer. It is reality distortion in action, a clear case of entryism.
The editor of OStatic is sadly enough falling for a lot of it because Microsoft marketers/spinmeisters are increasing PR and charm offensives as part of their attempt to paint others as the source of trouble (Richard Stallman, FSF, ‘dirty hippies’ et cetera). Owing to disinformation campaigns from Microsoft Florian and others, there’s painting of Microsoft rivals as “evil” with reinforcement through polls that can be manipulated (timing, push polling, and documented cases of Microsoft rigging polls). OStaticreaches the conclusion that “For Microsoft and Others, Proprietary And Open Source Coexist,” but for Microsoft, Open Source can only ever be complementary to proprietary software. That’s because Microsoft is in a unique position of actually owning its underlying platform, which is proprietary. IBM does not own GNU/Linux, so it can never truly carry other applications in the dependency sense. Just see what Windows has been doing to the bootloader for example. █
“I once preached peaceful coexistence with Windows. You may laugh at my expense — I deserve it.”
“The developer gives Really Bad Advice, rather than steering these problem administrators off of windows or at least into a virtual machine where the damage is somewhat mitigated:
“If you suffer from this problem, then please do the following…”
“Solution? Don’t use Microsoft products, don’t let others use Microsoft products. We all end up paying for it, just like with any other form of industrial pollution. This time they are again interfering with file systems and ensuring that via the outdated hardware and BIOS, we’re still stuck with shitty MS-DOS disk formats from the 1980s.
“Microsoft has been breaking competing applications for a very long time.” –Anonymous“Microsoft has been breaking competing applications for a very long time. Back before M$ tied MSIE to its OS, the MSIE installation process disabled the market leader, Netscape, if it was present. The list of other legal problems was long. Yet, the habit of breaking competing software seems to get left out of the repeated anti trust actions.
“Information Technology people have always hated the quality of Microsoft products and the behavior of Microsofters. That’s nothing new [1, 2]. The Wikipedia article has been worked over too much by Microsoft spinmeisters as with any other article related to Microsoft or its politics.” █
Summary: Virginia is having a computer failure which may last a whole week and Windows seems to be at the heart of it
YESTERDAY we wrote about some of the latest security concerns at the Pentagon. It’s a Microsoft Windows problem. Over at Linux Today, the editor writes: ‘I guess those bad foreign infiltrators don’t follow the rules, like the USB device ban. And they’re still not saying “Windows.” The Foreign Affairs article is worth reading, if only for its missing some seriously obvious points, like “don’t use a proven malware vector like Windows.”‘
A reader has sent us additional information about security disasters presumably caused by Windows. “The US state of Virginia has a computer failure that has lasted four days and is expected to last through the weekend,” wrote this reader.
“It does not take long to find Microsoft involvement with the service, called VITA.” –Anonymous“It does not take long to find Microsoft involvement with the service, called VITA. The agency uses Microsoft software for web
service, email and recommends it on all systems from desktops to mainframes. A search of the Vita site for “Linux” mostly turns up FUD about security warnings and the last document, which specifies software for systems, contains a lot of FUD about Solaris, Novell and only recommends Linux as an “alternative” for “low end servers”. It is no surprise that a system made by experts like that is expensive and failure prone. Perhaps Northrop Grumman sold Virginia a left over “SmartShip” network [2] [3].
“If the state is going to hand what should be protected public records to a private firm, the least they can do is hand them to a company like Google or IBM with the technical expertise to run things. People who use and push Microsoft are obviously incompetent.” █
Summary: Software which makes GNU/Linux and Free software developers more accessible to Microsoft continues to be developed at Novell
WE occasionally hear about Mono being further developed but rarely about Moon Lie (Moonlight). Moon Lie is still being developed a little, based on this new post about Mono Accessibility 2.1. It is said that for KDE there are benefits in Mono Accessibility too:
Mono Accessibility 2.1 Released
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A huge benefit of this work is that kde will be able to use it without pulling in a bunch of gnome dependencies allowing for a clean desktop independent accessibility infrastructure.
Mono dependencies continue to pose a risk to users and developers, who are simply giving Microsoft too much control over the API of choice. With promotion of Gnome-don’t (Mono) comes a certain liability and while it’s not constructive to ban such programs, shipping them by default (as some distributions do) is helpful to Microsoft, which is suing GNU/Linux and harming its adoption in all sorts of nefarious ways. █
The government of Andalusia, one of Spain’s autonomous regions, is preparing to use a complete open source desktop environment. The analysis of requirements of such a desktop system is nearly completed, the next step will be a few small scale tests, according to a presentation by José Félix Ontañón, one of the software developers involved.
Ontañón talked about the plans by the Andalusian government at the Guadec conference that took place in The Hague, Netherlands, last month.
For the first test, several work stations in the administration will be running a number of open source applications on the proprietary operating system currently used by the administration. In a second phase, a limited number of these desktops will be converted to run a locally tailored version of a Linux distribution.
I was in the Digital booth, which was near to the “Magic Software” booth when two men came up to the Magic booth and asked to see the penguins. The handler explained that the penguins were “resting” and the two men should come back in a couple of hours to see them. As the two people started to leave, I walked up to the group and said to the penguin handler “See that guy?” pointing to one of them, “None of this event would be here if it was not for him…..his name is Linus Torvalds. Show him the freaking penguins.” The handler then brought the penguins out, and Linus saw them and went on his way.
The next day a lady showed up with her two small children, one in a baby carriage, and asked to see the penguins. She was also told to “come back in a couple of hours”. The small entourage started to leave, and once again I wandered over to the booth:
“Remember that guy who was here yesterday who was the architect of the Linux kernel? This is his wife and two daughters, and my godchildren……get out the freaking penguins!”
About a month after Linuxworld I got a call from the show management. Apparently someone had written to the San Francisco Chronicle about how horrible it was that live penguins were “taken from the wild” and made to perform at the event, their “eyes open wide with fear”.
This behavior seems to be more and more common. The more specialized the software is, the more this seems to take place, too. The software vendors know their leveraging capabilities, and seem to adjust their pricing accordingly. They also lock in customers and use the same type of scheme that Microsoft does, thus forcing them to upgrade and pay over and over again.
As I have stated before, practice like this can be completely avoided by using open source software, which is immune to upgrade pricing, licenses, and other flaws of proprietary software. In the case here, I already know of an open source software package that could be used in its place, it’s called gLabels. But this would involve a lot of migration that is difficult to overcome. The options need to be weighed out, and action taken.
My new laptop is a machine which ZaReason was carrying until recently. It seems they have massively upgraded the version I currently have which provides me with a bit of jealousy and awe. For being an inexpensive machine it is plenty powerful for what I need. It is actually really damn powerful! It boasts an Intel Core 2 Duo T7100, 4 GB of memory, 160GB SATA drive, a NVIDIA GeForce 9200M, a 15.4″ widescreen display, camera, DVD burner, Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi, and the lists goes on. Hell, this thing even has HDMI, which I am proud to say, it is the only device in my house with such an option. Anyone have a high definition TV for me so I can test it out?
Oh yeah, I always see people comment on blogs where Linux-laptop vendors are mentioned that they wish there was a company in their country selling these. Guess what? ZaReason ships internationally!
On the last show for a few weeks: Steam not coming to Linux, new Ubuntu release name announced, Intel buys McAfee, Linux gets Google Voice and Video Chat, Dan’s review of the HTC Desire and much more…
About one month ago we reported on the emergence of patches that may fix the Linux desktop responsiveness problems, which is an issue that’s been experienced by many Linux desktop users in recent years. For Linux users it may take many seconds for a menu to appear when clicking on it or a half-minute to do a VT switch, but fortunately it’s becoming a thing of the past with these patches working well for many users and has since been integrated into the mainline Linux kernel. The story though is not over as even more patches have just been published to further improve the Linux desktop responsiveness.
Earlier this month we delivered benchmarks comparing the ZFS, EXT4, and Btrfs file-systems from both solid-state drives and hard drives. The EXT4 file-system was the clear winner in terms of the overall disk performance while Btrfs came in second followed by Sun’s ZFS in FreeBSD 8.2. It was a surprise that in our most recent testing the EXT4 file-system turned around and did better than the next-generation Btrfs file-system, but it turns out that Btrfs regressed hard in Linux 2.6.35 as to be found in Ubuntu 10.10 and other soon-to-be-released distributions. However, regardless of where Btrfs is performing, its speed can be boosted by enabling its transparent zlib compression support.
DRBD is a kernel loadable module, and as of kernel 2.6.33 it is included with the mainline kernel. If you are running a Linux server that has any level of kernel revision past 2.6.33, you already have drbd available, and at most will need to load the management tools. If your server is older than that, you will need to download the tools and the loadable module to get it running.
What this driver update though does provide is a fix that previously prevented XvMC (X-Video Motion Compensation) from initializing (but if there’s anyone still using XvMC in NVIDIA’s binary driver, you should really update your application and driver to utilize the much superior VDPAU API), support for the xorg-server 8 video ABI used by X.Org Server 1.9, a bug that caused extremely slow OpenGL rendering when on X screens other than screen zero when a compositing manager was in use, stability problems on select GPUs such as the GeForce GT 240, a slow kernel virtual address space leak with OpenGL/CUDA/VDPAU applications, and lastly is a bug-fix for hangs when using two or more VDPAU applications simultaneously.
We have reviewed a number of free email clients before. There is the ever so popular Thunderbird, there is Evolution for Linux and then there is Outlook for Windows. An area where Outlook scores fair and square over the other email clients out there is the fact that it integrates common email-related tasks and thus takes care of many chores. You have tasks, calendar, email and social networking (via plugins) all built in into one interface and they all gel together.
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All in all SpiceBird works well and does a good job of providing a single interface for tasks that you need to perform daily. The tabbed interface to track your tasks, calendar and emails all in one application is a big plus. The ability to add Google Gadgets to the start page is awesome.
VLC 1.1.4 is released, this is the fourth bugfix release of the VLC 1.1.x branch. This release comes especially to fix important security issue that was discovered in most windows application, Linux in general is not affected by this security bug. So this new release is targeted for the windows platform.
The Apache Software Foundation, best known for the self-named popular open source Web server, has a variety of other technology that can help enterprises with databases, search, development, and more. Here’s an overview of the best.
With Ubuntu 10.10 in the process of bringing a number of changes into Ubuntu Software Center including a proposal to provide support for commercial Linux applications, the significance of LinApp becomes even more important. The way they organize and manage their mammoth list of commercial Linux applications is something to be looked at for inspiration.
Pianoteq is an effort to model, rather than sample, acoustic pianos and other instruments on the computer. Now in its third major release, its interface and sound generation have each matured. Using mathematical models in place of recorded sounds, an entire grand piano fits in just a few megs of space, rather than requiring several DVDs, and the software maker claims the results can be more natural and playable.
Pianoteq, which runs as do its rivals on Mac and Windows, is also unusual in providing support for the Linux operating system – something some developers have claimed isn’t practical with commercial music software. And a new “Player” addition, announced this month, makes it more affordable. In addition to software development, the team has even launched an extensive piano restoration effort:
http://www.pianoteq.com/kivir
I’ve been impressed with my time playing with Pianoteq’s software. That’s especially meaningful to me, as my background in music has been on acoustic pianos, back to when I was literally old enough to reach the keys for the first time. But I also wanted to know more about how this software developed. Its rigorous approach to modeling has attracted a lot of attention in the virtual instrument world, and the fact that it targets Linux alongside Mac and Windows challenges notions that commercial software can’t make it on the free operating system.
This new version comes with a lot of new features and fixed many bugs, some plugins are now integrated in this software, adding a lot of features like for example: Capture – a new feature that allow you to record your games while playing, Other new features are wine import,PlayOnLinux_016 Cedega import, Offline wine and more.
Gaming On Linux resumed it’s competition after the failed attempt last time.
LGN and GOL made competitions back then, asking for news/articles – but sadly it didn’t go well for both of us.
One of my favorite GNU/Linux games is Tux Racer, a game where the famous Linux penguin, Tux, races down the ski slopes on his belly at dangerously high speeds. I was also a big fan of the Playstation race car series, Gran Turismo. I decided to skip the Playstation 3, but I used to play Gran Turismo a couple of years ago before I got rid of my trusty PS2.
So of course, while I’m spending a glorious and relaxing week hanging out in Boulder, Colorado, the KDE community is working overtime fixing a few showstopper bugs. Version 4.5 of the KDE Software Collection (also known as KDE SC) was released Tuesday, a week late from the original release plan, but it looks like a pretty good one.
Playing with dataengines I started to hack on another topic: sharing of articles on Akregator. I started to feel too much dependent on Google’s infrastructure and decided to move some of my stuff “out of the cloud”. I started with Google Reader and put all my feeds on Akregator. Kudos for Google for allowing me to export my list of feeds and kudos to Akregator that imports the file. Everybody is happy and Google is not evil trying to hold my data.
Fast-forward to now and Microsoft claims to have innovated a new feature. Soon after that KDE refines the same feature and ads it into 4.4. Of course 4.4 was still suffering from numerous bugs. Fast-forward a little bit further into now and you have 4.5 which squashes tons of bugs and offers an amazing desktop that includes a bug-free tiling experience!
Overall, I would say that SliTaz is the best fit. Seeing as most things worked fairly well right away, and no closed-source code was needed (this is an opensource blog after all) I would rate SliTaz an 8 of 10. The only reason for point docking being that overall performance left something to be desired. The best performance goes to Slackware. The boot time was bad, but once booted Slackware was a charm.
Mandriva Linux 2010 Spring is available in three editions: One, Powerpack and Free, for architectures i586 and x86-64. One and Free can be free downloaded from official Mandriva mirrors and via BitTorrent. To download these versions, visit this page. A Community version (community supported) based on Xfce of the One version will also be available. You can also download directly via BitTorrent from this page. The Powerpack version is a commercial version available for purchase on the Mandriva Store site. For more information on differences between versions, visit this page.
Just a few days after Parted Magic 5.3 came out, an update was released, mainly to fix an issue affecting the previous release. Parted Magic 5.4 fixes an issue which caused keyboard input to slow down. Despite the short time between releases, several other issues have been fixed as well and some packages updated.
It was time for a change and we at NetSecL realized that, the new version of NetSecL 3.0 is a live DVD + installation based on OpenSuse. Once installed you can fully enjoy the features of GrSecurity hardened kernel and penetration tools OR if you like to do some penetration testing you can directly run all tools from the live DVD. NetSecL firewall is included as always and most of the penetration tools are ported to the new platform. Also we’d like to mention that we’ve got many other programs up and running with GrSecurity enabled, which is great success especially when it comes to programs like wine, OpenOffice, Vuze, Qemu and many gnome applications. The password for both admin and root user on the DVD is linux.
The Lunar team proudly announce the final release of Lunar Linux 1.6.5 codename ‘Mare Ingenii’!
The last known issues with the ISO have been resolved. We added support for hybrid ISO in the last minute, which mean it’s a lot more easy to install lunar from an usb-stick from now on. The developers are currently brainstorming and voting on ideas to further improve the state of Lunar, an announcement about this will be made later. We also plan to let our users, yes you, to chip in with ideas that will be up for voting within our community, but more on that later. Enjoy the release of Lunar 1.6.5!
One highlight is the Wired Dreams party on Friday, 2010-09-17, after the first event day just next to the primary event location featuring free (as in creative commons) live music and delicious free beer (with some mugs in form of free as in free beer).
Fedora doesn’t suck, but it could be a lot more useful to a lot more people. And either I am right, or I am wrong. Policy, feedback, goals, all of these things will determine how many of the things I would like to see are feasible, in line with Fedora’s longer term vision, and so forth. So let’s see a very specific vision and direction and all be much happier for it.
Canonical uploaded today the new wallpapers and default theme for the up-coming Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) operating system. Seventeen new beautiful wallpapers and a lightweight and eye-candy theme will please every existing and future Ubuntu 10.10 user!
Earlier this month Canonical introduced its own multi-touch framework for Ubuntu that is set to premiere with Ubuntu 10.10 “Maverick Meerkat” and it’s called UTouch and is joined by their own gesture/touch language. That same day as announcing UTouch for Ubuntu that will support devices like the Apple Magic TrackPad and Dell XT2, Canonical proposed the X.Org Gesture Extension to the X.Org development community. While it’s good to see Canonical making more contributions to upstream projects that it depends upon for Ubuntu Linux, the X.Org Gesture Extension is already being re-evaluated and may in fact not be needed.
According to In Media, an existing version of the !ROFL is running an In Fusion software stack, — presumably based on another version of embedded Linux — that is said to be already shipping in handheld devices in China.
ARM Holdings has provided new details about its next-generation Cortex-A series processor core, currently code-named “Eagle.” In a presentation at this week’s “Hot Chips” conference, the company described relevant extensions to its ARMv7-A architecture, including hypervisor extensions and the ability to address more than 4GB of RAM.
According to Engineering for Change blogger Rob Goodier, cell phone carriers could cut costs and pass savings on to customers by taking advantage of the open source technology created by a team of engineers in the telecom industry.
Members of the Android community have done it again by gaining root access on the unreleased Samsung Epic 4G. This device is not yet available to the public, but as you can see, some lucky folks who already have the device have already done it. Those of you who plan on rooting your Epic 4G on launch day, the method already works. That makes 3 out of 4 Galaxy S devices rooted so far. Let’s see if the Fascinate can meet the same fate before launch.
This first Alpha release of Fennec for Android is an exciting first step in bringing browser choice and customization, along with a seamless Web experience across devices, to a leading open mobile platform. Now, developers have the power to use the latest Web technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript to to build fast, powerful and beautiful mobile apps and add-ons that can reach many millions of devices.
Along these same lines, it’s also interesting to note that Google recently added video chat features for Gmail users on Linux. Remember that Chrome OS is positioned to work with applications and data in the cloud. It’s not positioned as an OS for local apps. If users can make VoIP calls that cost nothing or nearly nothing from their Chrome OS devices, and use all their cloud apps too, Chrome OS netbooks instantly become interesting phone/computer hybrids—as do potential Chrome OS tablet devices.
The Google Nexus One experiment was a success in showing the market what Android phones could do, and how competitive they could be. Having similar flagship tablets would have the same results by creating a controlled environment for development and optimization. This would accelerate adoption of the platform, which is what Google really wants. It’s not a hardware company, after all.
The heavy lifting of subtitling a video is done via a browser-based javascript widget with tools that help users add on-screen text without re-uploading or re-transcoding the original video. The project’s Web site serves as a collaborative space where community members can work together on larger video projects, get advice, and track which captioning and subtitling requests have the greatest need. Both the widget and the Web site are licensed under the AGPL license.
Whether you want to display an interactive map of local farmers’ markets on your blog or you’re trying to put together a clickable map displaying branch offices on your corporate Web site, there’s a good chance Polymaps can help you get the job done. It’s a free, open source JavaScript library for making dynamic maps in a Web browser.
Online Twitter archive service Twapper Keeper has just released yourTwapperKeeper, an MIT-licensed, server-based app that functions essentially the same way as the Web-based version. Once downloaded and installed, yourTwapperKeeper lets users define Twitter searches by keyword or hashtag and stores results locally for later retrieval.
A quick look at the JavaOne conference schedule reveals some sessions that were to be conducted by Google, including one entitled “Cloud Cover: Testing Techniques for Google App Engine,” presented by Google software engineer Max Ross. Google also was to participate in a panel session entitled “Taking Java to the Sky: Cloud Computing 2010 Expert Panel,” as well as another session, “High-Performance Java Servers at Google,” featuring Google software engineer Dhanji Prasanna.
Two day weekend format and much lower price! The third edition of Introduction to VistA System Administration with Astronaut will be held in Houston, Texas, September 25-26th.
The h-node project aims at the construction of a database of all the hardware that works with a fully free operating system. The h-node.com website is structured like a wiki in which all the users can modify or insert new contents.
My old friend Serge Wroclawski has been working on OpenStreetMap.org (OSM) for a number of years now. He’s done this because he sees this as a worthwhile project — an open source, user-editable worldwide map — rather than as a way to make money. And that’s good, because Serge has made exactly $0.00 so far from his OpenStreetMap.org work. But this may change before long.
One of the interesting aspects of the original version of Pushdo is that its creator was using it not just to send spam, but also to spread other pieces of malware. This has become a more common business model in recent years as bot herders have looked for new ways to make money from the millions of compromised PCs under their control.
Like the Greenpeace protesters who occupied Kingsnorth power station three years ago, we argued that any crimes we committed paled in comparison to runaway climate change.
Like them, we aren’t robbers, kidnappers or terrorists. We are secretaries, parents, cooks, community workers, architects and saxophonists. We are part of a growing movement of concerned citizens who are prepared to put our bodies in the way of dangerous high-carbon developments.
The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is preparing to issue a report announcing that 90% of the oil spills in Ogoniland, Nigeria, are caused by the locals stealing crude from pipelines – and that Shell’s aged pipelines and ill maintained installations account for a mere 10% of the spills. Why so little, we might ask?
The UNEP has now admitted this figure is based on data from the oil industry and the Nigerian government. It’s not surprising that this is in line with what Shell used to claim in the 1980s – that about 80% of the oil spills were caused by vandalism or sabotage. This claim that infrastructure has been sabotaged is particularly attractive to oil companies, because they are then exempted from paying compensation for any resulting spills. Why accept responsibility for polluting the locals’ creeks, swamps and farmlands and destroying their livelihoods when you can blame the very same people for the mess now coating their own backyards with a toxic gloss?
Ah, well! But, here I am… using a cheap laptop and running a bunch of Free Software apps written for the sake of peace and love by some hippies to write this blog post. Funny, as it might sound, I somehow feel this is the right thing to do. I mean anyone with a sane mind would rather be on the Grateful Dead’s side than Britney Spears’. What about you?
Oops! I hope the MAFIAA doesn’t come after me for illegally linking to mp3 files in my blog post.
Ironically, Facebook would have gone out of business if all its users stopped sharing.
Summary: IDG continues to deceive people regarding “FOSS”, now with the appointment of a Microsoft person to run the “Open Source” blog; Ostatic overlooks the aspects which make Microsoft a unique foe of software freedom
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