10.30.11
Posted in News Roundup at 7:55 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Linux is one of the most secure and stable operating systems around, and yet, its user base hasn’t really grown as everyone expected it to. There are many reasons for this, and we won’t go into those right now. However, if you, like any other Linux user, are disappointed by the current market share stats, we can tell you some simple tips that will help you convince your Windows or Mac-crazy friends into using Linux.
Now, many Linux users have already tried to coax their friends and family members to try out this popular and newbie-friendly distro called Ubuntu. A select few have succeeded and many have failed. So here, we will give you some important tips to help you spread the word about Linux without sounding like that arrogant nerd who has nothing but contempt for Windows or Mac.
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Now being in Orlando for the UDS-P summit, but with the event not officially getting underway until Monday (beginning with Mark’s keynote where something will be announced), there’s time to catch up on a few things (especially as the beer is crap and the weather is less than ideal for VFR flight at the moment). In deciding what to write about next, I was looking at the most popular Phoronix stories from this calendar year.
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Kernel Space
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The PCI subsystem pull for the Linux 3.2 kernel was published on Friday evening. If you were hoping it would rework PCI-E ASPM (Active-State Power Management) to be more like the Windows implementation or for more PCI drivers to be setting the bits directly to support it (effectively white-listing drivers/hardware), it didn’t happen yet.
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Graphics Stack
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There’s a new driver to the DRM subsystem in Linux 3.2 and it’s the Samsung Exynos SoC driver. This DRM driver is only for the Exynos 4210 SoC at the moment. It supports kernel mode-setting, but doesn’t expose any 2D/3D hardware acceleration or any user-space interfaces. Samsung doesn’t have a full open-source driver stack for this ARM SoC, so the capabilities of this driver just come down to mode-setting in the kernel right now. Samsung has been working on this driver for a while.
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In September the 2011 Linux Graphics Survey came to an end, but due to Oktoberfest, AMD Bulldozer Linux testing, OpenBenchmarking.org developments, and other matters, I didn’t have time to look at the survey results until this weekend when getting ready for the Ubuntu Developer Summit. Here’s the 2011 results looking at what Linux desktop end-users are running when it comes to graphics cards and drivers as well as their key concerns.
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Applications
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Ekiga did not start as a simple instant messaging software but as GnomeMeeting – a Linux alternative to Netmeeting. One of the purposes of Netmeeting was video chatting between people. What was less noticed is that it was compatible with the H.323 standar and thus interoperable with professional videoconferencing environments. Ekiga is still the only client available on GNU/Linux software and able to communicate with H.323 hardware.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Tactical MMORPG Wakfu, Sequel to the incredibly successful Dofus, finally gets an official release date after a long period of beta testing. A brand new Trailer reveals thast it launches February 2012.
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Desktop Environments
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GNOME Desktop
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It never stops ! Here comes the first development release of the 3.3 development cycle. We are off to a slow start, with most features still
on the drawing board or in early development. Expect things to become more exciting in the next development release. But for now, we want you to download, compile and test this release.
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This release is a snapshot of early development code.
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Phoronix recently hosted a near Gnome User Survey, which surprised me, given Gnome Developers’ general “We know what’s best, bug off” attitude.
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Jolicloud Personal Cloud
Jolicloud is getting ready to roll out a new cloud-based service that the company says will offer a new way to interact with all of your online services from one place — and that place can be a web browser, smartphone app or tablet app.
When Jolicloud first launched, the company made an operating system for netbooks based on Ubuntu Linux. The “cloud” part of the name signified two things: the ability to “install” web apps to your desktop so you could launch them quickly just like native Linux applications, and a social element that let you share your recent activity with your peers.
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Red Hat Family
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Microsoft stirred the bee’s hive by announcing new requirements for manufacturers who want to ship Windows 8 systems, including a feature called ‘Secure Boot’. It means only Windows 8 will be able to run on that hardware, locking GNU/Linux out, shutting all windows on Linux on these computers.
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Canonical, the parent company of Ubuntu together with Red Hat, have weighed into the controversy surrounding the so called Secure Boot setup that requires OEMs to lock down your BIOS allowing only “approved” software to boot from it. This is of course being pushed by Microsoft.
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A few years ago I got up on stage and briefly talked about how the Linux community contained far too many people who were willing to engage in entirely inappropriate behaviour, how this discouraged people from getting involved and how we weren’t very good at standing up against that sort of behaviour. Despite doing this in front of several hundred people, and despite the video of me doing so then being uploaded to the internet, this got me a sum total of:
* No death threats
* No discussion about any of my physical attributes or lack thereof
* No stalkers
* No accusations that I was selling out the Linux community
* No accusations that I was a traitor to my gender
* No real negative feedback at all[1]
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Today we’ll look at Red Hat (RHT), a leading provider of open source operating systems based on Linux. The rise of cloud computing has been increasing demand for Red Hat’s open source solutions, which are often less expensive than comparable offerings from Microsoft and other rivals.
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Cisco and Red Hat offer RHEL with FlexPod: FlexPod, as you might remember, is the NetApp/Cisco virtualization project, essentially a blueprint for deploying a pre-configured interoperable virtualization environment specifically designed for scalability. Now, Red Hat Enterprise Linux will be part of that mix, and will be part of Cisco’s Validated Design (CVD) program. Ideally, Red Hat now has another avenue to find its way into enterprise data centers, potentially even through Cisco VARs. In addition to the CVD induction, Red Hat will also be made compatible with Secure Separation, a process that ensures secure “separate multi-tenant environments for non-virtualized workloads, alongside virtualized ones.”
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Fedora
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Debian Family
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If you checkout Dropbox’s Linux download page, you will see that Debian packages are provided. Up to a few days ago, they only provided packages for Ubuntu and Fedora.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu announced the 10.04 Netbook Edition and Ubuntu for ARM products 18 months ago, on April 29, 2010. At that time, Ubuntu committed to ongoing security and critical fixes for a period of 18 months for these specific products.
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I’ve come to enjoy launching and switching between applications via the Launcher. Making the distinction between running and not running applications less important and having stable targets for the most common applications is nice. But only as long as it’s about single window applications, as having to juggle windows after using the launcher just feels like a hassle. The single top bar switching between title and menu is great with maximized windows. This is barely enough to tolerate the shortcomings.
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Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot has a silly name, but it is a very decent and polished product.
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What do you do when your partners also become some of your most important customers? That’s a challenge Canonical executives grappled with recently as they moved to restructure Canonical’s relationship with OEMs. Here’s what’s changed at the company, and what it means for the open source channel.
As Canonical CEO Jane Silber pointed out in a recent blog post, OEM partnerships have been key to distributing Canonical’s main product, the Linux-based Ubuntu operating system. Agreements with server manufacturers in particular have helped Ubuntu gain a significant presence on enterprise machines.
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Flavours and Variants
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That’s where my time with Kubuntu ended. Barring a few Rekonq crashes which could be fixed by Mozilla Firefox, Kubuntu is absolutely amazing. It is stable, polished, and really, really fast. Plus, it brings with it the benefits of a familiar interface (compared to Ubuntu’s Unity) along with the large package selection and the PPA system of Ubuntu. I would strongly recommend that newbies try this, and if the trend of improvements is an indicator for future versions, I might just consider installing Kubuntu 12.04 LTS “Precise Pangolin” on my laptop as my main distribution, now that I know that it will be supported for 5 years. It, along with Linux Mint, Chakra, #!, and Pardus, is now a contender. Bravo Kubuntu!
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Xilinx Adds Open Source Linux Support as Xilinx Continues to Build out Development Model for its ARM Processor-Based Programmable SoC
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Phones
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Android
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Keyboard lovers, get ready – the DROID4 by Motorola is coming and according to our sources, has the best slideout they have “ever seen on a smartphone.” In this set of glamour shots we received, you can get a taste for what’s to come which means ultra-thin slider with DROID RAZR styling and wait for it….4G LTE. You asked for it and Moto appears to have made it.
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Motorola Mobility recently announced third-quarter 2011 financial results, posting net revenues of $3.3 billion, up 11 percent from third quarter 2010. Mobile device revenue came in at $2.4 billion, up 20 percent from Q3 of last year. Motorola smartphones have been flying off shelves, with 4.8 million smartphones shipped in Q3 of 2011, up 1 million from Q3 of last year. On the flip side, Motorola’s XOOM tablet hasn’t been doing so well, with only 100,000 XOOM’s shipped in Q3 (apple ships that many iPads a day). There’s also a few tidbits in there about the Motorola/Google merger, with around 18 million in expenses going towards the merger, which will seek stockholder approval on November 17th. The merger will also require antitrust clearances in the U.S., by the European Commission, and in Canada, China, Israel, Russia, Taiwan and Turkey.
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The Google TV platform contributes to this evolution by enabling new content creators to add to the programming you already enjoy on your TV. Given so much choice, we’re committed to delivering the best way to discover and engage with the high-quality entertainment on your television, whether that comes from your cable or satellite provider (DISH, Comcast, DIRECTV, etc.) or from the Web (YouTube, Netflix, and thousands more). The initial version of Google TV wasn’t perfect, but launching it gave us the opportunity to learn. These are still early days, and we’re working hard to move forward with each update.
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I’ve long held the opinion that the most effective way to get Internet-based content onto a TV is to simply hook a laptop up to the flat screen with an HDMI cable. The laptop acts as an oversized remote control. You get a full Flash-based Web browser, hard drive and keyboard on your TV.
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The original Motorola Atrix smartphone was a powerful device that doubled as a pseudo laptop or AV centre – you could connect it to an HDTV in your living room or the LCD on your desk and run a Linux variant with full keyboard and mouse.
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Before I follow up with a story on Nokia Qt’s news of the Qt platform now moving to a completely pure open source status, I thought I would also make mention of LinuxCon as I had to select just one from the two events and chose to have my beer German flavoured this year with Qt.
LinuxCon will reportedly feature a keynote/Q&A held between Linus Torvalds and Greg Kroah-Hartman about the kernel and 20 years of Linux.
So 20 years in as we are, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst will detail the biggest challenges we still now face and what the next 20 years looks like. While Chairman Emeritus at the IBM Academy of Technology, Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger will present “Linux – A Short Retrospective and an Opinion on the Future”.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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The only reason we have Firefox today is because Microsoft used their signature anti-competitive business practice to butcher Netscape. Google helped Firefox to generate revenue so as to create a competitor to Microsoft’s fossilized Internet Explorer and bring the Web to the highway.
Firefox used Google as its default search engine. The open source browser signed a deal with Microsoft recently to also use Bing as a search option.
Just today the open source browser announced another deal to feed the hand that bites it. The Mozilla foundation has announced a version of Firefox with Bing as the default search engine.
Microsoft is an abusive monopoly which kept all other players out of the PC business. When Linux emerged as a contender they started attacking all Linux players over unknown patent issues which Linus Torvalds called bogus.
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Firefox, which was created from the ashes of Netscape, which was burned down by none other than Microsoft, is now going in bed with the same Microsoft. The interesting point is Microsoft’s Bing gives out ‘confusing’ results.
We did a test and searched for Open Source Office Suite. The results were obvious for any user. You must see OpenOffice and LibreOffice as top results. When we Googled. We got the expected Results.
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It seems so long ago now, but for those of us lucky enough (and old enough) to have been there, the launch of Netscape’s 0.9 version of its Netscape Navigator browser in October 1994 was clearly the beginning of a new era. For a few years, Netscape was the centre of the Internet universe – it’s home page was the first you checked each morning for news about what was happening on this strange new Web thing that the company was doing so much to define.
Of course, Netscape went from Net hero to zero remarkably rapidly, but its influence is still felt in multiple ways. Perhaps most importantly, Netscape Navigator gave rise to Mozilla and thus Firefox. It also gave us JavaScript. Or rather, Netscape’s Brendan Eich gave us JavaScript. Eich is not so well known as some of his colleagues around that time, and that’s a pity, because he was one of the key figures in this formative time. Today he is CTO of Mozilla.
A few weeks ago I met up with him, and we looked back at the amazing ride the Web – and he – has had since the founding of Netscape. What follows is the first part of that interview, dealing with the birth of JavaScript and the origins of Mozilla. Next week the story will look at Firefox and more recent developments.
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SaaS
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Cloud computing is often positioned as a solution to scalability problems. In fact, it seems like almost every day I read a blog post about a company moving infrastructure to the cloud. At Mixpanel, we did the opposite. I’m writing this post to explain why and maybe even encourage some other startups to consider the alternative.
First though, I wanted to write a short bit about the advantages of cloud servers since they are ideal for some use cases.
* Low initial costs. Specifically, you can get a cloud server for less than $20. Even the cheapest dedicated servers (and I wouldn’t recommend the cheapest) will cost more than $50. For new companies, this can make a difference.
* Fast deployment times and hourly billing.If you have variable traffic and you’re not having problems scaling your data persistence layer, you can fairly easy spin up and spin down servers quickly in response to usage patterns. It’s worth pointing out that I specifically mean variable traffic rather than growing traffic. From purely an ease of deployment standpoint, handling even quickly growing traffic is fairly easy on both cloud and dedicated platforms.
* Cheap CPU performance.If your application is purely CPU bound, then you can end up with great price/performance ratios. Most cloud servers allow a single small node on a physical server to use more than its fair share of CPU resources if they are otherwise underutilized — and they often are. One of the last bits of our infrastructure still on the cloud is CPU bound and even though we pay for very small Rackspace cloud servers, we get the performance of dedicated hardware.
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Databases
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Yesterday’s filings of significance all came from Oracle, beginning with a letter to the judge disagreeing with Google’s request that certain copyright issues be disposed of by the judge before the trial commences. (566 [PDF; Text]) Google had suggested that the following issues related to Oracle’s copyright infringement claims were a matter of law and should be decided by the court before the commencement of the trial to make the trial proceed more efficiently:
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I would like to come back shortly on two of the announcements we made, regarding the porting of the LibreOffice platform (not the interface) to iOS and Android, as well as LibreOffice OnLine. While these two projects are at various stages of completion and have different requirements they help to show not just the vitality of our community, they also shed some light on how we manage to embrace a bazaar-like approach to development and think about what I call our “development ecology” (which some could really translate into development strategy, but I think it’s more subtler than that). What you see through our online office suite project and platform porting announcements is that we are taking some great care in doing something paradoxal with respect to our stated intent to change the codebase as much as possible: we keep our codebase intact. Note that we do change, upgrade, clear and trim the codebase, but we do adopt a singular codebase approach where the code used in LibreOffice OnLine, and the underlying code on iOS and Android will essentially be the same than the one inside the LibreOffice Desktop suite. In other words, we do not release a product here and something completely different there, even if in the future, a specific work on the interface for tablets will have to be made (we won’t use the existing interface on these as it would not make sense).
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Business
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Digium®, Inc., the Asterisk® Company, and the Asterisk open source community, today released Asterisk 10. Asterisk is a communications platform that allows developers to create powerful business phone systems and unified communications solutions. Since its introduction 12 years ago, Asterisk has been used, free of charge, in nearly every country of the world to power telephone and other communications systems. It has been downloaded millions of times, including two million last year alone, establishing Asterisk as the most popular open source telephony engine.
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The VAR Guy continues to ask the question: Can Digium and its open source IP PBX technology Asterisk make inroads in the telecom space? Now that Asterisk 10 has been released, more signs are pointing to yes. Read on for the feature list of Asterisk 10, and a little perspective on how it could shape the VoIP world …
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Semi-Open Source
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LogoZenoss, the open source server and network monitoring software provider, says 2011 revenues grew 300 percent year over year (YoY). The company claims IT service providers increasingly opt for Zenoss rather than management platforms from IBM, HP, CA Technologies and BMC. Anecdotal evidence suggests Zenoss’s annual revenues will easily exceed $10 million in 2011. But is Zenoss really disrupting the Big 4 IT management software providers?
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Funding
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Hadapt, creator of the first big data platform to integrate Hadoop with a structured data store to allow for high performance analytics across both structured and unstructured data, today announced that it has closed a $9.5 million Series A round of financing led by Norwest Venture Partners (NVP) and Bessemer Venture Partners. Matthew Howard, general partner at NVP, and Felda Hardymon, partner at Bessemer, have joined Hadapt’s Board of Directors.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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My problems with the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has been simplistically condensed to either being a knee-jerk reaction to anything the FSF has to say, or else part of a broader conspiracy to hate all free software.
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Licensing
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In the Python world the GPL is frequently frowned on, with most people preferring to use a more permissive license such as BSD, MIT, or Python’s. It’s understandable then when people get angry because I’ve licensed Lamson under the GPL. Many people just hate the license, since they feel it goes contrary to the spirit of Python.
However, I’d like to explain why I use the GPL after decades of writing open source software and after a couple of “successful” projects. These are my reasons for using it, and only apply to me and what I want to do with my software from now on. You are free to your own opinions and choices, and I hope you’ll respect mine.
[...]
I use the GPL to keep you honest. You now have to tell your bosses you’re using my gear. And it will scare the piss out of them. Good. Because I have a solution to that too.
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It was the late summer of 2008 that I found myself sat listening to Sun Microsystem’s then CEO Jonathan Schwartz explain how the open source model would work for customers in practice. Sat as I was at the last JavaOne conference before Oracle’s acquisition of the Java innovators, Schwartz said something like:
“Hey, the software is free. When you want the services that go with it, we’ll be there to provide them for you.” For ‘provide’ you can obviously take it that he meant ‘sell’ of course.
So how do companies now continue to justify the open source model and validate their option to sell a commercially provided service, support and maintenance package in this space?
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Openness/Sharing
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When we announced the initiation of the Open Compute Project earlier this year, we posed an audacious question to the industry: What if hardware were open?The benefits, if we could make it work, were clear enough: More openness and collaboration would likely mean a faster pace of innovation in infrastructure technology, greater accessibility to the best possible technology for us all, more efficiency in scale computing and a reduced environmental impact through the sharing of best practices.
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The StreetScooter is a $7,000 EV with a 74 mph top speed and an 80-mile range. It relies on leased batteries and uses a heat pump for heating and air conditioning, and shipping company DHL has already ordered 3,500 of them — but the most interesting thing about the vehicle is how it came to be.
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There are 640 muscles in the human body, or maybe it is 639. Or maybe it is 850. Or 656. It all depends on whom you ask. In any case, it is a lot. Stanford bioengineer Scott Delp knows; he has programmed almost every one into his latest work, OpenSim, a software application that helps medical professionals and bioengineers study, diagnose and correct abnormalities in how people move.
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Programming
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Serendipity logo Version 1.6 of the open source Serendipity blogging software has been released. The new update includes the jQuery framework so that plug-in and template authors can “provide extended functionality to the frontend” and, like plug-ins, templates can now also use config-groups.
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Engineers are hired to create business value, not to program things: Businesses do things for irrational and political reasons all the time (see below), but in the main they converge on doing things which increase revenue or reduce costs. Status in well-run businesses generally is awarded to people who successfully take credit for doing one of these things. (That can, but does not necessarily, entail actually doing them.) The person who has decided to bring on one more engineer is not doing it because they love having a geek around the room, they are doing it because adding the geek allows them to complete a project (or projects) which will add revenue or decrease costs. Producing beautiful software is not a goal. Solving complex technical problems is not a goal. Writing bug-free code is not a goal. Using sexy programming languages is not a goal. Add revenue. Reduce costs. Those are your only goals.
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Over the past couple of months the Hudson community has been working hard to ensure that its source code and libraries are IP and license clean in order to pass the stringent entry requirements of the Eclipse Foundation. I spoke briefly about this at my Hudson session at JavaOne and the response was so enthusiastic that I feel I need to bring the facts to a wider audience through this blog.
The Hudson code that is moving to Eclipse is made up of its core components and plugins for SSH-Slaves, Git and Subversion. The initial upload was made up of around 1700 Java files, 125 XML files, 600 Jelly files and some 3700 property files. The core elements (core, UITest and UpdateCenter) have now been approved and are around 8 of the external libraries but there is still some way to go. Each license is checked by both Eclipse’s automated system and by hand.
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Standards/Consortia
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Security
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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It’s quite clear that advocates on both sides of the current debate truly believe that the US can return to a growth path. Equally, they share an assumption that the supply of energy will adhere to a shift in the supply curve, which means simply that more supply or substitutes will be brought to market if the price level is sustained at high enough levels.
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Finance
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If these assets are made digital and put online, we can bring them to a wider audience, and preserve them for the next generation. They can have applications in education, tourism, or as a source for further art. They can be used by developers and for online exhibitions to which members of the public can contribute. And they can boost our growth and jobs, including in the creative sector which represents 3.3% of our GDP.
Europeana is the focal point for all these efforts. It already holds 19 million digital items – from Principia Mathematica to Het Meisje met de Parel. Check out the site now and explore our cultural heritage!
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10.29.11
Posted in News Roundup at 7:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Then there is Linux. It makes no promises, it offers no excuses. It is what it is and you can take it or leave it. Linux has it’s beauty spots and it’s warts and they are both out there, side by side, for all to see. Linux has features that windows users see and they exclaim “I want this on my computer!” They claim this quite emphatically, sometimes even going so far as to actually installing Linux and using it for a while.
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In the larger scheme, however, Linux is arguably one of the most influential technologies of our time. It’s providing the backbone for tech applications that are changing the way the world works and plays. The most powerful computers in the world use it to crunch complicated algorythms. Linux has paved the way for companies’ move of information into “the cloud” and for the general spirit of collaboration that has fueled everything from social networking to Wikipedia.
This year, Linux turns 20. The computing community is celebrating the anniversary of the date when Finnish programmer Linus Torvalds released Linux to the world, looking back at Torvalds’ vision for modern computing and looking ahead at some of the ways Linux might change business in the future.
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Want to watch a Blu-ray on your PC? That’ll be £50 please. Simon, for one, is fed up of this game. Join him as he looks at one of the many wheezes the proprietary software and hardware industry are still trying to pull…
I’ve just opened up my e-mail mailbox, to be greeted by press releases for another round of product announcements. The one that caught my eye, as it does every year, is the release for another piece of DVD playback software. In this case, it’s Corel WinDVD Pro 11, although it’s not the only offender. And if you’re looking for an example of the wheezes the proprietary hardware and software industries pull, then look no further.
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Desktop
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Linux Inside Where will you find Linux … Inside your phone? In your car? In your living room? Open Source Software has long been at home in the data center, providing the engine to drive everything from web servers to high performance computing to Cloud. Its versatility, combined with low cost and massive community are pushing it out of the raised floor and into your pocket.Let’s take a look inside a typical consumer router as an example. Chances are, you’ll find Linux at the core.
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Ubuntu has found some new horizons in China. In a post on Canonical’s blog, it was announced that Canonical and Dell will bring PCs loaded with Ubuntu to the Chinese market. According to the post: “The stores will feature Ubuntu on a range of Dell computers, and will carry branded marketing collateral in-store, trained staff positioning the benefits and advantages of Ubuntu to consumers and will be supported by a retail team of Ubuntu merchandisers, set up to support the stores. The work was carried out by the Canonical teams based in Beijing and Shanghai, working with Dell China.”
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Applications
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Linux for education is a great win, for all PC users. I have read about schools making the move to open source and Linux in the classroom, with countless success stories. I have been a GNU/Linux user for many years, and I admit that I have never really dug into the open source educational software that is available for the Linux desktop, until recently. I also read many articles written by Windows users about how Linux is dead on the desktop. Is it really? When I see articles that put down the Linux desktop, I am almost 100% assured that the author has not even tried to download a copy of GNU/Linux, installed some software and actually given it a test drive. For those that have actually used GNU/Linux enough to know what it is, you generally hear a completely different tone. Linux is definitely not taking over the market, but it is FAR from dead; there is a huge amount of software that comes with each and every GNU/Linux distribution that a lot of people are not even aware exists. To me, this makes the Linux desktop a very viable and economical solution for educational environments. It is also fine for business and personal use as well, but that is a harder nut to crack. As I have found for myself, it is definitely worth taking a look at what software is available; I guarantee you will be surprised.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Penetration (Pen) testing and security auditing are now part of every system administrator’s “other duties as assigned.” BackTrack Linux (http://www.backtrack-linux.org/) is a custom distribution designed for security testing for all skill levels from novice to expert. It is the largest collection of wireless hacking, server exploiting, web application assessing, social-engineering tools available in a single Linux distribution.
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I’ve always liked those smaller more obscure Linux distributions. The good ones usually offered a unique personality and the atmosphere around those projects were friendly and accessible. Kwort was one of these. However, it had faded from my memory since my last tests until I noticed on Distrowatch.com that a third release candidate for 3.2 had been released. Because it’s been four years since my last look, I thought another was waaay overdue.
The first thing I did was look back at my old reviews of Kwort. Back then it was based on Slackware (a big plus in my book) and featured Xfce as the desktop. These days it appears Kwort is now based on CRUX and uses Openbox for the desktop. Well, CRUX is cool I hear. Openbox is a little too minimal for my tastes usually, but let’s take a look anyway.
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New Releases
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For some important needs of international computer forensic experts and our community, we decide to release this micro update that allows you to create the “super timeline” using log2timeline (0.60) utility.
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Red Hat Family
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Tim Burke, VP of Linux technology development at Red Hat, gave a keynote speech at Linuxcon in Prague this week. Overall he expressed that the Linux community is essential to the open source operating system’s progress.
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Linux distributor Red Hat has joined the Open Compute Project. The OCP was founded by Facebook and develops specifications for building highly efficient data centres, ranging from specifications for motherboards, server chassis and cabinets, to ones for transformers for connecting to the high voltage electrical grid.
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Debian Family
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Phones
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Android
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Two startups are about to go “chrono y chrono” with competing Android smartwatch gizmos. The “I’m Watch” exclusively targets smartwatch applications, whereas the “WIMM Platform” is meant to create “a new market of connected wearable devices that deliver timely, relevant information at a glance” — of which smartwatches are but one example.
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Google unveiled Google TV 2.0, which will roll out on Sony TVs and Logitech Revue boxes Oct. 30. Featuring Android 3.1 (“Honeycomb”), the upgrade includes a revamped interface featuring a new customizable home screen and app shortcuts, provides hundreds of Android Market apps, and offers improved search for TV and YouTube, says the company.
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Motorola Mobility and Verizon Wireless began selling the Droid Razr Android smartphone on pre-order for $300, with shipments promised by Nov. 10. Meanwhile, a 3.5-inch Motorola Fire XT Android smartphone was announced in Italy; Motorola Mobility announced strong third-quarter earnings of $3.3 billion; and more evidence piled up regarding an imminent release of two Motorola Xoom 2 tablets.
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Here at OStatic, we regularly do posts designed to surface unsung but very impressive open source projects. Occasionally, an early look at any one of these unsung projects leads to ongoing coverage. For example, this site broke the news about the Eucalyptus cloud computing project at U.C. Santa Barbara long before there ever was the commercial entity Eucalyptus Systems. If you’re looking to expand your open source arsenal with some tools you’ve never heard of, here are some good resources.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Despite these flawed results of Bing which are kind of filtering out open source technologies, Firefox is going with Bing. So, next time when someone searches Microsoft Firefox, they will not find LibreOffice or Linux on the first pages. Well, it seems like Firefox has made its choice. What is your choice?
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SaaS
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Demand for Ruby, Hadoop and HTML5 developers jumped this year, with jobs requiring those skills increasing 70 per cent compared to the same period in 2010, according to a survey of the tech jobs in London by recruiters Adzuna. Adzuna collated every tech job advertised for London last month, a total of 100,000. HTML coders are still the most in demand, but also the most poorly paid – both at entry and top levels.
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Managed-hosting provider turned cloud provider Internap now has an OpenStack-based cloud ready for public consumption, beating even OpenStack founder Rackspace to the punch. It’s a big day for OpenStack, the open-source cloud computing platform designed to rival VMware and create competition for Amazon Web Services, but it’s likely only the first of many.
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Databases
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NoSQL type databases have become increasingly popular over the last several years as a way to deliver better scalability and performance. There are a number of different types of NoSQL databases, including a graph database structure, which is what open source startup Neo Technology is all about.
Neo Technology is the lead commercial sponsor behind the open source Neo4j NoSQL database. This week the company is launching its Spring Data Neo4j 2.0 release, bringing the database to the popular Spring Java framework. The company has also just completed raising $10.6 million in Series A funding.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Have you heard about those great LibreOffice extensions but have had a problem locating them? Well, those extensions (and templates) are going to be easier to find now thanks to The Document Foundation’s new online repository.
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Business
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I make no apologies for being a huge fan of the Asterisk open source PBX project. I’ve been a user since the 1.0 release, which is coincidentally the first time I ever wrote about the project, all the way back in 2004.
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Digium Thursday confirmed the release of Asterisk 10, the latest version of the 12-year-old Asterisk open-source telephony platform that’s slowly but surely gaining traction in the broader telephony market.
Digium, which is Asterisk’s primary developer, announced the release in line with this week’s AstriCon conference in Denver. According to Digium, the freely available Asterisk platform has seen millions of downloads in the past few years, including 2 million in 2010 alone.
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Project Releases
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The Orion project is pleased to announce the availability of its 0.3 release. If you’re using Orion Hub, then congratulations on successfully upgrading to the new release! If you don’t have an account, sign up for free here. If you’re the kind of person who still likes to download and install tools, you can find the latest server on our download page.
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Public Services/Government
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BSD-based operating systems are considered very secure. More so than Linux, in fact. Now, there are many reasons why this may or may not be so, including the market share, the speed and quality of software validation, the release cycle, the internal security mechanism, the skill and mentality of developers, administrators and users, the deployment setup, and many other factors, all of which are highly debatable.
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Science
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Security
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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New York firefighters removed about a dozen gasoline cans and six generators from Zuccotti Park, where Occupy Wall Street protesters have camped for almost six weeks, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said.
About 30 to 40 firefighters were sent to the park along with the police department’s community affairs unit, Bloomberg said today on his weekly WOR radio show.
The equipment, which helped power computers and mobile phones and keep people warm as temperatures dipped near freezing, are safety hazards and illegal, Bloomberg said. Forecasts call for rain and snow in the metropolitan area tomorrow.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Wisconsin’s environment and the health of its population might be on the chopping block as state Republicans push for mining deregulation in the name of “jobs.”
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Finance
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As the Occupy movement spreads from coast to coast, an attack in Oakland, California on protesters Tuesday night was the buzz of an impromptu march on New York’s lower Broadway on Wednesday night.
Amid chants of “New York is open, open is New York,” demonstrators moved freely with a growing police presence behind them. Inner City Press photographed, beside City Hall, police horses of the type injured in Times Square only ten days ago.
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“AS THOUSANDS have gathered in Lower Manhattan, passionately expressing their deep discontent with the status quo, we have taken note of these protests,” wrote Lloyd Blankfein, the boss of Goldman Sachs, in a recent letter to investors. “And we have asked ourselves this question: ‘How can we make money off them?’ The answer is the newly launched Goldman Sachs Global Rage Fund.” This will invest in firms likely to benefit from social unrest, such as window repairers and makers of police batons. As Mr Blankfein explained: “At Goldman, we recognise that the capitalist system as we know it is circling the drain—but there’s plenty of money to be made on the way down.”
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Disturbed, disillusioned and ashamed: Those aren’t emotions you expect a Wall Street quant to express when asked why taxpayers were obliged to bail out wealthy bankers.
Unless, of course, the quant is Emanuel Derman, a particle physicist and former head of quantitative finance at Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
“I am ashamed at the hypocrisies of the system,” Derman writes in “Models.Behaving.Badly,” an erudite yet pleasantly readable exploration of why financial models failed during the U.S. mortgage meltdown and why modelers must learn to use them more wisely.
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Mega-bank Goldman Sachs (assets $933bn), has declared war on one of the smallest banks in New York (assets $30m), the customer-owned community bank that happens to also be the banker for Friends of Liberty Plaza, Inc, also known as Occupy Wall Street. And you thought Goldman didn’t care.
The trouble began three weeks ago when the occupiers suddenly found their donation buckets filling with thousands of dollars, way more than needed for their pizza dinners. Suddenly, the anti-bank protesters needed a bank. Citibank and Chase certainly wouldn’t fit. So OWS opened an account at the not-for-profit Lower East Side Peoples Federal Credit Union. Peoples has a unique federal charter – designated to open accounts for low-income folk from all over NewYork, available to those families earning less than $38,000 per year. (Disclosure: the CEO of the Peoples bank is my dearly beloved ex. But that’s another story.)
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The “Occupy” movement has been inspired in part by the increasingly outsized political power of the top 1%, which has made elected officials more responsive to deep-pocket donors than those they were elected to represent. In response to the other 99% being left politically and economically disempowered, former MSNBC host Cenk Uygur has announced plans to work toward amending the U.S. Constitution to get big money out of politics and restore representative democracy.
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With Ohio voters looking to overturn Governor John Kasich’s union-busting Senate Bill 5 through a statewide referendum, national Republican donors, strategists and corporations are pumping money into the state to defend the Governor and his bill.
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ACTA
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10.28.11
Posted in News Roundup at 1:55 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Canonical, together with Red Hat, today publishes a white paper highlighting the implications of these requirements for users and manufacturers. The paper also provides recommendations on how to implement “Secure Boot”, to ensure that users remain in control of their PCs.
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Desktop
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Dell might have scaled back its Ubuntu Linux offerings in the west but in China – the market that really matters – the firm is rolling out a range of machines running Ubuntu in 220 stores. Unlike its solitary US web-store offering, Dell presents Chinese punters with a range of Ubuntu Linux systems and better still the firm said its staff will promote the benefits of Ubuntu Linux to consumers.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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DAY TWO of Linuxcon Europe included a keynote from Intel about the last 20 years of Linux since its creation.
Dirk Hohndel, chief Linux technologist at Intel, gave the talk this morning and counts himself lucky to be one of the people to get involved at the very early stages of the project with Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux.
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With flashing cameras and a crowd that flowed into the lobby where attendees could watch the keynotes on large screens, LinuxCon Europe debuted with an appearance by Linux creator Linus Torvalds and hundreds of Linux community members…
With flashing cameras and a crowd that flowed into the lobby where attendees could watch the keynotes on large screens, LinuxCon Europe debuted with an appearance by Linux creator Linus Torvalds and hundreds of Linux community members.
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GERMAN CAR MAKER BMW spoke about how it might use Linux for in-car entertainment at Linuxcon Europe in Prague today.
In a panel on providing high performance we heard that we could see Linux being adopted for use in car entertainment systems in future BMW vehicles. The firm is looking into it and thinks that it’s a valid possibility.
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Linus Torvalds and other kernel developers sat down for a question and answer session at the first LinuxCon Europe. Lennart Poettering, creator of PulseAudio and systemd, served as moderator for the panel, which consisted of Torvalds, Alan Cox, Thomas Gleixner, and Paul McKenney. The four took prepared questions from Poettering, as well as responding to impromptu audience member questions on every topic from version numbers to the future of the kernel project itself.
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The Linux 3.1 kernel was released earlier this week and it further enhances the Intel Sandy Bridge graphics support while also prepping the open-source kernel driver for Intel’s next-generation Ivy Bridge processors.
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Graphics Stack
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It seems to be a good time to clean-up the Linux graphics driver stack. After old hardware support was dropped in Mesa in August, more Mesa code was dropped, and most recently the classic ATI R300/R600 drivers are to be killed (this is set to happen this Friday). Now Intel’s Daniel Vetter is chopping up some DRM code.
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Last month during XDC2011 Chicago it was publicly talked about how Intel wants OpenGL 3.0 support in Mesa and ideally before year’s end. But how’s that goal coming?
For those not tracking the Mesa mailing list, there’s been a continual stream of new patches arriving for Mesa that ultimately work towards this GL3 goal. Intel developers and others (namely the VMware developers and other independent contributors) adding support for new OpenGL extensions, work towards GLSL 1.30 compliance, or cleaning up parts of Mesa to facilitate future support. E.g. just earlier this week a patch series arrived for adding interpolation qualifier support for i965 as needed by GLSL 1.30 and lots of other work.
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Applications
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Writing is a key skill in the modern world, whether it’s directly how you make your living or not. Whether it’s writing memos or emailing clients, most jobs include at least some use of the written word. Even outside of work, more and more communication is moving to the written word. Don’t rush through these things – take your time and get them right. Develop writing as a skill, because it will reward you. But it’s a lot easier to do if you have the proper tools.
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jEdit is a cross-platform text editor written in Java. The current stable version at time of this writing is 4.3.2, and it’s available at http://jedit.org. Besides the cross-platform capabilities, jEdit offers other features, such as a sophisticated plugin system, syntax highlighting for 130 languages, a built-in macro language and extensive encoding support. I wrote this article using jEdit, and I demonstrate some of its features here, especially some of the plugins I have found useful.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Desktop Environments
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Before anything, this article is for those using KDE and GNOME and start feeling the need for more, or something else. This is not a trolling article (we hate that), nor is a rant against the two DEs. We respect the freedom of choice, and the Open Source world is all about freedom of choice. With this article we only want to show you what other options you have, the pluses and the minuses, with no bias whatsoever. We’ll go less than technical with this article, and we hope we’ll widen your perspective and help you use something that’s really fit for your needs. All you need is a working Linux machine and the minimal knowledge of knowing how to install software on it, plus the use of an editor of choice. Since your DE/WM is something you work with every day, it’s more important to your productivity than it could appear at first look. You may have to learn some new commands, but if you feel it’s right for you and it makes you more efficient, it will be worth it. Plus your system will run faster, since KDE and GNOME are full of features for everyone, but that comes with a cost. Before we start, let’s get some terms clear.
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It’s no secret that I am a huge fan of the Enlightenment desktop. I recently got into contact with the project’s lead developer “Rasterman” and we did a little bit of a question and answer session. If you aren’t sure on what all the Enlightenment desktop and the EFLs are exactly please see my post here.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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If you are interested on digital photo management, I would encourage you to take a look at digiKam, and specifically at the newer 2.x version. The 2.0 release announcement was made at the end of July, and they are now already up to version 2.2. Here is a short recap of the reasons I choose to use digiKam rather than the other obvious candidates:
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Today I would like to introduce you to Inqlude, the Qt library archive. The goal of this project is to provide a comprehensive listing of all existing libraries for developers of Qt applications. So if you are creating applications using the Qt toolkit, and are looking for libraries, components or modules to use, Inqlude is meant to be the place where you find all information and pointers to get started.
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Because Kubuntu is gaining popularity I thought some users might be needing some additional help with network configuration and settings. Of course there are many ways to handle your network settings, but for new users, setup is extremely simple. Upon installation network settings are generally detected and configured automatically, but on occasion we all run into problems. Finding all of your network settings when using Kubuntu also is quite simple, and help is always available when needed. You can always check the official Kubuntu help documentation provided upon installation to get additional help with advanced topics.
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GNOME Desktop
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So, Ubuntu 11.10 is here and GNOME2 is gone…
Even if you had an option to run GNOME2 in previous release of Ubuntu 11.04, there is no more this option in 11.10. It is only shipped with Unity interface.
Does it mean GNOME is fully gone? No, it is still here… But that’s not GNOME2. That is GNOME3, updated version which follows (or creates?) new wave of user interfaces.
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The first development release for GNOME 3.4, which is marked as GNOME 3.3.1 in the 3.3 unstable series, is now available for testing.
The release announcement with source download links to all of the packages can be found in this mailing list message. When scanning through the change-logs for the core and application components to GNOME 3.3.1, some of the items that stick out are listed below.
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As you may have seen, the Phoronix site is hosting a private survey about GNOME. The survey still has several weeks to run, but, so far, neither the circumstances surrounding the survey or the replies show the GNOME project in a favorable perspective.
The survey was begun by Felipe Contreras, who first raised the idea back in July on the GNOME desktop-devel mailing list. “Lately I’ve [been] feeling that there’s a lot of dissatisfaction with GNOME 3,” he wrote. “Why not find for good what people are thinking with an user-survey?”
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Phil Miller proudly announced a few minutes ago, October 27th, the immediate availability for download of the stable Chakra GNU/Linux 2011.10.26 operating system.
Chakra GNU/Linux 2011.10.26 is now powered by Linux kernel 3.0.7 and X.Org 7.6, as well as the latest KDE Software Compilation 4.7.2 environment, updated toolchain, and WebGL and HTML5 support for Qt/KDE web-browsers.
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It’s always interesting, and usually fun, to try out a new Linux distribution. I saw the announcement on DistroWatch this morning of a new release of SalineOS, and I have a bit of free time today, so this seemed like a good opportunity. It has turned out to be both – interesting and fun!
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Gentoo Family
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Well it’s my third day on Sabayon Linux and I must say it definitely has a personality of its own. From its snappy performance to its unusual bugs it has left a huge impression on me. It’s also had me going through wikis and forums more than any distribution I have ever encountered on the “easy” side of the Linux distribution fence.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that it has joined the Open Compute Project, a project established by Facebook with the goal of building one of the most efficient computing infrastructures at the lowest possible cost. With this, Red Hat will collaborate with the Open Compute Project and its members on technologies, design and development to redefine the next-generation datacenter.
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In a blog post today, Richard Jones, Senior Software Engineer at Red Hat, announced the release of libguestfs 1.14, an open source set of tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine (VM) disk images. “I’m really charged about how the new tools let you analyze and fix alignment problems in your guests,” Jones tells NetworkWorld.
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Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) hit a new 52-week high Thursday as it is currently trading at $49.08, above its previous 52-week high of $49 with 47,056 shares traded as of 9:36 a.m. ET. Average volume has been 3.1 million shares over the past 30 days.
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Debian Family
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I never really considered myself a GNOME user. Though I am. I’ve used Xfce, Fluxbox, Fvwm2, LXDE, even JWM (Joe’s Window Manager) in Puppy and FLTK in TinyCore. But most of the time I stick with the default desktop environment offered by a given distribution.
And more often than not, that’s GNOME 2. And I’ve been using Debian Squeeze with GNOME 2 since November 2010 — almost a year now — and using it for more of my work than ever.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Jason Perlow, ZDNet Sr. Technology Editor, searching for a way to tap into the hidden strengths that all Linux operating systems have. Then an accidental overdose of half-baked user interface interferes with his unique mental state. And now, when Jason Perlow grows angry or outraged, a startling metamorphosis occurs.
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Canonical and Dell are teaming up to sell computers with Ubuntu preinstalled at stores in China. The program, which could help improve the mainstream visibility of the Linux-based operating system, will span 220 retail locations.
According to a statement that Canonical posted this morning on its official blog, the products will be set up with marketing materials that tout the virtues of the Ubuntu platform. Retail staff will also be trained to explain the products to consumers.
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On Wednesday in Beijing, Canonical and Dell announced the start of an exciting retail program to sell machines pre-loaded with Ubuntu, initially rolling out to 220 retail stores in China.
The stores will feature Ubuntu on a range of Dell computers, and will carry branded marketing collateral in-store, trained staff positioning the benefits and advantages of Ubuntu to consumers and will be supported by a retail team of Ubuntu merchandisers, set up to support the stores. The work was carried out by the Canonical teams based in Beijing and Shanghai, working with Dell China.
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With the past few releases, Ubuntu has been focusing more and more on their homegrown desktop Unity. Some people love it, but a lot of us don’t. Fortunately, as with all things Linux, there are many alternative options. For those of us who just can’t find a way to unite with Unity, here are 5 great options that you might find you like better.
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Orchestra is one of the most exciting new capabilities in 11.10. It provides automated installation of Ubuntu across sets of machines. Typically, it’s used by people bringing up a cluster or farm of servers, but the way it’s designed makes it very easy to bring up rich services, where there may be a variety of different kinds of nodes that all need to be installed together.
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When it comes to reporting what is happening in and around the Ubuntu community OMG! Ubuntu! reports the news as it happens, it seems like Joey and Benjamin along with other guest bloggers and writers never tire. The list of contributors to the OMG! Ubuntu! come from many areas of the community: Canonical, Debian, Zeitgeist, The Banshee Project, elementary OS, and more. As one who personally reads 100’s of feeds, mailing lists, IRC conversations and more this is no small endeavor and one OMG! Ubuntu! seems to have down to a science.
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What’s new about Ubuntu GNU/Linux? That is always the question that arises when the six-monthly release takes place and this time, with 11.10, the answer is probably best encapsulated by the project itself.
The Ubuntu project site proclaims “Hey, good looking!” and nothing could be more true – most of the work since the last release, which saw the introduction of the Unity desktop, has gone into refining and beautifying the desktop and all its appendages. Ubuntu 11.10, aka Oneiric Ocelot (dreamy wildcat) now looks very good, has nice fonts and is easy on the eye.
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While those who do get sponsorship are naturally happy and motivated to be going to UDS, those who don’t get sponsorship support sometimes feel quite de-motivated, and some feel insecure about how Canonical or leaders in Ubuntu view their contributions and “why wasn’t I chosen, particularly given all my contributions to Ubuntu?“.
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MontaVista Software has updated the MontaVista Linux “Bare Metal Engine” distribution with dynamically configurable data plane features. Bare Metal Engine (BME) offers a single development environment that can scale from high embedded Linux services down to the “near zero overhead” bare metal environments used in network packet processing, the company says.
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The system utilized a 32-bit ARM11 400MHz processor and the Linux OS
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Xilinx launched an open source Linux platform and developer community for its Zynq-7000 Extensible Processing Platform (EPP), which combines a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor and a 28nm FPGA. The Zynq-7000 EPP Linux Solution offers GNU toolchain, runtime libraries, and debuggers, plus options including a Virtual Platform hardware emulator based on Cadence VSP.
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VeriFone Systems announced an Linux-based Point of Sale (POS) payment device that integrates a near field communication (NFC) contactless reader. The H5000 runs Linux on an ARM11 processor, offers a 3.5-inch color touchscreen, and supports multiple payment types– including legacy magnetic stripe, EMV smartcards, and contactless cards — with a single hybrid card slot, says the company.
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Phones
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Android
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Android served up more ad impressions overall in Q3 than rival iOS, at 56 percent, Millennial Media reported. For its part, ABI Media noted that in Q2, Android overtook iOS to become the market share leader in mobile application downloads. The market shares of Android and iOS were 44 percent and 31 percent, respectively, ABI said.
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The most important thing about Ice Cream Sandwich is that “there seems to be a change in the wind insofar as Android being a pure operating system is concerned,” said blogger Roberto Lim. “With Android 1.6 to 2.3, the ‘vanilla’ version was a pretty basic OS, which provided the minimum necessary smartphone functionality.” With ICS, “the vanilla Android install is not very much like ‘vanilla’ anymore, but more like a Banana Split.”
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Leader International announced two Android tablets, both with full-sized USB ports and microSD slots. The $179 Impression 7 (I7) runs Android 2.2 on a 1GHz processor, and provides a seven-inch 800 x 480 resistive touchscreen, while the $349 Impression 10 (I10) runs Android 2.3 on a 1GHz Samsung Hummingbird, adding a 9.7-inch, 1024 x 768 capacitive IPS touchscreen, an HDMI port, and a two-megapixel camera.
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F4S: Greetings Richard. Please, give us a brief introduction about your company Eagle Genomics.
Richard: Eagle Genomics is an outsourced bioinformatics services and software company specialising in genome content management and the provision of open-source solutions. Eagle consistently delivers quality and value-for-money for customers across the biotech sector, combining cloud and NGS expertise with a track record in building scalable, efficient genomics analysis workflows.
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The digital age has added significantly to the tools available to scientific work, but has also introduced new challenges. Glyn Moody describes the present situation, and suggests that we need true openness with respect to scientific software.
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Google has announced the release of ScriptCover as an open source project. Available as an extension for the company’s Chrome web browser, ScriptCover is JavaScript coverage analysis tool that provides real-time, line-by-line code coverage statistics for web pages.
ScriptCover displays results as the page continues to load and is automatically updated when the user interacts with the site. The reporting tool highlights each of the lines of code that have been executed for a more detailed analysis.
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There are numerous counterexamples to this; my analyst colleague from the 451 Group Rachel Chalmers cites Unix, others the underlying protocols of the internet and I myself would point to the more recent work that browser teams like Chrome and Mozilla are doing or the pre-Cambrian explosion currently occurring in the non-relational database market. But superficial questions like “can open source innovate” obscure real, fundamental changes in the way that software is being developed today. Changes that are important.
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Events
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For those not able to attend this year’s LinuxCon Europe conference, which is currently taking place in Prague, Czech Republic, the Linux Foundation is offering live video streaming of all the keynote sessions. Free access to the live video streams of the first ever European LinuxCon event is available on the LinuxCon Europe 2011 site (registration required).
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With flashing cameras and a crowd that flowed into the lobby where attendees could watch the keynotes on large screens, LinuxCon Europe debuted with an appearance by Linux creator Linus Torvalds and hundreds of Linux community members.
Day one of the first-ever LinuxCon Europe was heavy on stellar content and great beer. The day started with a welcome from Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin, followed quickly by the exclusive Linux Kernel Panel featuring Linus Torvalds. The rest of the day included individual sessions from “Why the Free Desktop Matters” to “File and Storage Systems: Making Complex Systems Easy to Use” and “Using Dynamic Analysis to Hunt Down Problems in Kernel Modules.” The technical content featured at Linux Foundation events is the result of detailed review by Amanda McPherson of hundreds of submissions as well as her discussions with community members about the most important topics to address that will help advance the platform.
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People are invited to a Mooroopna LUV-in this weekend ? but you can leave your kaftan and hippy beads at home.
Linux Users Victoria are holding a free information session for people eager to learn more about the original computer operating system similar to Windows and Android, but with one major exception ? there is no cost.
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Web Browsers
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In April of 2000, when the U.S. Department of Justice handed down its decision that Microsoft was an “abusive monopoly” and set about imposing restrictions on the company’s business practices, many people wondered two things: 1) why did the decision arrive after so many years?; and 2) what exactly would the DOJ place restrictions on?
Among the various restrictions that were imposed, one of the most influential was that Microsoft could not continue to tie its Internet Explorer browser to Windows as inextricably as it had, thereby creating an unfair distribution model for the browser, since other browser makers didn’t have a ubiquitous OS such as Windows to tie their browsers to. Now, more than 10 years later, the DOJ’s consent decree has lapsed, and there is a possibility that Microsoft could once again tie Internet Explorer to Windows in a number of questionable ways.
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Chrome
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Google Chrome and Chromium open-source web browsers version 15.0.874.106 has been released. Latest stable release of Chromium web browser brings many improvements, performance enhancements and fixed several security bugs. The new tab page has been redesigned to easily access your mostly visited websites, web store applications and customizable website speed dial.
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Mozilla
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SaaS
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Hadapt has closed a Series A funding round of $9.5 million for its Hadoop-based software that handles structured and unstructured data in a single system. Norwest Venture Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners led the round, which comes about seven months after Hadapt’s launch in March 2011.
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Databases
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Whether the acronym “NoSQL” stands for “not only SQL,” as some database architects content, or literally “no SQL,” up until this month, it has been taken to imply “no Oracle.” One of the many hallmarks of Oracle’s SQL RDBMS technology, historically, has been consistency — the notion that every client perceives the same view of the data at any one time. Maintaining consistency, among other factors, incurs latency issues as database sizes scale with social media into the stratosphere.
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CMS
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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GCC 4.6.2 was officially released today as the second point release in the GCC 4.6 series to address bugs and other outstanding issues. GCC 4.6.1 was released in June and the original GCC 4.6.0 release happened this past March.
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Licensing
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Programming
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For myself, I can attest that there would be no O’Reilly Media without Ritchie’s work. It was Unix that created the fertile ground for our early publishing activities; it was Unix’s culture of collaborative development and architecture of participation that was the deepest tap root of what became the open source software movement, and not coincidentally, much of the architecture of the Internet as well
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Finance
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Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan has been trying to dismiss recent studies suggesting America’s tax system has disproportionately benefitted the super-wealthy. But his claims about upward mobility have themselves been refuted.
The Congressional Budget Office just released a study showing that between 1979 and 2007, income grew by 275 percent for the top 1 percent of households, whereas it grew just 18 percent for the bottom 20 percent and just under 40 percent for the next 60 percent. The income gap grew under Republican presidents who promoted low taxes on the wealthy.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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As newsrooms across the country shave off staff due in part to slipping ad revenue and corporate media conglomeration, the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, is rushing to fill the gap. The group has 43 state news websites, with writers in over 40 states. Its reporters have been given state house press credentials and its news articles are starting to appear in mainstream print newspapers in each state. Who funds Franklin and what is its agenda?
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10.27.11
Posted in News Roundup at 9:30 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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He was basically telling me that I, or people in my age group, had become old, and stuck in one place. Not an insult either, but a clear fact. If you remember back when you were younger you should remember when things changed all the time in your life and you easily accepted it. Not just accepted it, enjoyed it and looked towards tomorrow for more. Sure, this isn’t everyone, but the majority.
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Desktop
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The third generation model in Ubuntu-dedicated hardware company System 76′s Lemur Ultra laptop line is available to buy.
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Kernel Space
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The new Linux 3.0 kernel in all its shiny awesomeness will be finding its way into your favourite distro any day now. So what does this major milestone release contain to justify the jump in version number?
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The Yocto Project, a hosted project at The Linux Foundation, today announced the availability of Yocto Project Release 1.1, as well as a variety of one-year milestones for the project.
The Linux Foundation today also announced it will become the host for the Embedded GNU C Library (EGLIBC), further broadening and strengthening a common set of tools for embedded Linux development.
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The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that five Europe-based companies are joining the organization: AboveIT, Comarch, CSR, Symbio and Tieto.
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Many people use Linux every day and never know it. Indeed, they’re often using Linux without even knowing they’re using a computing device. For years now, Linux has been the operating system of choice for Digital Video Recorders (DVR)s, DVD players, Smart TVs, Wi-Fi access points, GPS devices, and on and on. But, there’s never been a Linux kernel just for consumer electronics… until now.
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LINUXCON EUROPE began today with some interesting thoughts from Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation and Linux founder Linus Torvalds.
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Applications
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Early on M$ worked hard to lock developers, ISVs, OEMs and consumers in to that other OS. The scheme worked well for more than a decade but is coming unravelled. Not only has growth of the platform frozen, there are now signs of shrinkage. SJVN points out that data from Download.com shows only 28% of downloads are software for that other OS. Also, the top downloads for that other OS are for anti-viral software, not productivity or entertainment items.
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Video editors out to make work-intensive, sophisticated compositions likely won’t be impressed with Kino. However, it is an easy-to-use choice for editors out to create something a little more basic. Kino, a GTK+-based non-linear digital video editor, has a range of formats that makes it a nearly ideal solution for video cam users.
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Proprietary
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Cognex Corporation (NASDAQ: CGNX), the world’s leading supplier of machine vision systems, has announced Linux support for the Cognex Vision Library (CVL), the world’s best-selling machine vision toolset. “This will open new markets for our products, so that machine builders using Linux platforms will have access to the same Cognex machine vision tools that have been available for years to our OEMs on Microsoft Windows®,” said Dr. Markku Jaaskelainen, Vice President and Business Unit Manager for Vision Software. “With Linux, they can obtain more predictable performance in critical machine control applications. It also offers them greater ability to manage operating system patches and upgrades for end customers who insist on Copy Exactly! procedures.”
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Instructionals/Technical
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Desktop Environments
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Here are a few great wallpapers available for download at GnomeLook.org. First and foremost is the debian chick, this gorgeous babe is the perfect addition to any desktop. Unfortunatelty those curves may cause you to miss a project deadline or two.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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The Calligra team is proud and excited to release the third beta version of the Calligra Suite. Since the start of the Calligra effort, we have had a long and very productive development phase. In the mean time we have released four snapshot versions, also known as alphas, to give the users a chance to see what we are doing.
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GNOME Desktop
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Aqua is a simple and clean light theme for Gnome Shell 3.2. This theme is made by Satya who also designed Evolve GTK3 theme for Gnome Shell and Unity.
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So, Ubuntu 11.10 is here and GNOME2 is gone…
Even if you had an option to run GNOME2 in previous release of Ubuntu 11.04, there is no more this option in 11.10. It is only shipped with Unity interface.
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New Releases
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Barry Kauler’s Puppy Linux distribution has a new child, or better a pup, named Slacko and based on the Slackware Linux 13.37 operating system.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat posted a surge of 28% in quarterly revenues over the past year, which drove net income up a whopping 69%. This staggering growth was mainly because of enormous demand for its open-source solutions everywhere, especially in the financial services sector and local, state, and federal governments. Moreover, Red Hat’s customers have been looking to modernize their data center infrastructure. This helped in growing revenues and highlighted customer loyalty. High demand for Red Hat’s services, low service charges, and excellent reliability drove revenue growth.
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Tim Burke is the VP of Linux technology development at Red Hat. He spoke to us about the power of free software, what he thinks is the best thing about Linux and what it might be used for in the future.
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Fedora
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Red Hat is hiring a Fedora release engineer with primary focus on the PowerPC platform, where he/she will prepare the testing and final releases, work on the build system infrastructure, work with architecture maintainers on package build failures and much more.
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Debian Family
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We’ve done it! m23 rock 11.4 is ready – and now Debian Squeeze is available as an additional client distribution and TDE (which can be seen as a continuation of KDE3) was added to the list of desktop interfaces to choose from.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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First off, I would like to congratulate Ubuntu team for releasing another milestone of a good Linux distribution. It is such a big project which requires great balance between schedule, functionality, level of polish and quality.
On the polish, I really like the new theme, it fits well to my taste.
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I love planning a new Ubuntu release. It’s a great experience to take a few steps back and look at the biggest challenges and opportunities in your area of interest and try to identify the most promising.
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If you want a shiny barely-customizable straitjacket as a desktop environment, go buy a Mac. Please stop wrecking Ubuntu.
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At the end of the upgrade process, I had changed an existing installation of Ubuntu 11.04 with a core of Linux kernel 2.6.38 to one running Ubuntu 11.10 with a core of Linux kernel 3.0.0, with no loss of existing data. Very nice. Though I did not backup my data because there was no useful data on the system, it is always a good idea to keep a backup of your data before an upgrade. You just never know.
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Remember the good old days when Windows had problems with the “Blue Screen of Death.” Years later, XBox followed with its “Red Ring of Death.” Now, it’s Ubuntu turn, what others are coining as the “White Screen of Death.”
Yesterday, I upgraded to Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot. Prior to the upgrade, I was using Ubuntu 11.04 and the Gnome desktop (not Unity). Somehow, for some reason, when I upgraded to Ubuntu 11.10, it wiped out my Gnome default environment and switched me back to Unity. Argh!
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Having said this, allow me a Captain Obvious moment to say that folks have different tastes, likes and dislikes, which in the final analysis boils down to a subjective smorgasbord of opinion rather than any resemblance to objective fist-bearing, knuckle-bashing fact.
I loathe Unity with a heat of a nova, but some people absolutely love it to the ends of the earth. And that’s great, but it’s not for everyone. What about those Ubuntu users who don’t like Unity because it’s a brain-numbing, unintuitive desktop environment that’s has a my-way-or-highway range of tweakability (or do I overstate it?), or what about an Ubuntu user who can’t use it because they’re using older hardware?
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Ever since Ubuntu shipped its first long-term-support release, the 6.06 Dapper Drake (one of my all-time favorites by the way), the distro’s LTS editions have enjoyed three years of support on the desktop and five years on the server.
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Phones
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Android
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Verizon pinged us this morning with a reminder that the pre-order period for the DROID RAZR starts tomorrow at 8AM, giving potential owners a chance to jump on the device early for $299 on contract. Up until now though, we had no idea when you would expect to see that order since Big Red and Motorola decided not to give us an actual release date last week at the RAZR event. According to this reminder email, it looks like November 10 is the latest you will see it.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Google has rolled out version 15 of Chrome to its “stable” channel. The update brings some minor cosmetic changes, including a slightly cleaner new tab page, and Google has also redesigned the Chrome Web Store with a simpler layout.
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The Google Chrome developers at Google proudly announced last night, October 25th, the immediate availability for download of the stable
and final release of the Google Chrome 15 web browser for Linux platforms.
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Mozilla
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Mozilla, has joined up with Microsoft to make a special version of Firefox that uses the Bing for its default search engine and home page.
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Licensing
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I started with the notion that GPL should always be used in open source software. I also thought that releasing software under BSD license was letting others take advantage of your hard work without giving anything in return; a highly unfair practice. My thoughts have changed a bit. You can read all about the regurgitated pros and cons all over the Internet. I’m looking to introduce a new perspective, if I can.
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Programming
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Security
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The attack hit approximately 45 servers and 38 computers, which were infected with malware at 10 facilities located throughout Japan, and at Mitsubishi’s Yokohama headquarters.
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Finance
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Nigeria, the West African nation that has gained notoriety for the illicit e-mail spammers aiming for Western bank accounts, is attracting attention for legitimate financial opportunities — investing its own savings.
In an effort to preserve and increase its oil revenue, the country recently established a so-called sovereign wealth fund, following the path of many resource-rich countries. Now, Wall Street titans like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase are courting top government officials, aiming to grab a piece of a portfolio that could eventually be worth tens of billions of dollars.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain’s new internet ad features a tight head shot of his campaign’s “chief of staff,” Mark Block, telling viewers how great Cain will be for the country and how much confidence he has in Cain.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
10.25.11
Posted in News Roundup at 3:22 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Microsoft’s new verification system for Windows 8 – OA 3.0 – which will add complications toward the upstream ODM’s production lines and relatively generate significant extra cost, is raising controversy between notebook ODMs and brand vendors as to which side will pay the increased cost, according to sources from PC ODMs.
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I was very excited when Chris Forster agreed to participate, because the academic perspective, especially the humanities perspective, isn’t always very visible within the Linux community. Chris does more than get academic work done, though. He does it with a fairly hardcore setup that might make some computer science faculty gulp in fear and wonder.
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Server
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Kernel Space
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Over at openbenchmarking.org/linux I have been experimenting with some improvements to OpenBenchmarking.org for the past few weeks. What’s shown at the user-interface level is quite simple: it’s serving as just a directory of Linux hardware (right now the public version just shows motherboards and processors, but the graphics card category will be enabled next). It’s similar to the OpenBenchmarking.org Performance Index where it lists all detected hardware components of a certain type, as it discovers new hardware from the crowd-sourced benchmarking process. From there you can explore the product, find benchmark results, etc.
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To do that, it’s time to break out the crayons and markers, Photoshop or GIMP, or anything else your creative minds can use to make this happen. Where will Pengroid show up next? What will he look like? Only you can decide. And you might even win a T-Shirt with your Pengroid image on it! If you can’t come up with your own image, don’t worry. You can still participate by going to our Facebook page and voting for your favorite Pengroid submissions from other people.
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Graphics Stack
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While the open-source Radeon Linux driver is MIT-licensed and could be forked into a proprietary Windows driver, it appears that AMD intends to make this WEC7 graphics driver available as open-source, at least to their device partners. In response to a comment whether taking code written in part by the Linux community (a “form of cheap labor”) and porting it to Windows embedded with some “proprietary sauce” was part of AMD’s original open-source Linux strategy plan, Bridgman responded with: “Nope. This is a fairly recent project, conceived and started years after we got back into supporting open source graphics drivers, and the request was for a driver that could be released in source code form.”
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Intel’s Juan Zhao has written and published some new documents on Wayland. In particular, a step-by-step guide for building and setting up Wayland under Ubuntu 11.04 and also a document briefly going over the Wayland architecture and API.
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Applications
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Increasing number of scientists are enthusiastic about using free, open source software for their research purposes. Authors’specific goal was to examine whether a Linux-based operating system with open source software packages would allow to prepare a submission-ready scientific manuscript without the need to use the proprietary software.FindingsPreparation and editing of scientific manuscripts is possible using Linux and open source software.
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Wine
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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New Releases
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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The Mageia project has announced that version 2.0 of its Mandriva Linux community fork will be delayed. In a post on the Mageia Blog, the developers say that they have decided to postpone the final release of Mageia 2 following more details about the release dates for other major projects, such as GNOME and KDE, allowing them to integrate the most current stable versions into their distribution.
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Back in July Mageia announced the developmental schedule for its second release. At that time Mageia 2 was planned for release on April 4. Now it appears developers and management are pushing back developmental and the final releases in order to “integrate the last stable versions and provide better quality for your favorite distribution.”
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Red Hat Family
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…a new record-setting SPECvirt_sc2010 virtualization performance benchmark in collaboration with long-time partner HP based on the powerful Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor and HP ProLiant systems.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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THE demand in South Africa alone means Fiji cannot get the Vodafone Webbook until next year.
This week, Vodafone South Africa announced that it was the first Vodafone operating company to launch the Vodafone Webbook. The device is extremely compact and lightweight, weighing less than one kilogram.
The Vodafone Webbook is presented with a 10 inch LCD (liquid crystal display) screen, 512MB (megabytes) of memory and an additional 4GB of storage space.
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More than a year ago, Canonical began betting Ubuntu users would be willing to pay for certain software titles. The company has now taken that belief one step further, expanding the for-purchase section of the Ubuntu Software Center to include ebooks and magazines as well as applications. Will Ubuntu become the new publishing hub of the open source channel? Read on for thoughts.
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Earlier this month some concerns were expressed in a Community Council meeting about some aspects of the Ubuntu community experience. Based on this feedback I released a survey that went out to all Ubuntu Members to gather some data about views on motivation, pride, leadership, and more. I also invited feedback via other means such as email and I was keen to reach out to many community members on the phone to continue to explore these concerns further.
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Casio Computer announced an Android 2.2-based Point-of-Sale (POS) terminal built around a 533MHz dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor. The VX-100 business support terminal offers a 10.4-inch, 800 x 600 touchscreen, a secondary 2 x 20 subdisplay, a thermal printer, a sales management application, and the ability to be remotely controlled via email.
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Web-enabled TVs are coming in various forms. But it doesn’t look like they will be using x86 cores anytime soon.
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Phones
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Android
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Call it delayed gratification, but it looks like developers will be able to get their hands on Android 4.0 source code (code-named “Ice Cream Sandwich”) after all. Just not right away.
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Students from India have a reason to celebrate the highly anticipated “Sakshat Tablet” was successfully launched in India on Wednesday. The tablet is called “Akash” and was jointly developed by India in collaboration with the Datawind, and can easily be obtained for ($ 45) 2,200/- in Indian rupees.
Akash tablet was developed jointly by India, with the UK Based company Datawind. The tablet will run Google’s Android 2.2 (Froyo) and a 7 “inch LCD, 800×480 resolutions. Akash tablet has 256 MB of RAM and 32 GB of expandable memory with two USB ports. Akash Tablet also comes with a 12 months replacement warranty.
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The day ICS(Ice Cream Sandwich – Android 4.0) will be made open-source is not too far. Once it is out, developers around the world(including OEMs like HTC, Samsung, Sony Ericcson) will start building the source code and start rolling out the update for android devices. But what bewilders me is the need for workstations with no lesser than 16 GB RAM to build the source code(I am not kidding). Ice Cream Sandwich is a Vampire 
that requires twice the amount of blood that GingerBread needed.
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Verizon Wireless has disabled the bootloader unlock feature in the software on the Droid Razr, the Android smartphone that Motorola unveiled last week.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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“The tablet PC and notebook PC markets are on a collision course as both product categories continue to evolve and improve on their respective weaknesses,” said Richard Shim, DisplaySearch Senior Analyst. “As such, each product category will influence the other over time. Still, the incumbent platforms have inherent advantages in the early years.”
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ViewSonic has begun selling a $200, seven-inch tablet that runs Android 2.3. The ViewPad 7e is equipped with a 1GHz Cortex-A8 processor, 4GB internal storage, 800 x 600 pixel screen resolution, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, dual cameras, and a micro-HDMI port, says the company.
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The Toronto-based maker of the electronic book readers is entering the increasingly-crowded market for cheap tablet computers, releasing a touch-screen, colour device that runs on Google Inc.’s Android operating system. The device allows for e-reading of books, magazines and newspapers, and also allows users to watch movies, listen to music and play video games such as Angry Birds, like they do on other tablets.
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Meet Scott Nesbitt. He’s a freelance writer and consultant in Toronto, Canada. He uses open source tools for more than 85 percent of the work he does. He’s idealistic about more getting more open data from our governments. Nesbitt also contributes to FLOSS Manuals (FLOSS stands for Free/Libre open source software) by helping to document open source projects. Documentation for the win!
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Consider, for example, software for processing DNA samples in some way. Such software is highly specialised. It is tempting to look for other people who are working in the same area and seek to share code with them.
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What does the future hold for eager, talented software developers, and people with related essential skill sets? The overriding trend, as in all industries, is you’re on your own, chum. But free/open source software (FOSS) offers considerably more richness of opportunity than anything else. Let’s peer into the crystal ball and see what the future holds.
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The International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (Icfoss) is being revamped with an amended vision document and functionalities.
The decision was taken at the fourth meeting of the Icfoss governing body held here chaired by Mr P. K. Kunhalikkutty, Minister for Industries, IT and Urban Affairs.
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Events
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JavaScript should win the Golden Mummy award! Or so believes Bastian Feder, an open source addict who gets talking with LFY about his journey from struggling-with-Linux days to being a speaker on Symfony 2 at OSI Days! He also tells us how communication is the key in open source and why he’ll also give a talk on the most hated topics of a developer, ‘documentation’ at the Summit.
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The Linux Foundation is organising its first LinuxCon in Europe this year. If you can’t make it to Prague this week for LinuxCon Europe 2011, you can now watch it online. The foundation will be streaming the conference on the web. We, Muktware, will be there providing daily reports on the conference.
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Web Browsers
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SaaS
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’ve been watching OpenStack, the emerging open source cloud standard, for more than a year now. Without a doubt, open source cloud projects generate buzz on TalkinCloud. But where exactly do VARs and MSPs fit into the OpenStack conversastion?
Since the OpenStack project’s mid-2010 launch, the community of open source developers and solution providers building on the platform has grown from just two — Rackspace and NASA — up to more than 110 today. And technology titans like Dell, Citrix, and HP have all signed on, with even traditionally hardware-focused Intel submitting code to the OpenStack community.
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Databases
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Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if MySQL is the top open-source database around the world. But that doesn’t justify using a sample of users of a single Java cloud company as a sample set to reflect all open-source database users around the world. After all, data that confirm our own beliefs and prejudices is information that requires more skeptical analysis, not less.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Oracle (ORCL) is using its strategy with open source as a template for its approach to cloud: First you dismiss it. Then you buy into it. Then you muddy it up. Wash, rinse, repeat.
In open source, this meant that Oracle first charged it was theft; then bought the largest player, Sun Microsystems; then used its control of key projects to muddy the industry’s waters, while it monetized what it could.
That process has now begun again with the purchase of RightNow. (RNOW). The price, $43/share, is not far a huge premium over Friday’s close of $36. But it’s still a nice pop for RightNow shareholders, and for those who got in exactly a year ago, it’s a near doubling of their money.
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CMS
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Open source enterprise CMS providers Alfresco is expanding its operation in the Asia-Pacific region, enhancing its partner programme on the back of ‘spectacular’ revenue growth.
Barry Costin, sales director for Alfresco APAC, says the company has added 13 new customers and appointed three new partners in the last 12 months, as open source software gains momentum in the market.
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Business
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While open source as a concept and philosophy is not new, it’s not well publicised either. Peter Ward talks to Jan Wildeboer, open source evangelist at Red Hat about how open source can be used by small businesses and start ups to dramatically lower costs.
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Semi-Open Source
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What does it take to build a successful business in the open source channel? That’s a question with no easy answer, but it’s also one the staff at Talend, one of the open source world’s largest commercial organizations, knows something about. I recently spoke with them about the importance of open source to their work. Here’s what they had to say.
First, a little background: Founded in 2005, Talend focuses on delivering data-integration solutions based on an “open core model,” in which the core technology is open source but value-added components, provided by both Talend and partners, may be proprietary.
Talend isn’t the very biggest open source business in existence, but with 400 employees and offices in 13 countries, it represents a powerful force within the open source channel. It also counts 2,500 paying commercial customers for its data-integration products and about 750,000 users of its free tools, making it one of the most important software vendors in its niche.
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Funding
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The Web site http://www.kickstarter.com is an interesting place. Basically, it’s a site that allows people to invest in various projects, giving people real money to develop an idea. Those ideas vary from film-making to programming video games, but the concept is the same regardless of the project.
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BSD
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The FreeBSD project has announced the arrival of the first release candidate (RC1) for version 9.0 of its FreeBSD operating system. The developers say that 9.0 RC1 was delayed due to a bug that the team encountered during the initial testing of the images, as well as problems related to FreeBSD-Update.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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What is really sad about this lack of acknowledgement is that many people and writers who do recognise events that are newsworthy in the field of computing have turned a blind eye – or else issued something that’s similar to weak tea.
Take Richard Stallman, the head of the Free Software Foundation, for example. Stallman has much to thank Ritchie for; were it not for the C programming language that Ritchie developed, Stallman would not have been able to create any of the GNU tools that he did, in his quest to create a free operating system.
Stallman had time to comment on the passing of Steve Jobs. Yet, to date, neither him nor anyone else at the FSF or the GNU Foundation have said a word about Ritchie.
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Project Releases
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Openness/Sharing
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The two hope that local online news organizations will use the software as a way to improve their publishing systems without having to spend lots of money.
The package is a “content management system,” or CMS, named Armstrong. The two nonprofits say they themselves have been using the Armstrong CMS since 2009.
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Open Data
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The UK government is about to start publishing data on all current roadworks in progress, so we may stand a chance of actually arriving at a destination on time and relatively free of rage and desires to kill.
As part of a new attempt to be more open, accountable, transparent and so on and so forth, the transport department will soon begin to “publish useful raw data on road works, cycle routes and car parks, to help travellers use our transport networks better.”
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Open Access/Content
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Programming
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Standards/Consortia
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If you are like me then you were very excited about HTML 5′s video tag. Simplistic, great functionality, and now it is even supported by all of the latest browsers. Video is just a source away, and easier than ever to portray high quality videos right on your website. HTML 5, like anything else, doesn’t have everything we want. For example the biggest problem is a “full screen command.” Even though you are able to specify the dimensions appropriately, you still want to be able to save space, and provide that option. Early on there were a number of options available to have a deluxe video player. There seems to be a frontrunner in this battle, and that is VideoJS.
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Health/Nutrition
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Today’s teenagers are probably the most savvy generation yet when it comes to filtering out advertising, but that is no worry for junk food and drink companies who steadily deploy stealthier and more sophisticated interactive promotions that specifically target teens and exploit their emotional and developmental vulnerabilities. The newest generation of internet-based junk food promotions uses cutting edge marketing techniques with names like “augmented reality,” “virtual environments” and “neuromarketing” — the use of scientifically-devised digital marketing techniques that trigger teens’ subconscious emotional arousal.
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Members of Congress and the Obama administration have assured us that on January 1, 2014, junk health insurance plans — which offer only the illusion of adequate coverage to the millions of Americans enrolled in them — will become a thing of the past.
Among those who clearly don’t believe those plans are headed for extinction are the insurance companies that market these highly profitable plans, and the employers that buy them — primarily restaurant chains and retailers with high employee turnover.
If I were President Obama, I would send one of my aides to the Chicago suburbs later this week to see first-hand just how determined these companies are to continue selling these plans — which are euphemistically called “mini-med” and “limited-benefit policies” — long past 2014.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Brent oil price have remained stubbornly above $100 a barrel in 2011. Part of the reason why has been the decline in days supply of OECD Total Oil Stocks. Following the financial crisis of 2008, total oil inventories in the OECD climbed steadily, rising above 60 days supply. However, after the low in oil prices in 2009, inventories started a gentle decline which has now seen levels fall below 59 days supply. Over the years it has been my observation that while the level of days supply influences oil prices, changes in direction matter more.
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Finance
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In September the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), a bipartisan deficit-hawk group based at the New America Foundation, held a high-profile symposium urging the Congressional “supercommittee” to “go big” and approve a $4 trillion deficit reduction plan over the next decade, which is well beyond its $1.2 trillion mandate. The hearing began with an alarming video of top policy-makers describing the national debt as “the most serious threat that this country has ever had” (Alan Simpson) and “a threat to the whole idea of self-government” (Mitch Daniels). If the debt continues to rise, predicted former New Mexico Senator Pete Domenici, there would be “strikes, riots, who knows what?” A looming fiscal crisis was portrayed as being just around the corner.
The event spotlighted a central paradox in American politics over the past two years: how, in the midst of a massive unemployment crisis — when it’s painfully obvious that not enough jobs are being created and the public overwhelmingly wants policy-makers to focus on creating them — did the deficit emerge as the most pressing issue in the country? And why, when the global evidence clearly indicates that austerity measures will raise unemployment and hinder, not accelerate, growth, do advocates of austerity retain such distinction today?
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Earlier this month, hundreds of New Yorkers received an unusual dinner invitation from the Lower East Side People’s Federal Credit Union.
The Credit Union, a small lender serving New York’s poor, was holding a fund-raiser to celebrate its 25th anniversary. Among the chief sponsors listed on the invitation was Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
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Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 4:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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“Most developer jobs require current knowledge of non-open software,” said blogger Barbara Hudson, “but it’s a safe bet to say that most jobs are not ‘open’ jobs. … The most reliable way to get a job that uses open source exclusively is to create your own. The bad news is that, as in every previous recession, we’re seeing a lot of this ‘involuntary entrepreneurship.’ The good news is that this time the tools are freely available.”
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So, are updates the dirty little secret of running Linux?
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Desktop
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The next morning I began looking into UEFI more since I had not done a lot of research but did know it was discovered around the time Windows 8 Developer was released. Anyways Ubuntu has a Community Documentation Article that discusses some workarounds for the UEFI problem and I have personally been considering how greatly the UEFI problem could affect Linux Users. I think there is some positive discussion going on and brainstorming occurring that will allow the Linux community to find reliable workarounds and solutions before UEFI becomes a standard.
Apparently Dell has had UEFI laptops for a while so it is no surprise that a new HP laptop has UEFI by default although with HP doing quite a bit of stuff in the FOSS community I figured they might have provided better support for someone trying to install Linux. Hopefully some sort of legislation will pass that requires manufacturers to list that a certain device is only capable of running a certain OS out of the box and further the whole issue seems very anti-competitive.
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It’s been about three years, since I finally migrated all of my personal PCs for my immediate family from Windows XP to Fedora Linux. I had used it for many years previous to that, but I had held off on migrating all of my PCs permanently because of issues with getting apps to work in Wine, and problems finding apps to replace proprietary ones I had used up to that point.
It’s been a pretty smooth ride on Fedora during the past 3 years though, for me and my family. I originally installed Fedora 9, and have upgraded the PCs to Fedora 14 during that time. I originally set up a Windows XP virtual machine in VirtualBox for those times where applications MUST run in a Windows environment, where there is no Linux alternative. But those cases are getting more rare now. I haven’t used my XP virtual machine in quite some time. I have realized one thing though, that staying on Fedora’s current release does take some extra time to upgrade from version to version. I have stated in other posts I became sick of maintaining Windows XP, and yet I’ve found that I still do need extra time to upgrade Fedora. But, I should mention that I don’t absolutely need to upgrade to the latest versions, but I do it mainly to upgrade all of the applications to their latest version, like Firefox, Thunderbird, and other software on the PCs. Overall, it’s a nice and easy way to “refresh” both the Linux kernel and all of the applications installed in one easy step.
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A couple of weeks ago, ZaReason sent us a shiny new Invenire 1220 running Qimo 2.0 for a review. This is the first time I’ve ever seen Qimo running on a machine I hadn’t put it on, and the fact that it was like that out of the box was one of the coolest experiences I’ve had. Having Qimo available as a pre-install option is not only a great opportunity for Qimo, but an easy way for parents to get a working computer that’s safe and inviting for their kids.
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On this machine I have installed Linux Mint Debian Edition, 32-bit and I’m using XFCE as my desktop environment. LMDE provides the necessary proprietary codecs to make my life simpler. Also the fact that LMDE is a rolling distribution is great as I don’t need to worry about the upgrade treadmill anymore and I have to admit that I like the idea of always having all the most current apps installed.
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Kernel Space
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Released several weeks late due to malware attacks on kernel.org in August, the Linux 3.1 kernel is out now, with a variety of enhancements to performance, virtualization, and power management. It also includes support for near field communication (NFC), the OpenRISC open source CPU, Nintendo’s Wii controller, and 3D acceleration with Nvidia GEForce graphics processor units (GPUs).
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Among the most prominent advancements of Linux 3.1 are the kernel’s 3D support for new NVIDIA graphics chips and virtualisation enhancements for KVM and Xen.
About !!! weeks after the version jump to 3.0, Linus Torvalds has now released the second kernel in the 3.x series. Without the break-in at kernel.org, the new version would probably have been released three to four weeks earlier, as the temporary unavailability of the central server structure slightly hampered the kernel developers’ work. However, the scope of modifications compares quite well with that of the new kernel’s direct predecessors, as another round of advancements enhances the range of features and hardware support of Linux. Users are likely to benefit from these advancements in the near future, because distributions such as Fedora 16, which is due to be released in November, are already planning to use kernel version 3.1.
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Two weeks ago AMD introduced the Bulldozer FX-Series CPUs to much excitement, although many were letdown by the initial results, and it was months after showing the first Linux benchmarks of an AMD Dual-Interlagos pre-production system. In the days that followed I delivered some initial AMD FX-4100 Linux benchmarks when securing remote access to a low-end Bulldozer system running Ubuntu 11.04 (and there were also some Linux benchmarks from independent Phoronix readers), but then last week a Bulldozer kit arrived from AMD. The centerpiece of this kit is an eight-core AMD FX-8150 CPU, which is now being used to conduct a plethora of AMD Bulldozer benchmarks on Linux.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Qt, the Nokia-owned graphical toolkit used in popular products from Google and Adobe, is now being run as an open-source project, meaning independent developers can have more influence on the direction of the software.
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There are many levels of openness that a project can espouse, from simply dumping open source code at regular intervals, to actually fostering a community and letting the community dictate the course of development the project should take. It can be endlessly debated as to what level of openness is better and for what project or under what conditions. Regardless Qt, the popular open source cross-platform framework used by KDE, is now a little more open with the launch of the Qt Project.
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GNOME Desktop
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A title that is effectively social-suicide to post on PlanetKDE, but I’ll risk it anyway. I spent some time last week trying out Gnome 3.2, and it has a lot of really good ideas that we can steal take influence from.
I think as desktop developers it’s always worth spending some time to see what our “competitors” are doing in both the open source and commercial world.
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GNOME 3.2 got its own file previewer: GNOME Sushi, but what if you want to use Gloobus Preview instead (the main reason for this being that Gloobus Preview supports more file types)?
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Two distributions that I have been most asked to review are Arch Linux and Chakra. And the reason I have so far refused to do so is the relatively high level of knowledge required to operate them. Think of Slackware, turbo mode into Gentoo, then add some. Supposedly, Arch Linux is good and stable and light on the system, but it takes time working out and taming, or as we say in technical parlance, why bother. But Chakra, as it turns out, is unto Arch what Sabayon is unto Gentoo. All of the horrible geekiness is taken away and you have a simple and friendly desktop.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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For some added fun, go to the Panel Tool Box (the cashew at the right end of the bottom panel), choose “Add Widgets” then *Get New Widgets”, then “Download New Plasma Widgets”. In the search box enter “CpuFreqDisplay”, and install the widget that comes up. Then go back to the Add Widgets function, and add that widget to your panel. That gives you a nice colorful display of the CPU speed as it is adjusted on demand. Enjoy!
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Gentoo Family
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Red Hat Family
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The OVA is an organization founded by Red Hat, IBM, HP and Intel to foster the adoption of the open source Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor, upon which Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is based.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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With Oneiric Ocelot just released, Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth wants to get next year’s release right
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At the end of the week my impression is Ubuntu 11.10 offers a good, newcomer-friendly distribution. It has a few issues, most of them minor, but it really feels like a distribution I could put in front of someone who considered themselves both a Linux and a computer “newbie” and they would probably do well with it. The Kubuntu edition feels to be targeting power users who want the convenience of Ubuntu, but who want to be able to configure their interface. It’s fast, easy to customize and, aside from a few issues with package management and the annoying Nepomuk pop-ups that appear at login, it’s been a solid experience. The two editions compliment each other well. Both install quickly, come with a good base of software (with over 30,000 additional packages in the Software Centre) and are easy to use. This is probably the best release Ubuntu has put out in the past two years and I think Kubuntu may become a permanent resident on my main machine.
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As is natural for an LTS cycle, lots of people are thinking and talking about work focused on quality rather than features. With Canonical extending LTS support to five years on the desktop for 12.04, much of this is quite rightly focused on the desktop. I’m really not a desktop hacker in any way, shape, or form, though. I spent my first few years in Ubuntu working mainly on the installer – I still do, although I do some other things now too – and I used to say only half-jokingly that my job was done once X started. Of course there are plenty of bugs I can fix, but I wanted to see if I could do something with a bit more structure, so I got to thinking about projects we could work on at the foundations level that would make a big difference.
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Ubuntu sponsor Canonical has announced that it has signed a partnership agreement with the Pearson Technology Group and Linux New Media to provide ebooks and magazines to the Ubuntu Software Centre. Canonical says that several ebooks, including “The Official Ubuntu Book” and “Ubuntu Unleashed: 2011 Edition”, have already been added to the Software Centre; magazines such as Ubuntu User and Linux Magazine should be available soon from $6.99.
The Software Centre is the Linux distribution’s recommended software management system for adding additional applications, tools or components; commercial software was first added to Ubuntu in April 2010 with the 11.04 “Natty Narwhal” release. “Through this innovative partnership we are adding eBooks and magazines to the wide range of applications currently available in the Ubuntu Software Center, creating a fantastic revenue opportunity for Ubuntu developers and content creators”, said Canonical VP Business Development Steve George.
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One of the best feature of the Unity desktop in Ubuntu is the lens. Lens are the search feature in the Dash. Different lenses allow you to perform search functions, for example, the Music Lens allows you to search for music that you have recently listened to while the Applications Lens searches for all your applications in the system. In Ubuntu Oneiric, it comes with three default lenses, namely the Applications lens, Recent Files/Folders lens and the Music lens. Below are several useful lens that you can add on to your system.
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Flavours and Variants
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Most of the time I am writing articles on getting users up to speed with specific tools, distributions, or desktops. This time, I am going to help you set up one of my new pet distributions so that you’ll spend less time figuring things out, and more time enjoying Bodhi Linux.
You should already know that Bodhi Linux is proud to be one of the few distributions that is a minimal, yet very functional, desktop Linux. What that means is you are going to have to actually install some software. That task is always the first thing I do upon completion of installation. Naturally everyone has their own list of favorite software they install, my list looks something like this:
* The Gimp
* LibreOffice
* Audacity
* Banshee
* Gnucash
* Lucky Backup
* Speedcrunch
* Fotowall
* Calibre
* Chromium Browser
* Dropbox
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Phones
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Android
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The telecom boom in the emerging markets of the Asia-Pacific is expected to continue in 2011, and will drive the total mobile subscription rate in the region to grow by more than 15%. The mobile market in the Asia-Pacific still has the potential to grow at more than a 10% rate for the next two years.
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It is reported that Microsoft’s rather unpopular Windows Phone 7 costs more to make than the iPhone 4s, disproving the theory that “You get what you pay for”. It’s no secret that Microsoft is allegedly making more money from Android “licenses” than it is from WP7 and it doesn’t seem like Mango has stirred any excitement – the one “fruit” product in the Tech world that’s truly gone rotten?
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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But broadband does not just benefit science for the developing world – it benefits science in the developing world too. In places like Chile, where low light pollution levels are conducive to astronomical observation, and where scientists make use of the regional RedClara network, itself largely funded by the EU. Even in a place like Somalia, the existence of a research and education network is not just remarkable – in a country with few functional national organisations – but positive, as an agent for change supporting healthcare, education services and the Fibre for Peace initiative.
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10.24.11
Posted in News Roundup at 5:08 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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· Announced Distro: Ubuntu GNOME Shell Remix 11.10
· Announced Distro: Sabayon 7 CoreCDX, SpinBase, ServerBase and OpenVZ
· Announced Distro: Kororaa 15.1
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Server
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I may not know exactly what you’re trying to do with your servers, but I do know that, no matter what operating system you’re running, you need to know servers to be successful.
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Kernel Space
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After going through ten release candidates, the Linux 3.1 kernel should be released by early next week. However, with the Linux 3.1 kernel release cycle having been dragged on by more RCs than normal and the Kernel.org hacking incident, the Linux 3.2 kernel may end up being abnormally large and its worrying Linus Torvalds.
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Graphics Stack
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One of the features that NVIDIA introduced in the 290.03 Beta Linux driver that was released on Friday is support for an OpenGL shader disk cache.
NVIDIA’s OpenGL shader disk cache option for Linux allows compiled shaders to be cached to the system disk in a temporary area so that they don’t need to be re-compiled again later on, which can potentially save time by just pulling these binaries from the disk instead. This OpenGL shader disk cache feature is also supported by the proprietary Solaris and FreeBSD x86/x86_64 drivers, which were also released on Friday at version 290.03 Beta.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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Games
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Desktop Environments
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Linux is fundamentally a command line Operating System. Anything and everything can be done through the command line – system configuration, connecting to WiFi access points, even accessing new hardware devices before the Linux Kernel gets a driver for it (like USB Flash Drives before Linux Kernel 2.4 – pre 2001)
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Today Nokia announced the start of the open governance model for Qt, known as the Qt Project. The Qt Project allows both companies and individuals to contribute to the development of Qt. KDE supports this move and is excited about the possibilities it brings. We have been waiting for opportunities to take a more active role in Qt’s future for a long time and open governance will make this easier. KDE has been working closely with Qt during its 15 year lifetime and the Qt Project promises to bring this collaboration to a new level.
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GNOME Desktop
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Let’s hope that the folks behind Ubuntu can admit a mistake, and get back to making Ubuntu one of the most newbie-friendly Linux distributions.
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1. PCLinuxOS
As I’m rather familiar with its installation process, I installed PCLinuxOS first. I was not very sure because I have some problems with effects on my desktop (nothing that prevents me from sleeping, actually), but PCLinuxOS went out like an energetic Texas longhorn and installed everything without a finch. I tried the Kwin effects and everything was perfect! Of course, I was lacking the Office suite but the process to get it is simple enough for a Linux non-technical user like me: you fire up Synaptic, search “lomanager”, select it for upgrade, close Synaptic and click on the Libre Office installer icon on the desktop. The only drawback, if any at all, is that this is a 32 bit OS… Again, nothing that matters much to me.
2. Linux Mint 11 “Katya”
I installed the 64 bit version of Linux Mint. I have always liked the elegance of this OS and the way it handles the installation process. I noticed something new: Mint said that it had detected PCLinuxOS and prompted me for an action. I selected “install next to it” for a dual boot. However, after the process was complete, PCLinuxOS was unbootable… In Linux-Linux dual boots that happens quite often, but my real problem was that I do not know how to repair it from the grub mechanism in Mint (Megatotoro taught me the ropes for GRUB legacy, but I simply do not know how to repair this thing). The only option was to start over…
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It’s again a while ago I wrote my review about lightweight Linux distribution. In my very first review of 2008 I took a look at the following distributions:
* Arch 2007.08-2
* Damn Small Linux 4.2.5
* Puppy 4.0
* TinyMe Test7-KD
* Xubuntu 8.04
* Zenwalk 5.0
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The Gentoo-based SystemRescue CD/USB is one of the very best rescue distros, packing amazing functionality into a 350MB image. It can rescue Linux, Unix, Mac, and Windows systems, and recover data from almost any media. Today we will learn how to create a SystemRescue live USB stick, and recover data from failing drives.
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New Releases
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The ZevenOS Team is pleased to announce ZevenOS-Neptune 2.0.
This is the first version we ship in two editions: Minimal Edition (with LXDE) and Full Edition (with KDE SC)
Both ship with an updated and optimized Kernel 3.0.4. Minimal Edition includes PCManFM 0.9.8, DeaDBeef 0.5.1, Gnome-Mplayer 1.0.4 (with Mplayer2), Abiword 2.8.6, Iceweasel 7 (alias Firefox w/o branding) & Iceweasel 5 (alias Thunderbird w/o branding).
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Gentoo Family
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Verdict: 4/5
Sabayon is a very polished, modern distribution, giving you all of the amenities that you expect from Linux. And being based on a rolling release system, you should only ever have to install once. The only issue was using the Live CD with an inadequate video card, ending up with artifacts and distortions, but advanced users should be able to deal with this issue in double-quick time.
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Sabayon is an incredibly fast Linux distribution, probably due to its Gentoo roots. Even though I ran this in Live mode it was snappy and highly responsive.
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Red Hat Family
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Debian Family
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Debian is the mother of many popular distributions such as Ubuntu and Linux Mint. Debian has a cult following among its users. It is fast, smooth and free from the control of any company. If you are one of those users who want to run a ‘pure’ community driven OS, then Debian is the one. A caveat, Debian may require some extra work to make it work for you.
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I’m a long-time Debian user, since the mid-90s or so. I like their technical decisions some but what I really like is their culture and goals. I still wear with pride my old Debian shirt from the time I helped staff a booth at a conference. Later I reluctantly switched to Ubuntu after I repeatedly couldn’t get my laptop wifi/sleep to work.
I recently got a new desktop system and hesitated when considering what to put on it. I don’t much enjoy fighting with details and would prefer a system that just works, but I’m tired of fighting with CADT-developed GUIs; both Gnome3 and Unity are too heavy and fiddly for what I want — browsers and terminals.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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South African Vodafone affiliate, Vodacom, announced the immediate availability of a Webbook device powered by the newly released Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) operating system.
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After some consideration and some positive results of Ubuntu 11.10 Live run, I decided to install this operating system onto my hard drive.
Because my Live USB was broken, as you can see at the end of linked post, I had to use usual fall back option – CD-RW.
[...]
But despite these facts I think I’ll keep Ubuntu 11.10 on my hard drive for some time. Maybe I’ll get used to new Unity interface and its features.
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In a statement issued this morning on the company’s blog, Canonical revealed that Ubuntu 12.04 will be supported for five years on the desktop instead of the usual three years that a standard long-term support release gets. The company says that the longer duration of desktop support is intended to better serve corporate desktop rollouts.
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One of the strange things about Canonical’s Long Term Support (LTS) releases has always been the disparity between the length of support on the desktop vs. the server. LTS releases today provide 5 yrs of support on the server and 3 on the desktop, but that’s going to change with the 12.04 release.
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Being able to install GNOME Shell in Ubuntu Oneiric is exciting. And as we experienced in our earlier review of GNOME Shell in Ubuntu 11.10, GNOME Shell has come a long since its first release and now is a very stable, fast and usable shell for GNOME. To further improve the functionality, GNOME Shell has extensions support. Though these are very early stages, there are quite a number of really good GNOME Shell extensions already.
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Based on our “on-the-move” lifestyle and dependency on our computer we expect performance without flaw. The Ubuntu OS certainly has impressed us and we would recommend it to anybody who wants to break the Microsoft chain.
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Quick, how old is Ubuntu? If you remembered it being about 10 years old, that was my initial recollection too. In fact, Ubuntu is seven years old this week. PC World has taken note of the original release language for “Warty Warthog:” “Ubuntu is a new Linux distribution that brings together the extraordinary breadth of Debian with a fast and easy install, regular releases (every six months), a tight selection of excellent packages installed by default and a commitment to security updates with 18 months of security and technical support for every release.” Now, Mark Shuttleworth is discussing the next major version of Ubuntu, dubbed “Precise Pangolin.”
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Ubuntu 11.10, codenamed Oneiric Ocelot, prowled out of the development forest earlier this month. In our review of Ubuntu 11.04, released back in April, we took a close look at the strengths and weaknesses of the new Unity shell and compared it with GNOME 3.0. In this review, we’re going to revisit Unity to see how much progress it has made over the past six months. We will also take a close look at the updated Software Center user interface and the transition from Evolution to Thunderbird.
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I use the Linux desktop at work, but I’m in a tiny minority. Most people use Windows. Canonical, Ubuntu Linux’s parent company, plans on getting at least some Windows users to switch though with its next long term support (LTS) release.
Canonical has announced that it would be extending the support and maintenance period for the April 2012 LTS Ubuntu Linux release for desktop users from three years to five years. The move comes in response to what the company claims is “increasing demand for Ubuntu desktops in corporate environments where longer maintenance periods are the norm. It brings the desktop product into line with Ubuntu Server which continues with five years of support for LTS releases.”
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Flavours and Variants
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Well, it’s that time of year again: it’s October, so another edition of Ubuntu has been released. This includes its official derivatives, like Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, and Edubuntu. Today I’ll be testing Edubuntu because I feel like it doesn’t get reviewed enough, yet it provides the same experience and support as standard Ubuntu, aside from having a whole bunch of educational applications included in the live session (hence the name).
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Everything either works out of the box (or, since there is no box, right off the .iso) or can be made to work with a little research and a few minutes of keyboard-pounding. The Broadcom wireless situation can’t really be called satisfactory, but neither can it be laid solely at the feet of Kubuntu.
What you do get in Kubuntu is a vast selection of possible softwares, an active and dedicated development team and community, an exceptionally polished visual impression, and a lot of stuff that works just the way it’s supposed to. Unless you revile KDE and/or go around saying things like “Canonical is just like Micro$haft”, I’d say Kubuntu 11.10 is absolutely worth checking out.
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OpenELEC aims to make home theater PCs as much like your DVD player as possible, using a lightweight, instant-on version of XBMC that updates itself for a maintenance-free media center.
We talk a lot about XBMC around here, because it makes a great home theater PC—but it can often take a lot of work to set up. Even if you use XBMC Live—the easy-install distribution we used for our silent, standalone XBMC machine—you’re essentially installing Ubuntu Linux on your PC with XBMC on top of it, which brings in a lot of software you don’t necessarily need. Plus, it can take a bit of work to update the box and fiddle with its configuration. If all you want is a simple media center, OpenELEC makes XBMC’s installation and maintenance a snap so you can just get to the good stuff: watching your movies.
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More details about the first stable release can be found in the official release announcement. OpenELEC 1.0 is available to download from the project’s site and installation guides are provided. OpenELEC source code is hosted on GitHub and licensed under the GPL.
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Phones
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Android
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Sales of tablet computers running Google Inc.’s Android software rose last quarter at the expense of Apple Inc.’s iPad, after companies led by Samsung Electronics Co. introduced new models, according to a researcher.
Android-powered tablet computers accounted for 27 percent of global sales during the three-month period, jumping from 2.3 percent a year earlier, Strategy Analytics said in a statement today. The iPad’s share fell to 67 percent from 96 percent.
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Users of Apple’s iPhone 4s have touted the voice service Siri as a killer feature on the latest iteration of the phone. Though voice support on Android has been around for sometime, it has not quite enjoyed the kind of buzz that Siri is enjoying. That’s what prompted the guys over at Dexetra to develop Iris, a Siri alternative for Android.
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Google has revealed two new APIs – Calendars and Text-To-Speech – which are now marked as public APIs in Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS). This means that developers will be able to rely upon them, that their functionality will be tested as part of Android’s Compatibility Test Suite and that Google “promise to try very hard not to change them and thus break your code”.
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Google unveiled Android 4.0—codenamed Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS)—this week at an event in Hong Kong, alongside the new Galaxy Nexus smartphone. The much-anticipated new version of Google’s mobile operating system includes a unified interface for phones and tablets and a number of significant new technical features, such as face detection.
Shortly after the launch event, Google made the ICS software development kit (SDK) available for the public to download from the Android developer website. The SDK makes it possible for third-party software developers to start building software that is designed for the new version of the operating system. The SDK and the updated developer reference documentation offers a first look at the new APIs introduced in ICS.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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World tablet sales hot up during Q3, it was revealed today. Shipments almost quadrupled year on year, from 4.4m units in Q3 2010 to 16.7m tablets in Q3 2011.
So said market watcher Strategy Analytics, this morning.
Neither SA nor anyone else would be surprised that Apple remained top dog, though with a much-reduced share of the market.
In Q3 2010, it had a 95.5 per cent share. One year on, it only commanded 66.6 per cent of the table market, at least as far as units shipped go.
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In the proprietary arena, patent wars have raged out of control, while the old “security through obscurity” theory has been proven wrong. Piracy has continued unabated around the globe, the mobile arena has become increasingly locked down, and the possibility of a new generation of Windows 8-only PCs looms on the horizon.
Threats to software users’ freedom are coming fast and furious, in other words, making the open source alternatives–with all their myriad benefits for businesses and consumers–look better than ever.
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Perhaps the Libre Software Community should take heed to the old joke about the two preachers who both preached from the subject, “You’re Going to Hell”. The same message draws different reactions. The difference lies in the tone of the preacher. Libre software advocates should pay attention to the tone of their message. It is true that many people simply buy various devices based on functionality and not based on what they may be free to do. But libre software advocates need to craft a solid message with a tone that inspires people to accomplish greater things.
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Events
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The 22 of October 2011 is the day of the eleventh Italian Linux Day .
This wonderful event is now in its eleventh version, I have participated at various editions of this event in my local town and adjacent areas, depending on the programs offered, and I must say that I always come out very satisfied.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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This week I ran across a blog by Eric Raymond that was posted on October 8, in which Raymond defends the now infamous remarks made by Richard Stallman on his blog shortly after the death of Steve Jobs. I found this to me more than a little interesting, because Raymond and Stallman don’t always see eye to eye on FOSS issues. Indeed, he even manages to take a swipe at RMS while speaking in his defense…
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Programming
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It has been more than two years since the last major release of PHP, with PHP 5.3 debuting in June of 2009, which means it’s almost time for a new major release.
PHP 5.4 is currently in beta and will make multiple improvements over the current PHP 5.3 release.
“There are a lot of improvements in PHP 5.4, especially around performance and memory use,” Andi Gutmans, CEO of Zend told InternetNews.com. “The fact that we’ve given it the beta name, it means the product is already pretty complete. The community feels good about what’s in there.”
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Standards/Consortia
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Security
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The next time you hear someone asserting that oil extraction “was always difficult and expensive”—as a way to refute the very high cost now of the marginal barrel—you’ll know they’re spinning a folk tale. A helpful chart from the just released EIA Annual Energy Review shows that the capital required to add an additional barrel of oil to reserves experienced a step change starting last decade. The chart uses the COE unit (crude oil equivalent) which is a way to measure the cost of adding 5.8 million btu regardless of whether the resource is oil, natural gas, or natural gas liquids.
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Finance
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The GAO released a report yesterday that provided some anodyne but nevertheless useful confirmation of many of the things most of us knew or strongly suspected about the Fed: it’s a club of largely white male corporate insiders who do a bit too many favors for each other. But the GAO seemed peculiarly to fail to understand some basic shortcomings of its investigation.
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10.21.11
Posted in News Roundup at 7:00 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Vodacom announced an Ubuntu Linux-based netbook for the developing world, to be initially be launched in South Africa for $188. The Vodafone Webbook offers a 10-inch screen, 512MB of RAM and 4GB of storage, a Vodacom SIM card slot, and a weight less than 2.2 pounds, says the mobile provider.
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The Ubuntu Developer Summit 2011 is approaching and, as is customary, Mark Shuttleworth has laid out his objectives and themes for the fourth Ubuntu LTS (Long Term Support) release, Ubuntu 12.04, recently named Precise Pangolin. The two foremost issues on Shuttleworth’s mind are the fact that 12.04 is an LTS release and Ubuntu’s presence in the cloud; he is also aware of what Ubuntu owes to the work of other developers.
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Kernel Space
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One of the great things about being The Linux Foundation is that we get to work with the foremost open source contributors in the world on a regular basis. What’s just as exciting, though, is watching companies evolve from traditional, closed source development organizations into full-fledged open source contributors. This is happening every day, and the pace is astounding.
However, this transition doesn’t usually happen overnight. We’re often asked, “How can I be more effective at consuming open source and up-streaming our own code?” Most companies would love to be active participants but also recognize that it takes a number of years to get to where they want to get. The implied question is actually, “How can I accelerate this process so that I see the benefits sooner?”
In a similar vein, we also get asked about starting new open source projects and releasing existing proprietary technology as open source. This trend is becoming increasingly common as companies discover their business partners have a vested interest in the success of their technology and are willing to share in the destiny of the code.
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Applications
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In the age of globalization, working with people from different parts of the world is common for many industries. Employees often have to travel long distances, which are not only hectic, but also costly for the company. Thanks to the fantastic state of the current economy, companies can no longer afford to spend extra money on travel expenses and accommodation. Furthermore, since travel often involves shifting between different timezones, employees are jet lagged and they aren’t able to perform at their fullest potential. And finally, there’s the environmental crisis, which is forcing more and more companies to go green and to cut out any unnecessary activities that may affect the environment, which obviously involves travel too.
So, what’s the solution to this? Should we stop globalizing? The answer is No. Thanks to the marvelous advancement in modern computing, people from different parts of the world can now communicate without even leaving their own office. The technology I’m talking about is web conferencing. Web conferencing allows you to hold meetings, seminars (called webinars), annotate whiteboards, training events, lectures and more using the power of the Internet.
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Proprietary
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We have now released 11.52 addressing a 0 day security issue. We have at the same time thrown in some stability fixes.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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For nine years, my default desktop was GNOME. About the third of the time, I’d use another desktop or a shell, either for the purposes of review or just for a change, but I’d always return to GNOME. It was a no-fuss interface in which I could do my common tasks without any problem. But a glitch on my system that left GNOME unstartable coincided with the release of KDE 4.2, and — not having the time to reinstall — I switched to KDE. I haven’t looked back since.
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GNOME Desktop
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A day after Owen Taylor’s announcement for GNOME Shell 3.2.1, here comes the final and stable release of the GNOME 3.2.1 desktop environment.
GNOME 3.2.1 is the first maintenance release of the wonderful open source GNOME 3.2 desktop environment for Linux-based operating system.
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The first point release to the Oktoberfest-christened GNOME 3.2 was released today. Like usual, this GNOME update (v3.2.1) just brings translation updates and bug-fixes. There’s also some “tiny improvements” but nothing major.
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New Releases
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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With the advent of Mandriva 2011, Mandriva versions were reduced to only one. Previously, you could select among Free, ONE, and PowerPack. I was introduced to the world of Linux by the ONE version (back in 2009), but I paid for the PowerPack 2009 and 2010.
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Red Hat Family
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Version 2.0 of the JDK build environment, IcedTea, has been published. The software harness enables compilation of the source code provided by the OpenJDK project using only free developer tools. This is the first version released that supports the new OpenJDK 7.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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It was exactly seven years ago that the very first version of Ubuntu Linux–dubbed “Warty Warthog”–was released, kicking off a long line of increasingly popular versions of the free and open source operating system.
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Seven years ago Ubuntu 4.10, the Warty Warthog, was released. It was the very first Ubuntu release.
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Released to schedule on October 13, Ubuntu 11.10 (codenamed Oneiric Ocelot) sees the end of official support for the GNOME desktop, the OS relying instead on Canonical’s own Unity desktop in either the default 3D or 2D mode. Oneiric is something of a consolidation release, with improvements mostly limited to completing the switch to Unity begun in 11.04, along with general polish in terms of look and feel. You can persue the official Ubuntu 11.10 release notes and take an online tour of Oneiric at the Ubuntu web site.
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In just over a week, quite a large cross-section of the Ubuntu community and representatives from many free software projects and companies will gather in Orlando to map out the Precise Pangolin. Now’s the time to prepare for the event, with 11.10 out (well done everybody!) and the key infrastructure slotting into place.
Figuring out the optimal balance of goals is the work of the summit, but we can lay out some over-arching themes that have been in progress during this meta-cycle and come to their full fruition in the LTS release. We can also remind ourselves of the ways in which an LTS is different, and the impact that will have on our choices in Orlando.
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Now that Ubuntu 11.10 was released, we are proud to announce today, Octomber 18th, the immediate availability for download of a new Linux operating system based on the newly released Ubuntu 11.10 distribution.
The new Ubuntu-based operating system introduced here is called Ubuntu GNOME Shell Remix and it’s build on top of the Oneiric Ocelot release, but without the Unity shell.
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We’re about to embark on a new cycle and with that comes the hopes of many that the Perfect LTS can be a really good break through release. I was reading a comment by the ever ready Jeff Spaleta over on Mark Shuttleworth’s Blog. His assertion was that Ubuntu has been loosing people according to the Wikimedia web stats data, so I decided to put this to the test.
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Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu, chose the day when Ubuntu turned 7 to laid the plan of the next version of Ubuntu, code named Precise Pangolin.
Ubuntu 12.04 is a very important release for Ubuntu and users as it is an LTS release. LTS means Long Term Support. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, releases LTS versions every two years and supports it for 3 years. What’s more interesting about the LTS version is that it is supported for 5 years on servers, thus making it perfect for enterprises and governments.
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This new edition, dubbed the Oneiric Ocelot (it means “dreamy”), is much less adventurous. It brings no new features to speak of, just a clutch of interface refinements, more like a service pack than a new version.
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Phones
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Android
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Sprint unveiled two $100 Android 2.3 smartphones with 1.2GHz processors. The rugged Motorola Admiral offers a 3.1-inch screen and exposed keyboard, and operates on Sprint’s Direct Connect push-to-talk network, and the HTC Evo Design 4G is a four-inch “worldphone” that supports Sprint’s 4G WiMAX network.
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SAMSUNG Electronics shipped more than 20 million smartphones in the quarter ended September 30, a person familiar with the situation said, beating close competitor Apple, which sold 17.1 million units in its fiscal fourth quarter, ended September 24.
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Yet, this comparison must be done. For one thing, Google and Apple have both recently unveiled huge changes that respectively make their mobile operating systems far more powerful, and in some ways more similar to each other. For another thing, weighing the pros and cons of each platform against the other is a scenario that’s played out daily among many people who are deciding which phone to buy.
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A lot has been written about the red hot battle between smartphone giants Samsung Galaxy S2 and iPhone 4S. Analysts and tech observers dissected specs and compared features, but there was no consensus. However, the battle of wits took a turn when two were dragged to a brutal, unforgiving drop test. And hold your breath, Samsung Galaxy S2 took the prize for being sturdy.
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Sprint has added yet another member to their growing family of EVO products today, tapping the EVO Design 4G with an October 23rd release date. Bowing at a mere $99.99 ($50 mail-in rebate), the handset is the first in the product line to feature World Roaming capabilities. Hardware for this Android 2.3-powered phone include 1.2GHz processor, a 4-inch qHD display, and a pair (5-megapixel rear, 1.3-megapixel front-facing) of cameras.
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Motorola has revealed that the Ice Cream Sandwich update for the Motorola RAZR will be pushed out OTA at the beginning of 2012.
The Motorola RAZR was announced on Tuesday at a New York event for the Verizon network in the US, before the European announcement was made on Wednesday in Berlin.
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Google has confirmed that the source code for Android 4.0 ‘Ice Cream Sandwich’ will be made public, after it refused to release the code for its predecessor ‘Honeycomb.’
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There’s a lot of focus on security these days. Web security, keeping your passwords intact, and maintaining a secure online presence. Viruses, malware, and anything that can come from the web, right over your net conenction and cause an untold amount of devastation to your world. A valid concern, for sure, but I have found that by adjusting your browsing behavior and looking before you click can often remove most of the threat.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Kobo announced a $200 Android 2.3 tablet with a seven-inch, 1024 x 600 pixel AFFS+ anti-glare display. The Kobo Vox eReader features an 800MHz processor, 512MB of RAM, 8GB of internal storage, a microSD slot, Wi-Fi, and access to the Kobo eBook Store, says the company.
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First demo’d way back in March 2011 – we tried it out back then – the Slider is a 10.1in, 1280 x 800 screen on the back of which Asus has built a slide-forward base unit, complete with Qwerty keyboard.
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As expected, Asus chairman Jonney Shih was on hand at All Things Digital AsiaD conference where he gave the world its first look at the next-generation Android tablet. According to Engadget this tablet will be known as the Transformer Prime when it debuts on November 9th. Specifications include a quad-core Tegra 3 Kal-El processor, and an 8.3mm thick body with USB and mini-HDMI ports.
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Netflix has released a new version of its video-streaming app for Android devices that officially adds support for Android 3.x (Honeycomb) tablets. The October 19 release of Netflix app v1.5.0 build 360 also extends Netflix’s Android support to Canada and Latin America for the first time.
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Events
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One of the first luminaries of the free and open source software world, Bruce Perens, has been announced as the second keynote speaker for the 13th Australian national Linux conference.
LCA 2012 is scheduled to be held in Ballarat from January 16 to 20, the first time the event has moved out of a capital city either in Australia or New Zealand: it has been hosted across the Tasman twice.
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The Open Source Digital Pathology Consortium (OpenDP), which announced its formation earlier this month at the Pathology Informatics 2011 meeting in Pittsburgh, plans to engage academic medical centers, research institutions and digital pathology manufacturers to create an open source community to contribute and build open source tools for digital pathology.
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SaaS
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He views cloud computing as being primarily a story of production. For users, cloud computing can be viewed as an enhanced dynamic utility, making intensive computing much more accessible and thus diffusing the potential for innovation. For providers, cloud computing significantly improves their ability to deliver very high volume of services at significantly lower costs and higher quality. For both users and providers, cloud computing truly represents the industrialization of information-based service activities.
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The email went to Eric14. His real name is Eric Baldeschwieler, but no one calls him that. At fourteen letters, Baldeschwieler is a mouthful, and he works in a world where a name takes a backseat to an online handle.
The sender was Rob Bearden, a serial entrepreneur from Atlanta, Georgia, famous for actually making money from open source software. He e-mailed Baldeschwieler because he was looking to build a new company around what is widely regarded as The Next Big Thing in corporate computing. The irony is that Baldeschwieler worked for an outfit few would associate with enterprise technology. And if you listen to the pundits, it wasn’t a technology company at all. He worked for Yahoo.
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Databases
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Hadoop has its limits for Big Data analytics – and relational databases may have more of a future than you think.
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Exactly one year ago, a group of former employees of what was once the company with the most popular open source database, MySQL, came together to form SkySQL, a fork of the project.
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CMS
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Joomla 1.7 stable release was available on the 19th July 2011. The new features are primarily behind the scenes, and are not as “visible” as features have been for other Joomla upgrades. Yet the new features are very powerful and they include one click upgrades, and Joomla Platform is now split from the cms.
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Drupal is an open-source rich with several resources that make it incrediblybest alternative amongst all available open source CMS (content management systems) applications. It makes the mission of web application development so unproblematic and picturesque that you can build Drupal based lovely website on your own. You even don’t need to be professionally solid for web designing or development.
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Education
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Cengage Learning has announced it will partner with Moodlerooms and with Unicon on open source learning projects. Both partnerships are designed to increase functionality for the respective learning platforms through Cengage’s new service, Mindlinks.
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Have you noticed anything missing from the ongoing phone hacking scandal involving the News of the World? There are no hackers involved. This is the latest example of hacking’s troubled history with the mainstream media, which confuses the “playful cleverness” of expert computer programmers with the malicious meddling of computer crackers and criminal journalists. With this confusion, the rich and fruitful history of the true hackers is diminished and a thriving intellectual culture focused on problem solving, self-directed learning and the free exchange of knowledge is undermined.
Much has been written about hackers and hacking, but rarely is it contextualised as part of the scholarly tradition. Yet careful reading of the history of hacking reveals that it is very much a part of the work and values of universities and that the hacker ethic is shared, in part at least, by most academics working today.
We can trace the history of hacking back to MIT University in the early 1960s and greater access to shared computers. At the core of hacking is the academic practice of peer review: the opportunity for academics to closely examine, modify and use other people’s work. Hackers extended this through the creation of legal licenses that allow the copyright holder of software to grant anyone the ability to use, modify and re-distribute their work providing the modified version is licensed under the same terms. The great MIT hacker Richard Stallman called this hack Copyleft and his general public license (GPL) has become the most popular open-source software licence in use today. In 2001, Stanford Law professor Lawrence Lessig founded Creative Commons, an organisation that borrowed much from these free software licences to create a similar set for other types of creative works. The activity of hackers has provided academics and their institutions with the legal basis upon which to overcome the traditional restrictions of copyright and permit the public use, modification and redistribution of research articles, research data and teaching materials.
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Business
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Around 50% of surveyed companies claim that vendor-supported open source software provides either the same or better features and benefits than proprietary software.
This is the key finding in this year’s ITWeb open source survey, administered in conjunction with Linux Warehouse, which attracted more business management respondents than last year’s survey.
Click here
The majority of respondents voted overwhelmingly that open source is either the same or better than proprietary in terms of features, speed performance, ease of use, tools and utilities, documentation, technical support, cost of ownership, scalability and ease of change.
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Semi-Open Source
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Waltham-based enterprise data security form Aveksa Inc. has launched a new product that taps the open source model and will hopefully bring in a new customer base to the company.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Archimedes is the GNU package for semiconductor device simulations that has been released for the first time in 2005 under GPL. It has been created by Jean Michel D. Sellier who has been, since then, the leader of the project and the main developer. It is a free software and thus it can be copied, modified and redistributed under GPL. This is one of the big advantages of using Archimedes.
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Project Releases
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The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has announced the release of version 1.0 of the open source, highly scalable, column-oriented, distributed “NoSQL” database, Cassandra. The release comes just under five months after the release of the previous version, 0.8.0, and since then the developers have added support for data compression to reduce the volume of data on disk on Cassandra nodes and have improved the memory and disk space management with off-heap storage of the row cache and self tuning memory tables.
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After more than two years of constant development and a year of open beta testing, the team of the OpenELEC Project are pleased to announce OpenELEC Version 1.0
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Public Services/Government
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The Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC) is reviewing a planned web development and hosting tender that appeared to favour open source over proprietary technology.
The department issued a pre-release notice on September 29 for a new business application and website for the Office of the Migration Agents’ Registration Authority (MARA), which sat under its remit.
MARA needed to replace an existing Microsoft Access database with a secure, user-friendly and “innovative database solution … built upon proven open-source frameworks and technologies”.
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Openness/Sharing
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At their main trade show GEOINT this week, the intelligence community talked a lot about making progress in preventing the next Bradley Manning from leaking government secrets. Keeping a tight grip on sensitive information has proved to be a challenge for spies in a technological age that celebrates the free flow of data, but Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, thinks they’re making progress. “The trick is, can we allow robust sharing for analytical and operational purposes and protect the information at the same time?” Rogers told Eli Lake at The Daily Beast. “I argue yes, there are lots of ways to do it.”
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Goepel electronic has developed a new demonstration kit within the framework of the goJTAG initiative.
In addition to the USB 2.0 controlled Boundary Scan controller, PicoTAP and respective software, it contains a specific demo board for practical exercises.
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Data journalism: the new, wild frontier where the intrepid reporter is free to create any informative and investigative project their heart desires – providing that they have the tools to do so.
But how do you get started? Where are these mysterious programmes that make data journalism accessible to the regional reporter and independent blogger?
Never fear, launching an investigative project based on data needn’t be a huge financial expense. There are plenty of open source technologies out there to satisfy the aspiring data journalist.
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The growing popularity of software defined networking has resulted in a spurt in networking startups, and that is going to get a further boost in coming months thanks to Google and an open-source project shepherded by the Internet Systems Consortium, a non-profit entity. The ISC is supporting a project to stabilize and test Quagga, open-source networking software. The project, called the Open Source Routing Project, is exciting because it could help make a cheap, open-source router a reality.
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A Melbourne-based director Ryan Alexander Lloyd has released the raw footage of his upcoming film onto the internet for free.
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Open Data
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I’ve said before that I’m a big fan of open data. Opening up public data will get citizens involved in society and political life, increase the transparency of public administration, and improve public decision making. Those benefits cannot be overestimated. And public data can be used in many unexpected ways, too: as the father of the Internet, Tim Berners-Lee, put it: “if people put data onto the web… it will be used by other people to do wonderful things in ways that they never would have imagined”.
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Finance
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The Federal Reserve needs to take steps to control the conflict of interest involving Reserve Bank directors that also run some of the largest Wall Street banks and U.S. corporations, including Goldman Sachs(GS) and General Electric(GE), a government audit report on Wednesday said.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Last week, the city of Philadelphia mandated paid sick days for “workers whose employers have contracts with the city or apply for city subsidies.” Last month, Seattle also passed a paid sick leave ordinance. Connecticut passed a bill in June that will make it the first state in the nation to mandate paid sick leave for service workers. Food service workers are a special concern of such laws.
Workers in these locations will no longer have to come to work with the flu or other infectious illness, endangering the health of their coworkers and customers and exacerbating their own health.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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It’s my dream to get Every European Digital. And that means everyone needs to be covered by fast broadband connections.
The economic benefits are clear: increasing broadband penetration by just 10 percentage points can boost GDP by 0.9 – 1.5%. But we face problems in delivering new networks: insufficient investment, problems in accessing capital, and a weak business case for operators to roll out everywhere. And we also face difficulty in making online public services available across Europe.
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Bell’s letter raises several interesting issues. First, it is an acknowledgment of what groups like CIPPIC, PIAC and others were saying as far back as 2009 in the net neutrality hearing. Peer-to-peer traffic is declining as an overall percentage of network traffic and the stresses on the system are far more likely to come from online video services such as Netflix.
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Copyrights
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Copyright dominated debate at the House of Commons on Tuesday as Bill C-11 was the primary subject of debate. Digital locks was one of the most discussed issues (new levies were the other), with the main opposition parties lining up to oppose the bill due to the digital lock provisions. For example, the NDP’s Charlie Angus stated:
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U.S. authorities have demanded the extradition of Justin Bieber, the Canadian singer who turned blatant copyright infringements into a profitable career. The teen star is accused of streaming unauthorized songs to millions of people without compensating the copyright holders and now faces a 5 year prison sentence.
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