05.11.10
Posted in News Roundup at 7:01 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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David H. Wheeler has argued in detail why you should at least consider GNU/Linux. However, as explained to Robin Miller in an interview for Linux.com in 2004, “in the end, the only way to be really sure that you have unbiased results is to do the comparison yourself — which you have to do anyway, because some measures like total cost of ownership (TCO) and performance are incredibly sensitive to specific environments.”
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Desktop
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In our previous post, we discussed how mainstream media is adopting linux(‘Stop using Windows, Use Ubuntu instead’). And a lot of people started complaining how not-user-friendly Linux really is. Before saying such far fetched statements, one thing they all need to consider is this, Linux!=Windows!
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I always keep a LiveCD with me just in case things like this happen (on other people’s computer, normally). I fire it up and the computer responds normally… so I’m able to work on it… even if I don’t have all the information about the project. I check and see that the D partition (where the data is) is usable… at least I get to see many files I’m working with and md5sum them.
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Ballnux
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Kernel Space
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Assuming there are no major last minute issues, the Linux 2.6.34 kernel will likely be released in the very near future. Last night Linus put out the Linux 2.6.34-rc7 release, which he hopes will be the last release candidate.
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Graphics Stack
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One of the benefits of kernel mode-setting on Linux besides providing a flicker-free boot experience, faster and better VT switching, and a cleaner architecture is that it removes a requirement against the X.Org Server from needing to be run as root. With Ubuntu 10.04 LTS now utilizing kernel mode-setting across Intel / ATI and AMD / NVIDIA graphics hardware, they are looking to make the X Server run as a normal user in upcoming releases.
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Applications
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The next step is to open up the Ubuntu Software Center, or package manager of your favorite Linux, and search for a suitable program. Alternatively, you could do a quick Google search for Linux paint programs. Keep in mind that some applications (including GNOME-Paint) have been compiled for 32-bit Linux (i386) and won’t necessarily work if you’re running a 64-bit (amd64) installation. In this two-part series, we’re going to take a look at the options, starting with simple programs for doing basic tasks and then the more complex tools on par with Gimp.
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There’s always something noteworthy happening in Linux audio development. This week’s news includes reports about a new Linux audio blog, music made by particle acceleration, how to use a laptop as a virtual music stand, synth emulation from the terminal command prompt, and watching the Linux Audio Conference on-line.
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Keeping your system clean can be a time-consuming affair, unless you use specialized tools like BleachBit (thanks to Nick Lord for the pointer). With just a few mouse clicks, this nifty little utility can help you to purge all the junk produced by the system and installed applications. Packaged versions of BleachBit are available for many popular distributions, so you can easily install the utility using your distro’s package manager. Once installed, you can run BleachBit either as a regular user or as root.
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Proprietary
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Wine 1.2 release plans were sent to the wine-devel mailing list from Alexandre Julliard the Wine project leader. Here is the release plans and Alexandres email to wine-devel.
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Instructionals
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Games
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CK was wondering about those old games Disciples 2: Dark Prophecy and Bandits: Phoenix Rising that were announced by LGP about 7 years ago at 2003.
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For example, the latest Alien Arena in the ubuntu repositories is 7.33, which we have installed here on altFIRE (upgrading soon!). You could of course download the new binaries from the official website, but like me you might like to keep things apt-based so upgrades just involves running apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade.
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Judging by that pie chart Linux users appear to make up almost 25% of the donations and their average donation amount is almost double that of the average Windows user donation. This means that of the 571,048$ donated thus far 142,762$ is from Linux users. But remember Linux users are cheap and their is no money in Linux game market – right.
Games that already exist on only the Windows platform need ports as well. In fact there is so much demand for some of these games to run on Linux that Codeweavers has a business commercially supporting many of these titles on the Linux operating system (its not perfect – but for now it works).
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To be eligible for inclusion in this list each game engine needed to meet the following requirements:
Free to use without restrictions
Not in the early stages of development
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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Almost two months after the technical preview was released, the development of version 4.7 of the cross-platform Qt C++ framework for GUI applications is beginning to take shape, as Nokia has now presented a beta version. A beta of the Qt Creator 2.0 development environment, which is part of the framework, has also been released. The developers highlight the integration of Qt Quick (Qt UI Creation Kit) as the prominent feature of the next version of Qt. Qt Quick is a tool collection for creating animated, touch-enabled Qt interfaces and applications for mobile and embedded devices.
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GNOME Desktop
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While I think the even-tighter integration of GNOME apps in the Ubuntu panel is theoretically a step in the right direction, I find that things are broken enough that the benefits of that integration aren’t terrible available at present (but I hope they will be in future).
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But there’s a lot to be said for a system with just a Web browser. I haven’t heard anybody say this, but the way I have Tiny Core running at this particular moment, I can’t imagine the Google Chrome OS being much different. And if you want to boot super-quickly into a working desktop like Google Chrome OS promises, but you want to do it now with old, crappy hardware like mine, Tiny Core is ready to do it today.
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I ran Ark as an experimental on my system a couple times in the past few years. I was always impressed with it. It’s simple. It’s not bloated or overloaded with fluff. It’s a working man’s (or woman’s) Linux. For those of you concerned about these things, Ark is a 100% FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) distribution.
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You’ll find Ark familiar and easy to use. It comes with KDE as the default desktop environment. It uses the familiar RPM and Apt as package managers. Most of your favorite Linux apps and tools will run fine on Ark. Their repos have the standard fare found in most distro’s repos.
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We have some pretty big changes today, with an update to the latest KDE SC 4.4.3, and the addition of support for ConsoleKit and PolicyKit which have been enhanced to use shadow authentication.
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XtreemOS is a Linux-based operating systems that includes Grid functionalities. It is characterised by properties such as transparency, hiding the complexity of in the underlying distributed infrastructure; scalability, supporting hundreds of thousands of nodes and millions of users; and dependability, providing reliability, highly availability and security.
The XtreemOS Summer School will include lectures on modern distributed paradigms such as Grid computing, Cloud computing, and network-centric operating systems. The Summer School will combine lectures from research leaders shaping the future of distributed systems and world leaders in deploying and exploiting distributed infrastructures. Hands-on laboratory exercises and practical sessions using XtreemOS will give participants experience on using modern distributed systems.
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New Releases
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* After six months of our new accelerated development schedule, MythTV 0.23 is now available. MythTV 0.23 brings a new event system, brand new python bindings, the beta MythNetvision internet video plugin, new audio code and surround sound upmixer, several new themes (Arclight and Childish), newly resynced ffmpeg libraries, and fixes for analog scanning, among many others.
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Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Reports from the community site Mandriva Linux Online (MLO) this weekend indicated that Mandriva appears to be the flower around which two bees were buzzing: namely, UK-based software-as-a-service provider lightapp, and the French open source software firm LINAGORA.
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Features:
Kernel 2.6.32.11-bfs kernel for maximum desktop performance.
Openbox Desktop with Tint2 panel
Nvidia and ATI fglrx driver support.
Multimedia playback support for many popular formats.
Wireless support for many network devices.
Printer support for many local and networked printer devices.
Addlocale allows you to convert PCLinuxOS into over 60 languages.
GetOpenOffice can install Open Office supporting over 100 languages.
MyLiveCD allows you to take a snapshot of your installation and burn it to a LiveCD/DVD.
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The NEW PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community.
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Red Hat Family
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Another big change in the RHEL 6 beta is the wide selection of disk formatting options, including ext4. You know a Linux feature has arrived when it makes its way to the conservative enterprise releases like RHEL and such is the case with ext4 file system, which is now the default filesystem format in RHEL 6. In addition to ext4, the XFS filesystem is now supported.
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Fedora
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The Fedora 14 name has been announced, and it’s Laughlin.
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This is the third post in our blog series highlighting cool features slated for Fedora 13. Our first spotlight looked at the enhancements in NetworkManager, and the second covered the innovations planned for Python developers. With this blog, we’re focusing on a feature that affects everyone, from the newest users exploring the rich environment of open source, to the most diehard developers of the Linux kernel: video drivers.
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Fedora 13 will bring a lot of interesting new features when it’s released in late May, but also interesting is what’s going to be missing. For example, official support for PowerPC. So what happens now, and what’s the right thing to do for users on niche platforms?
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Debian Family
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Ubuntu
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In the Ubuntu Developers Summit today, Mark Shuttleworth announced some very interesting new features and ideas regarding the future Ubuntu releases.
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All in all, this has so far been a very pleasant experience. I even took the time to upgrade my wife’s 9.10 installation to the latest. The upgrade, while taking 1.5 hours, went smoothly. No problems seen. Great job Canonical!
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I was quite surprised this morning whilst reading my RSS feeds to discover that Ubuntu has named their most recent ‘lite desktop‘ Unity. Surprised because we have our project, Unity Linux. Strange that both our ‘lightweight distribution and desktop’ and Ubuntu’s ‘lite desktop’ should share a name together.
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Ubuntu is shipping to OEMs a release for netbooks that is usable in under 10s. This was a design goal not quite achieved for the desktop version yet but the netbook release is there. This greatly adds to the convenience of the portable PC and saves some battery life.
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Ubuntu will be following the normal market trend of releasing custom-built images for OEM hardware, working with the manufacturers to get the boot time as low as possible. Shuttleworth is claiming that Unity will have a 7 second boot time using SSD.
What does Unity look like on my netbook? Take a look.
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Canonical’s Ubuntu Server hasn’t yet caught up to the progress that’s been made in Linux desktops, but it offers a serviceable alternative to server offerings from other Linux vendors and from Microsoft.
Canonical and the Ubuntu Project have done great things to help bring Linux to the mainstream desktop. But what about the server edition? If Ubuntu can bring the same level of polish to its server offerings, it should be a formidable competitor to Microsoft and other Linux vendors. Looking at Ubuntu Server 10.04, aka “Lucid Lynx,” there’s a lot to like and also some disappointments.
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If you’re building an internal or private cloud, Canonical wants you to use Ubuntu Linux 10.04 as your operating system of choice. To that end, the newest version of Ubuntu includes a feature set called Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud.
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The Me Menu in Ubuntu 10.04 is getting much needed improvements for Ubuntu 10.10 based on user feedback and research conducted recently.
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Variants
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A new Linux distro is officially hitting its 1.0 release today, but you’ll have to forgive me for not being too excited. Peppermint OS is now out, with the aim of being a fast, cloud focused Linux operating system.
A quick look under the hood reveals that it’s mostly a mashup of technologies that are available (and I’m already running), with an Ubuntu base (by way of the Linux Mint Ubuntu derivative) and leveraging the lightweight LXDE desktop. Ubuntu by default uses GNOME which is bulkier and consumes a larger resource footprint than LXDE.
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Looking at the remaining bugs and considering the amount of testing needed I would say we’re about 1 week away from releasing Linux Mint 9. I know most operating systems and distributions stick to release dates and announce them well in advance but I see no reason not to release something once it’s ready and many reasons not to do so until it is. The release could be out a little earlier or a little bit later than expected.
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Last week I did a review of Kubuntu 10.04, one of Canonical’s officially supported Ubuntu derivatives. Today’s review is about Xubuntu 10.04, an officially recognized but not supported Ubuntu derivative. According to the Xubuntu downloads page, it is based on the “feature-rich core of Ubuntu” Linux.
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If you are looking for a Linux toy that really rocks, your search ends here. This is a stringless digital guitar and it’s powered by Linux
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I love ice, and now I love it even more. Linux can make you coffee, wash your clothes, heat your meal and it can also serve you a delicious fresh made Ice Cream.
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Grace Digital Audio is shipping a Linux-based Internet tuner that offers Pandora access and costs only $105. The Solo Wi-Fi Receiver provides over 50,000 radio stations, podcasts, and on-demand programs over its 802.11b/g WiFi receiver, runs on two Watts of power, and according to one early DigitalGuru review, is “heartily” recommended as “a great little device at a very affordable price.”
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Android
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The data places Android, with 28 percent of the smartphone market, in second place behind RIM’s Blackberry smartphone market share of 36 percent. Apple now sits in third place with 21 percent.
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But did I mention it’s $199? For the price of an iPod Touch, you get a 7-inch, antireflective screen with an 800×480-pixel resolution, multimedia playback, Web, e-mail, photos, and a ton of Android app goodness.
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The news comes to us today that in 1Q 2010 Android phones outsold Apple’s iPhone by a significant 7%. As it said on the gunslinger’s gravestone, “I was expecting this, but not so soon.”
Business Week and the Wall Street Journal are on the story, but the most interesting version is from the story they’re apparently deriving from at All Things Digital, because it includes a graph showing recent market share trends that conveys a lot more information than the present-time numbers.
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Sub-notebooks
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Lastly, lets hear the (constructive) feedback. If you ask me, Ubuntu has become the best desktop experience available, and the only thing that Ubuntu lacks compared to Mac and PC is professional use applications and some usability. This Netbook stuff is the foundation for pure perfect beautiful usability on the Ubuntu desktop, and you, the user, needs to speak up about the things you want. Theres plenty of stuff that I spend my time criticizing, but its by analyzing what is good and what is bad that leads to improvement. Lets speak up, and make 10.10 the best operating system it can be.
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A keynote which really stood out and succinctly discussed all of this was Dan Frye’s talk, “10+ Years of Linux at IBM” (video). The first half of the keynote discusses the progress of Linux within IBM, but then he moves into discussing contributing itself. Some of their take-aways were that they needed to get involved directly with small contributions and do away with closed-door meetings and canned corporate responses, IBM employees were empowered to become community members. They needed to learn to collaborate with the community to develop higher quality solutions than they could have in-house, and to start these discussions with the community early in the brainstorming process. Related to collaboration, he also discusses control, and how a company does not have it within a community and needs to learn to deal with that, instead what a company should strive for is influence within a project to help guide direction and priorities. He also suggests never creating a project. Instead he encourages companies to join a project that’s close to what they need and work with them to take it in a direction that can benefit everyone and reach their goals and scratch their itches.
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Sponsored by the Rensselaer Center for Open Source Software, Glide is a GNOME presentation program in its earliest stages.
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“It’s a step-by-step process,” Wang says. “First we put in an application server, an Apache Web server. Then, over time, we put in all the Linux operating systems and migrated away from Sun hardware. Then we switched the BEA application server out to JBoss,” he adds, naming just a few of the changes eHealth made. Nine years later, his company’s production environment consists of open-source applications completely, except for an Oracle database. “It’s all [open-source software], from operating systems, middleware, application server, Web server and more,” Wang says.
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So here we list our favorite free (open source or beggar-ware) wireless security test tools.
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Moreover, open-source companies that develop open-source software already have a business model that is compatible with the Cloud : their software is already freely downloadable and can be run on any computer. When the old license-based model is used then some adaptation on the business sides of things, for instance usage based vs instance based. When a service-model is used, then no change is needed.
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Events
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If you have been wondering: What’s all the fuss about VistA? Where can I learn more about VistA? Who is the VistA Community? Can I use VistA in my hospital, clinic etc? How can I contribute to the improvement of VistA? Then plan on attending the 21st VistA Community Meeting, June 8 to 11, 2010 at George Mason University, Fairfax Virgina.
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has given a breakdown of its plans for Firefox 4, including a pledge to make it “super-duper fast”.
Perhaps the most striking change to Firefox 4 is the user interface, which takes a great deal of inspiration from Google Chrome. Though Mozilla was keen to note that the mockups shown in the presentation were subject to change, it’s clear Firefox 4 will benefit from the design choices made by Google’s pared-back browser.
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This is a preview of Firefox 4 from Mike Beltzner of the Mozilla Foundation
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Mozilla has confirmed that the next major upgrade to its open source browser will be known as Firefox 4.0.
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Trademarks and free software can make a volatile mix. It is understandable that a project would want to ensure that code shipping under its name is “the real McCoy”, but modifying the source and distributing the result is a hallmark of free software. Trademark policy can place limits on what changes—for bugs, features, or even policy compliance—downstream projects can make and still use the trademarked names. The tension between the two has led some, like Debian, to re-brand Mozilla projects, so that they can ship the changes they want; some Fedora developers would like to see that distribution follow suit.
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Oracle
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The Oracle hardware support changes mean significantly higher prices and less flexible terms than customers received before Oracle acquired Sun.
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Three former Sun Microsystems executives have set up shop at an open-source enterprise application software provider called ForgeRock.
Former Sun executives Simon Phipps, Lasse Andresen and Hermann Svoren have joined Oslo-based ForgeRock in prominent positions. ForgeRock is the official steward of the ForgeRock I3 Open Platform project.
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When Oracle bought Sun, there were many unanswered questions about Sun’s open-source portfolio of programs. Over a year later, we still don’t know if OpenSolaris is going to have Oracle’s support. But we do know that OpenSSO, an open-source access management and federation server platform, will live on as a product under the new open-source company ForgeRock.
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Government
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Small conferences are often the best, especially when there’s a high concentration of really well-educated and personally committed people sharing a room for two days. That’s what I found at the Politics of Open Source conference at the University of Massachusetts Amherst on Friday. (I could attend only the second day.)
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Licensing
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Openness
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Selling products whose design anyone can access, edit, or use on their own is pretty crazy. It’s also good business. At the annual hacker conference Foo Camp East this year, Phillip Torrone and Limor Fried from Adafruit Industries gave a rapid fire five minute presentation on thirteen companies with million dollar revenues from open source hardware (OSHW). Companies providing OSHW allow all designs of the products to be shared through an open license, meaning that everyone is free to download, modify, and share all the schematics and associated software.
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Open Access/Content
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Duke’s strategic plan says that one of our key goals is to apply knowledge in the service of society. Currently, much of the knowledge produced by Duke faculty is published in venues with limited distribution and often very high subscription rates that preclude access by many who would benefit from reading it. Making the research freely available to anyone with Internet access helps to increase the potential number of readers, and opens up possibilities for more people to make use of and build on the research being done here.
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Standards/Consortia
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PS I took the screenshots with the free software Screenshot application (GPL license but the install screen says ‘freeware -not to be sold’ ?!?).
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Science
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Security/Aggression
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The senior former policeman in charge of the National Hi-Tech Crime Unit squad which first arrested Gary McKinnon has described the ongoing US prosecution of the Pentagon hacker as “spiteful”.
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Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates challenged some sacrosanct Pentagon spending practices in a speech on Saturday, directing both military and civilian officials to find cuts in their overhead and operating costs and then transfer the savings to the fighting force.
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Although Britain’s political system has been in stasis for the past five weeks (and looks likely to remain that way for the foreseeable future) a number of recent stories and columns have highlighted a growing resentment in the mainstream media towards the National Programme for IT (otherwise known as the Government’s new-fangled NHS IT scheme).
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I’ve been writing about email privacy with City of Ontario v. Quon and Stengart v. Loving Care, how about an encore from New York: People v. Klapper. Factually, People v. Klapper is pretty straightforward. The defendant, Andrew Klapper, was a dentist who installed keystroke logger on his office computers. As a result, when one of Mr. Klapper’s employees accessed a personal email account from a work computer, Mr. Klapper learned the employee’s email password, which Mr. Klapper later used to access the employee’s personal email himself. As a result, Mr. Klapper was charged with Unauthorized use of a Computer, which appears to be a New York state law analog of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act
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A man who posted a message on Twitter threatening to blow an airport “sky high” has been found guilty of sending a menacing electronic communication.
Paul Chambers, 26, claimed he sent the Tweet in a moment of frustration after Robin Hood Airport in South Yorkshire was closed by snow in January.
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Federal agents can examine webcam photos and other information secretly collected from students’ laptops and stored in the Lower Merion School District’s computer network, a judge has ruled.
Acting on a request from federal prosecutors, U.S. District Judge Jan E. DuBois agreed to broaden an earlier order that limited the release of the photos to the students or their parents and lawyers. His order was signed Friday and made public Monday.
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St Mary’s Primary School in Beetley, near Dereham, Norfolk was told by Breckland District Council that the flag required planning consent.
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A third-grader at Brazos Elementary was given a week’s detention for possessing a Jolly Rancher.
School officials in Brazos County are defending the seemingly harsh sentence. The school’s principal and superintendent said they were simply complying with a state law that limits junk food in schools.
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Four Northampton residents were fined after being found guilty of litter offences at Northampton Magistrates’ Court.
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He received a £100 fine and must pay £100 costs and a £15 Victim Surcharge.
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Alderney residents are being asked if they think CCTV cameras should be installed in the island.
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A mother-of-three has raised concerns over privacy in some public toilets in Pembrokeshire after spotting a security camera visible from a cubicle.
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Once again Ladies and Gentlemen, common sense has officially left the building.
The Environment Agency say it is illegal to remove fish from their habitat without permission; but surely even the EA can see that if the fish are about to snuff it, their transportation becomes imperative?!
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Last week, a 17-year-old knucklehead exposed his idiocy to the world by venturing onto the field at a Philadelphia Phillies game and running around waving a towel. When a pursuing policeman got weary of the chase, he pulled out his Taser and shot the kid.
For that, the officer won praise from players, sportscasters, and city police commissioner Charles Ramsey, who said the cop “acted appropriately. I support him 100 percent.” The cop was in line with department policy, Ramsey said, because “he was attempting to make an arrest and the male was attempting to flee.”
Really? Hitting a delinquent with a potentially fatal 50,000-volt burst of electricity even though he poses no physical danger to anyone and has zero chance of escaping? Maybe the commissioner should read the directions from the Taser manufacturer, which say the devices are meant to “incapacitate dangerous, combative or high-risk subjects.”
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Since its inception, the Department of Homeland Security has promoted modern technology as a way to save the nation from terrorism, and it’s done so in part by emulating the Pentagon’s preoccupation with science and experimentation. Some of the country’s most significant achievements, in fact, were conceived by pioneering researchers the government hired to help give warfighters an advantage over their enemies.
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Environment
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As BP prepares to lower a four-story, 70-ton dome over the oil gusher under the Gulf of Mexico, the Russians — the world’s biggest oil producers — have some advice for their American counterparts: nuke it.
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Methane-trapping ice of the kind that has frustrated the first attempt to contain oil gushing offshore of Louisiana may have been a root cause of the blowout that started the spill in the first place, according to University of California, Berkeley, professor Robert Bea, who has extensive access to BP p.l.c. documents on the incident. If methane hydrates are eventually implicated, the U.S. oil and gas industry would have to tread even more lightly as it pushes farther and farther offshore in search of energy.
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The oil now lapping barrier islands near Louisiana threatens wildlife, wetlands and businesses all along the Gulf Coast, but its reach also extends hundreds of miles to the nation’s capital, where it is causing political discomfort — and downright embarrassment — for some lawmakers and administration officials.
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Federal regulators warned offshore rig operators more than a decade ago that they needed to install backup systems to control the giant undersea valves known as blowout preventers, used to cut off the flow of oil from a well in an emergency.
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In a century of doing business, BP has been implicated in bribery of public officials, grand theft, fomenting unjust wars, of murder, torture, fraud, stock swindling, plunder, environmental destruction, and money laundering in and between scores of countries on every continent except Antarctica. If BP were a person it would be a career criminal, a pathological liar and an international serial killer with a rap sheet several times the size of the Chicago Yellow Pages.
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Alexandria residents soon will have to pay for larger home recycling bins featuring built-in monitoring devices.
The City Council added a mandatory $9 charge to its residents’ annual waste collection fee.
That cash — roughly $180,000 collected from 19,000 residents– will pay for new larger recycling carts equipped with computer microchips, which will allow the city to keep tabs on its bins and track resident participation in the city’s recycling program.
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Finance
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American conservatives, particularly the fiscal variety, tend to hold up the European Union as a model of irresponsible, big-spending economic policy. But consider this: According to E.U. rules, member countries cannot maintain budget deficits above 3 percent of gross domestic product; nor can their total debt rise above 60 percent of GDP. As Veronique de Rugy points out in this issue, the U.S. budget deficit in 2009 was three times the E.U.’s limit, and total debt will zoom past the 60 percent threshold sometime this year. Washington makes Paris look frugal.
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It doesn’t come as too much of a surprise that the measure to audit the Federal Reserve is coming under continuous fire from the central bank and its cronies. For the first time since the Federal Reserve was created nearly a century ago, they have hired an actual lobbyist to pound the pavement on Capitol Hill. This is a desperate effort to hang on to the privilege of secrecy and lack of accountability they have enjoyed for so long. Last week showed they are getting their money’s worth in the Senate.
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Two former executives of Integrity Bank and a hotel developer were charged with conspiracy, bribery, bank fraud and securities fraud related to $80 million in loans that helped bring down the bank, U.S. prosecutors said.
Hotel developer Guy Mitchell, 50, of Coral Gables, Florida, pleaded not guilty at an arraignment today in U.S. District Court in Atlanta before Magistrate Judge Gerrilyn Bell. The timing of appearances by Douglas Ballard, 40, and Joseph Todd Foster, 42, both former Integrity Bank executives from Atlanta, has not been announced.
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In August, 2008, state regulators closed the bank in resulting in a draw of $235 million from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s insurance fund. According to the indictment, Integrity customer Guy Mitchell, a hotel developer from Coral Gables, Florida, used false pretenses to obtain more than $80 million in loans from the bank.
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What follows is a glimpse of the possible future of finance—if policymakers and politicians recognize that confronting crises requires radical reform.
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The Democratic-controlled Legislature on Monday sent a bill raising income taxes for the highest-paid Minnesotans to a tax-averse Gov. Tim Pawlenty as part of their plan to wipe away a $2.9 billion deficit.
The proposal, which also makes spending cuts, barely cleared the Senate on a 34-33 vote before passing the House 71-63. Pawlenty, a potential Republican presidential candidate, eliminated any suspense by promising to veto it. Neither chamber’s votes in favor were anywhere near what it would take for a veto override.
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Shares of Moody’s fell sharply on Monday after it disclosed that the Securities and Exchange Commission had warned that it might sue the firm for making “false and misleading” statements as part of its application as a ratings organization.
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Although 650,000 homeowners had enrolled, most had been waiting for months to learn whether they would be able to keep the federal aid that slashed their mortgage payments.
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The Treasury Department is lax about keeping records of its negotiations with bailed-out banks, including undocumented conversations in which billions of taxpayer dollars are at stake, a new watchdog report says.
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The government has already transfused $137.5 billion into Fannie Mae and its cousin, Freddie Mac, since seizing the two mortgage financing giants in August 2008. The money covers losses on mortgages that the companies bought or guaranteed during the housing boom, allowing them to continue buying new loans.
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In addition, if the Dow falls by 20 percent before 1 p.m., trading is halted for two hours, or one hour if the 20 percent decline occurs between 1 and 2 p.m. After 2 p.m., a 20 percent decline closes the market for the rest of the day. And if the Dow falls by 30 percent, all trading is halted for the remainder of the day. Trading normally ends at 4 p.m.
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Stung by criticism that it was slow and weak, the European Union surpassed expectations in arranging a nearly $1 trillion financial commitment for its ailing members over the weekend and paved the way for the European Central Bank to begin purchases of European debt on Monday.
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Despite declarations from President Obama, his top aides and Democratic leadership that the pending financial reform bill in the Senate will forever end taxpayer bailouts of large banks, a top Federal Reserve official argues the bill will do no such thing, calling bailouts “inevitable.”
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The central premise in The Age of Customer Capitalism is that: “For three decades, executives have made maximizing shareholder value their top priority. But evidence suggests that shareholders actually do better when firms put the customer first.”
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Recently, SourceWatch helped preserve history when the Family Research Council (FRC) deleted one of its co-founders from its website after he was caught in an embarrassing scandal. The FRC was co-founded by James Dobson and George Rekers, and the organization attempts to inject what it considers to be evangelical Christian values into the public debate. Most recently, as noted in SourceWatch, the FRC held a “prayercast” against health insurance reform in which Dobson publicly prayed that his savior would “frustrate the plans of the Evil One and revive us again with conviction and forgiveness,” referring to the President of the United States, Barack Obama.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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US academics at the University of California-Davis have reportedly canned a Gmail pilot project over privacy fears regarding Google’s ill-conceived launch of Buzz.
According to Information Week the university’s IT officials backed out of plans to shift its email system for its 30,000 faculty and staff members over to Gmail because of privacy doubts over Google.
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This morning, the Supreme Court of New Hampshire handed down an important decision holding that a mortgage industry website, The Mortgage Lender Implode-O-Meter, is entitled to protection under the state’s reporter’s privilege.
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Following rulings in Germany, Bulgaria and Romania that the Data Retention Directive is unconstitutional, Digital Rights Ireland have been given permission to challenge it in the European Court of Justice.
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Civil liberties group says court decision a blow to press freedom
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Know your rights. Protect your rights. Another lesson from the ACLU.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Something I think gets lost in the debate over DRM: Big Content doesn’t want DRM because they want to usher in an era of totalitarian control technologies; they don’t want copyright filters because they want to make the censor’s job easier; they don’t want increased intermediary liability because they want to extinguish easy personal expression and collective action.
They want these things because they want to make more money.
But they are indifferent to the point of depravity to the totalitarian, censorious and restrictive consequences of DRM, filters and liability.
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Significantly, Warner Music said that digital sales of recorded music now account for 46.8 percent of the company’s domestic music sales.
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For a couple years now, the MPAA has been asking the FCC to break your TV/DVR, and let them effectively put a type of DRM (by enabling “Selectable Output Control” or SOC) on video content, such that you will not be able to access the content via third party devices, such as your DVR or your Slingbox. Effectively, they want to break the ability of your equipment to work. You wouldn’t be able to legally record the movie that was playing on your TV. The MPAA’s argument here makes absolutely no sense at all — and when they’re called on it, the doubletalk comes out.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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A look at the official complaint revealed a litany of allegations including cybersquatting, unfair competition, dilution (of the IP), and more. Part of Games Workshop’s problem with all of this, according to the complaint is that Curse’s use of the Warhammer name and trademarks “literally states and implies that Defendant and their business are in an “alliance” with Plaintiff and its products and services offered under the WARHAMMER Marks,” and that this “conduct as aforesaid has caused great and irreparable injury to Plaintiff, and unless such conduct is enjoined, it will continue and Plaintiff will continue to suffer great and irreparable injury.”
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Copyrights
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Hollywood may have some reason to be nervous about President Obama’s nomination of Elena Kagan to be the next U.S. Supreme Court justice.
Not a whole lot is known about Kagan’s judicial philosophy, which in some ways, makes her the perfect pick to win confirmation by the Senate. Her record on issues the industry cares about, though, isn’t entirely opaque.
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The hugely popular sports streaming and download site Rojadirecta has been declared legal by a Spanish court. The appeal of sports rights holder Audiovisual Sport has been dismissed, putting an end to a legal battle that started three years ago. The site continues to operate without having to face the threat of being shut down.
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But, no, apparently not. The only acceptable way for a musician to get paid is via copyright, I guess. He recently put up a a rant about the evils of musicians getting money from corporations in the form of sponsorship or advertising.
Why is it bad? Well, something about the purity of music the old way. You know, where instead of taking money from corporations to make commercial music they… took money from corporations (record labels) to make commercial music. Oh wait…
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That’s what Milun Tesovic wanted to know back in 2000 as he searched online for the lyrics of his favorite tunes. But often, he got results that seemed dubious or could not find the song at all. So a year later, at age 16, he started his own site.
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ACTA
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The request of the European Parliament is no good idea at all but it certainly expresses it concerns about the planned ACTA governance model.
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When the interested public and Parliament fails to spot undesirable measures in ACTA (cast light on it) we’ll get it anyway, sneaked through a bilateral route, because Commission trade specialists want it so. Domestic effects of institutional activism and forum shopping. The process demonstrates us how trade policy severely undermines parliamentarian democracy when trade administration steps into merely regulatory matters, legislation not trade. I hate to admit that but maybe the globalisation critics were right with their fierce criticism of the EU- “Global Europe” strategy spirit.
NASA Connect – SF – NASA Aviation Safety Program (1/9/2001)
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Send this to a friend
05.10.10
Posted in News Roundup at 4:28 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Comparisons
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Last week we delivered the first of our Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu 10.04 benchmarks to much anticipation, but now we have the results for Apple’s Mac OS X 10.6.3 operating system to tack in too. In the first part of that Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu Linux performance examination, we looked closely at the OpenGL gaming performance across six different systems and a whole slew of tests. More articles are on the way looking at the performance and later in the week we already delivered some initial disk benchmarks. However, now it is time to see how Microsoft Windows 7 Professional x64, Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, and Apple Mac OS X 10.6.3 compete with one another.
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sentvid passed me a linkto his admittedly “not very Scientific but end user perspective” boot race video that sees him pit clean installs of Ubuntu 10.04 and Windows 7 against one another.
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Sony
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Sony is starting to come under serious fire over its latest Playstation 3 update (3.21), which saw the removal of the ‘Install other OS’ feature, and the denial of access to the Playstation Network and all online gaming for those that chose not to update (as is per the majority of PS3 updates). First came the class action lawsuit from Anthony Ventura of California, and now two more lawsuits have been levelled at Sony over the same issue.
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You shouldn’t act surprised to find out that Sony is being sued yet again over its decision to remove Linux support from its PS3 game console. Attorney Rebecca Call was the first lawyer to smell blood and find a disgruntled PS3 owner who was willing to file suit and go along with a class action status.
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Server
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The supercomputer uses a blade design to scale to up to 65,536 compute nodes, the firm said, while its open x86 architecture makes it relatively easy to deploy commercial, open-source or custom applications on standard Novell SUSE or Red Hat Linux operating systems.
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Audiocasts
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Full Circle Podcast #6: Mark’s Space Brain from the Future
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Ballnux
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Kernel Space
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While new stable kernel releases seem to have become somewhat less frequent, they now include more changes. Although the most recent version of AMD’s proprietary graphics drivers finally work with X Server 1.7, NVIDIA’s drivers already work with version 1.8. Videos of the Linux Audio Conference and the Collaboration Summit provide insights into audio and kernel topics.
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A version of the proprietary GeForce driver, functional with X Server 1.8 after setting a special Xorg.conf option, was already available when the new X Server was released. Version 195.36.24 (x86-32, x86-64), which was released at the end of April, no longer requires this trick and also supports the GeForce GTX 470 and 480 models introduced in March.
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Applications
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Ailurus is an open-source software that makes Ubuntu easier to use.
With ailurus,you can manage system settings include nautilus,desktop,windows effect,network,sound,etc;you can install/remove applications which do not provide Debian packages at all;you can check you hardware information include motherboard,CPU,BIOS,Total memory;you can check the system version,desktop environment,host name,kernel version and so on;you can select the fastest repository,clean up system cache,study Linux skills …
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I know I tend to moan about a lot of things in my blog, sometimes I celebrate good work, well executed. Rarely do I get the opportunity to agree with the Ayatana/DX Ubuntu design direction. I may not agree with the group’s past choice of language communicating things to the community, but this is something I think it’s got mostly right.
OK so what don’t I like about the old notification area? Well it’s an arbitrary parent-widget, this means that it’s a container for other widgets which are not internally defined but are defined outside. This results is very inconsistent behaviour and a real problem when your trying to keep tabs on design as a distro.
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Today we continue on with our Wallpaper theme! You’ve already seen how to Manage your wallpaper in GNOME as well as how to set up a changing rotation of wallpapers with Wallpaper Drapes (see “Desktop Drapes for GNOME“). Now it’s time for something a bit different. Most wallpaper applets pretty much do the same thing: They will either place a picture on your desktop or manage multiple pictures that will change at a set interval. For the most part there is little variation in these tools. But one such tool offers a single addition to the standard wallpaper manager that sets it apart. That tool is anyPaper. And that feature allows you to place your image anywhere on your desktop you like. For those that use icons on their desktop, this is actually a most welcome feature (you’ll understand in a bit). And, unlike most tools, AnyPaper actually offers you a preview of what your desktop will look like.
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There are a lot of things easier to do with a command line then with a graphical user interface. That’s not to say doing things with a command line is intuitive – no, you will need to learn how to use the tools – but it is easier – that is to say, quick and simple to remember. A powerful, easy-to-use command line is a huge part of what makes Linux so powerful.
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Proprietary
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No biggie. I’ll just bop on over to Hulu™ and watch it there. BUZZZZZ! Wrong! It seems that Hulu™ is having an issue with 64 bit Linux and the Adobe Flash® plugin. Attempting to play the video gives me this warm and fuzzy notice:
Were sorry we are unable to stream videos to your system. This may be due to an Adobe software limitation on 64bit Linux systems.
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Instructionals
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MySQL Server is a very powerful yet light and quick database engine. It is a widely spread standard among developers, capable of running fairly big databases in professional environments, but also very convenient for medium to small projects. In fact, it is about the latter I want to talk about in this article.
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Games
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MMORPGs are really popular nowadays that they are played all over the world, and revenues are said to be more than US$1 billion a year since 2006. World of Warcraft (WoW) is currently the world’s most-subscribed MMORPG but its client only runs on Windows and Mac OS X platforms. So if you are using Linux, you may have to rely on Wine to play the game (see 10 Best Windows Games That Can Be Played on Linux). However, if you want to play MMORPGs that are native on Linux, check out this list that I’ve compiled…
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Just a few hours ago we reported on the progress by those within the Phoronix community working to get the Steam client running as much as possible based upon Valve’s Steam Linux binaries that are inconspicuously housed on their servers. By making some modifications to the Steam client binary and libraries, as of this morning they are up to the point of displaying the main Steam UI window. Just hours after that, the Steam Friends’ UI is now being partially drawn along with other windows.
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If you’re not already aware, Valve’s Steam client and Source Engine are coming to Linux. It’s something we have been talking about for weeks now along with those in the Phoronix community via our forums and IRC. If you’re not up-to-date on our coverage, read Investigating The Steam Linux Client Continues and Here’s The First Screenshot Of The Linux Steam Client. However, if you are up to speed, here is the newest screenshot exhibiting the latest progress to the Steam Linux client.
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The present is also much better then 5 years ago and we see constant improvement each year.
I very much agree with David’s post, specially about the fact that most GNU/Linux ports came way after the original Windows release, which harms the sales and in many cases lowers the game “worth” (if the port is made several years after the Windows release for example, and yeah it did happen many times).
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Judging by that pie chart Linux users appear to make up almost 25% of the donations and their average donation amount is almost double that of the average Windows user donation. This means that of the 571,048$ donated thus far 142,762$ is from Linux users. But remember Linux users are cheap and their is no money in Linux game market – right.
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The Humble Indi Bundle is a revolutionary way of selling software which Wolfire Games are running for a week. It allows you to download a collection of great games (World of Goo, Aquaria, Gish, LagaruHD, Penumbra-Overture) for a price that YOU decide. The games are available for Linux, Mac or Windows, contain no DRM and you can even choose how your donation is distributed.
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One of the reasons why people don’t shift to Linux platform is Gaming. Being having a large user-base, game titles are primarily programmed for Windows. Linux versions are available but only for handful of titles. WINE project has made it possible to play windows games on Linux but not without some anomalies. Due to such scenario, gaming under Linux has been limited. The Linux community has been aware of these problems infesting Linux adoption & have been encouraging developers to develop games for Linux.
[...]
The games bundled are a mix of 2D & 3D, some having simple gameplay while others more challenging. The game mix considered is almost perfect & showcases the best fro Open Source World in form of TORCS, Nexuiz etc. The distro is suited for varied age levels & hence will please everyone. The games should play fine on most of the machines having a decent graphic card. I had a great time playing on my 24 inch monitor at full HD settings cranking up all the details. Inspite of running off a live DVD the games didn’t lag or stutter even once. Sound was great but I could not test multi channel support as my speakers are not in a good shape but online testimonials of people suggest no problem in surround channel mode either. Once I got down to play, I was hooked. Small or big both types of games are extremely addictive & will come handy when you have loads or even a couple of free minutes at your disposal. Anybody who says Linux doesn’t offers good games should definitely try this distro. Offcourse it can’t be compared to biggies on Windows platform but all one expects from gaming is recreation & Linux Gamers Live offers just that. Happy Gaming!
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My today selection for Linux gamers are three nice opensource games, the games are
* Go Ollie! : At first sight Go Ollie! looks like a game for kids, but once you play it you realize it can be fun for anyone, no matter what age.
* Bos Wars : A futuristic real time strategy game (RTS)
* Scorched 3D : A simple turn-based artillery game and also a real-time strategy game in which players can counter each others’ weapons with other creative accessories, shields and tactics.
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How do people pirate the bundle? When I say this bundle is DRM-free — I really mean DRM-free. Not only do the games themselves have no copy protection (not even a simple serial number check), but the Humble Indie Bundle website has limited copy protection. That means there are no download limits, everything is reachable on the command-line with ‘wget’, you can resume downloads, and do anything else you would expect to be able to do with a personal download link.
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GNOME Desktop
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Gnome 3.0 is coming to give the Linux desktop a boost
Gnome, the desktop environment favoured by the likes of Ubuntu Linux, is getting an overhaul. For users this means a number of things, including a new way of interacting with files and a new way of launching and managing applications.
The existing Gnome desktop, version 2.x, is now close on eight years old.
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Gnome 3.0 is expected to be released in September this year. It will most likely find its way into mainstream Linux releases from October onwards.
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I had a lot of time available to myself over the past week, as you might have guessed by my relative proliferation of posts. Some of that time was spent distro-hopping, although I had plenty more things to write about than just the flavor of the day.
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# Last but definitely not least, Slackware. Ah, Slackware. Slackware is the distro I really want to like, but every time I use it I am frustrated and befuddled and left feeling like a newb again. My run-in with Slax the other day was both the cause and the effect of trying out Slackware 13: I started with the Slax ISO, decided I wanted to build it from scratch with Slackware, became frustrated and then went back to Slax again. I know I need to try harder on this one; I shall have to look for some sort of howto that illustrates how to start at the command line and build up to a graphical environment, because that’s what I ultimately would like to do with Slack.
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CDlinux is a well-crafted mini-distro which manages to pack a lot of functionality into a small image. It has the ability to function as an on-the-road desktop for people who want to carry their operating system in their pocket and it also has tools, such as the partition imaging software, which make it a good rescue CD. It’s fairly light on resources, making CDlinux feel like a smaller version of KNOPPIX and additional functionality can be added to the distro using Slackware packages, making CDlinux suitable for a wider range of tasks. The only thing I felt missing was an option to install the distribution to the local hard disk. While this could be done manually, I’m looking forward to seeing it as a feature of the system’s graphical installer. I think CDlinux fits in nicely with the family of other small distributions, such as SliTaz GNU/Linux and Damn Small Linux in the mini-distro niche.
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Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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PCLInuxOS 2010 has been released and is once again shinning at its best. Mylivecd is the new customized format of previous mklivecd and I wanted to give it a spin to make a remaster of my installed system. Though many report failure with remastering I managed to do it on my second attempt.
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Mandriva Linux, a distribution that was one of the first to understand the concept of user-friendliness on the desktop, is apparently for sale and in negotiations with two potential buyers. That’s according to some unconfirmed reports that appeared on the Internet over the weekend
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Red Hat Family
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He then served as president and chief operating officer for JBoss, the world’s leading open source middleware company, where he also came in contact with Terry College’s Chris Hanks, a management faculty member and director of the college’s entrepreneurship program.
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Debian Family
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Ubuntu
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In the meantime, however, “I benefit because Debian can use Ubuntu packages with no problem,” Mack added. “I only wish the other distros would dump RPM and switch to .deb — there would be fewer packaging headaches.”
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Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 192 for the week May 2nd – 8th, 2010. In this issue we cover: Maverick is open for development, Call for Ubuntu User Days Instructors, Window indicators, New Ubuntu Regional Membership Boards, Maverick UDS Translations Sessions, Patch Day Success, Ubuntu Open Week en Español closes on high note, Ubuntu Open Week – Lucid: Community, Canonical, Collaboration, Call For Nominations: Ubuntu Women Leader Leadership Committee, Ubuntu Server and Apache Tomcat – supporting MuleSoft, Full Circle Podcast #6: Mark’s Space Brain from the Future, and much, much more!
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With the release of Ubuntu 10.04 I marked 5 years of Ubuntu usage and involvement.
During these years there were UPs and DOWNs but in general I have to say, that I was right in 2005 to switch from Gentoo Linux to Ubuntu Linux.
In 2005 Oliver Grawert gave me a Ubuntu 5.04 prerelease CD in my hand and told me I should try it, even when he knew that I was a Gentoo Linux addict. I tried it on my company laptop (HP NC6000) and it was working out of the box, without any glitches these days.
And after this I started to work on Ubuntu and for Ubuntu. After my first “virtual” meeting with Mark I was convinced that Ubuntu has potential to overrule the big 2 distros (RH and SuSE). I dreamed about the possibility that we will have an enterprise ready Linux distribution for free.
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Once this is done, go ahead and enable desktop effects. If all went well, you should have all the compiz bells and whistles!
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Almost all types of hardware and configurations are compatible with Ubuntu, and Ubuntu includes a hardware checker to ensure that all your hardware is working as it should be. I would doubt this tool would be needed in most cases, as Ubuntu works out of the box most of the time, but it’s there should you need it.
So there you have it, possibly the most consumer friendly version of Ubuntu yet. Yes, there’s a bit of a learning curve here and there (especially when installing programs, plug-ins) and you do start to miss the “wizard” to guide you through complex operations, but aside from that, Ubuntu makes a great Windows alternative for those of you who just want to get on with things.
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I’ve been quite happy with Lucid all in all. It’s a solid LTS release that incorporates a number of new features alongside impressive stability. If you haven’t upgraded yet, you’re missing out.
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Mark Shuttleworth, Founder, Canonical and Ubuntu Linux shared his thoughts with Srikanth RP on the increasing significance of open source, the roadmap for the cloud and why he thinks Ubuntu will succeed on the desktop, where other equally famed competitors have failed.
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Ivanka Majic, the Canonical design team manager, held a design team plenary in the auditorium at the Ubuntu Developer Summit where she talked about the design team as a whole, what they do and how they do it. As this is the first UDS that has a dedicated design track, many people in the community haven’t had a lot to do with the design team and perhaps are unsure of their inner workings.
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Notably, however, one of the data sets from the Ubuntu Forums implies that a not-insignificant portion of the community is older than 50. That conclusion is backed up by anecdotal evidence of the presence of seniors among a group where we might not expect to find many, given that they were contemplating retirement before Linux even hit the desktop.
Different authors have written about why Linux can work for the elderly, and an “Ubuntu for Seniors” project has even been registered on Launchpad, although it appears dormant. Nonetheless, the retired crowd seems to be an important part of the Ubuntu demographic, even though it may often be overlooked.
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Variants
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There are also parts of GNOME that I love, kubuntu
Ubuntu still lacks a powerful desktop. KDE still lacks simple applications like the Ubuntu Software Center and commercial solutions like the Ubuntu One Music Store. Ubuntu could bring to KDE what it lacks, and vice-versa.
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The team behind the cloud-based Peppermint OS flavor of Linux announces the availability of Version 1.0 of the technology.
The team behind the cloud-based Peppermint OS flavor of Linux has announced the availability of Version 1.0 of the technology.
Indeed, in a news release and related material on the Peppermint OS Website, Shane Remington, a core member of the Peppermint development team as Web developer for the Peppermint OS, said Peppermint OS One will be available by noon on May 10. The OS had been in beta up to this point, but is now ready for prime time, he said.
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For his part, Remington said Peppermint OS One is the only operating system shipping with Seesmic Web by default.
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Four distributors have begun shipping the open platform, Linux-ready Hawkboard single board computer (SBC) for as low as $89. Based on the Texas Instruments OMAP-L138 system-on-chip (SoC), which combines an ARM9 core and a DSP, the community-driven Hawkboard project is structured on the TI-sponsored BeagleBoard project, and is similarly designed for hobbyists and general testing.
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Sub-notebooks
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Unless you have a real reason to want XP (games… sigh), or OS X on non-Apple hardware (games… heh), you really are just setting yourself up for a headache down the road. Ubuntu installs fast, is very straightforward, small and netbook-friendly. Oh and there are even proprietary games for it these days too.
I look forward to the day when $199 ARM-based netbooks with Ubuntu flood the market 
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During a keynote at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Belgium, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth unveiled a new lightweight user interface shell called Unity. The new shell is designed to use screen space more efficiently and consume fewer system resources than a conventional desktop environment. It will be a key component of the Ubuntu Netbook Edition and a new instant-on computing platform called Ubuntu Light.
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The fruit of that R&D is both a new desktop experience codebase, called Unity, and a range of Light versions of Ubuntu, both netbook and desktop, that are optimised for dual-boot scenarios.
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Climate Lab, which has its roots in the problems the World Bank was having organizing the mounds of data it was collecting on climate change, is not only using open source tools to organize, collaborate and syndicate data, but the very data itself is open source.
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Open source software is the heart of many successful businesses, and like anything else has advantages and disadvantages. Depending on the client’s requirements and budget, iDES advises clients as to what technology to adopt.
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Furthermore, on its way to an Open Source vendor WeWebU works together with Prof. Dr. Dirk Riehle, leader of the OSR Group at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. Thus, they quickly can integrate newest trends and research results into their development process. Prof. Dr. Riehle knows the advantages of an Open Source strategy: „We see that Open Source marketing and development models are ahead of traditional closed source approaches. Open Source allows software product companies to go to market faster with a better product and at lower costs.” With this method, WeWebU wants to be up-to-date and close to the users’ requirements as well.
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BlendELF is a work in progress, compact open source 3d game engine aimed towards independent game developers for quick prototyping and game / virtual environment creation.
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It’s very interesting that this is the case seeing as how the same phone has been rooted with 2.1. Or, even better, I read a post on another site of man who successfully ported Android 2.1 to an iPhone 2G. But what exactly does all of this have to do with open source? I knew you’d get to that question.
If you swim with the open source fishes long enough you start seeing the patterns develop surrounding development – specifically bug fixes and update releases. Ubuntu is a perfect example. Every 6 months Canonical ships a new version of their distribution. Sometimes those releases are epic in scale (such as 9.10 to 10.04). Yet they still manage to get those releases out on time. And, as you continue to use that release, you find that updates come very shortly after a bug is discovered.
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Industry-wise, this week has seen a major acquisition announcement – over $1 billion – ABB taking Ventyx, as well as Honeywell (News – Alert)acquiring Akuacom. The latter is particularly interesting for the Open Source angle. Wearing my telecom hat, Open Source has been a big deal in the voice space, and it’s starting to find new homes, including smart grid. Followers of our portal will know there have been interesting developments this week on other fronts, such as wireless networks, electric vehicles and renewable energy initiatives.
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A guest post by Ms. Darlene Parker from Opentechexchange. Ms Parker is actively involved in the spread of Linux over here on the African continent. She is an expert in FOSS deployment.
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Events
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Mobility, social media, open source and virtualization are four keys to productivity and cost savings, especially for small and mid-sized firms.
This was the consensus of panelists who spoke at a recent roundtable organized by the Direct Engagement Show.
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Open source evangelist Obsidian Systems, in partnership with ITWeb, will host the next quarterly Free Beer Session, to explore the potential of open source solutions for organisations.
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Mozilla
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The Mozilla developers have released the second beta for what will become version 3.1 of their popular open source Thunderbird email and news client, code named “Lanikai”. According to the developers, the development release is aimed at discovering “possible problems caused by the changes in the underlying platform”.
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Mitchell Baker, the woman behind Firefox, told Click that customisation tools such as add-ons have helped it take on the competition.
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SaaS
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While there isn’t going to be a specific focus on open source at the new lab, it won’t be a surprise to see open source cloud advancements come from it.
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Servoy chose the AGPL as the license for this release because of its simplicity and openness. The AGPL license is approved by the Open Source Initiative, making it widely accepted with both corporations, governments and educational institutions.
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Phipps
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That’s all fine in theory, but does it actually work? I intend to find out. Starting this week, I’m joining ForgeRock as chief strategy officer. They are a company building an enterprise integration and identity platform using some superb code that has been set aside in the acquisition of Sun by Oracle. Customers worldwide rely on OpenSSO; ForgeRock will be offering them the option to stay with it (renamed OpenAM for trademark reasons) rather than needing to re-architect their systems to use a different product.
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Oracle
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The Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced yesterday a campaign to collect a clear list of OpenOffice.Org extensions that are FaiF, to convince the OO.o Community Council to list only FaiF extensions, and to find those extensions that are proprietary software, so that OO.o extension developers can focus of their efforts on writing replacements under a software-freedom-respecting license.
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The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has announced that it will maintain a list of free software extensions for the OpenOffice.org open source office suite. Discussing the announcement, FSF executive director Peter Brown said, “OpenOffice.org is free software, and an important contribution to the free software community. However, the program offers the user a library of extensions, and some of them are proprietary. Distributing OpenOffice.org in the usual way has the effect of offering users the non-free extensions too.”
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The OpenOffice.org Community Council has since responded to the FSF, saying that they “believe passionately that FOSS delivers better software – including extensions, but that users must be free to make the comparison and reach their own conclusion,” adding that, the council “regrets that the FSF was unable to accept our compromise proposals for a more clearly signposted extensions repository.”
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When I was freshly elected at the OpenOffice.org’s Community Council the Free Software Foundation approached us with a question related to our extensions web site. Basically they felt that we should not be hosting non Free Software extensions and requested we take those down otherwise they would open their own extensions site.
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CMS
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Education
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Koha is the world’s first open source system for managing libraries (the books and periodical variety, that is), and one of the most successful. In the ten years since its first release, Koha has expanded from serving as the integrated library system (ILS) at a single public library in New Zealand to more than 1000 academic, public, and private libraries across the globe. But the past twelve months have been divisive for the Koha community, due to a familiar source of argument in open source: tensions between community developers, end users, and for-profit businesses seeking to monetize the code base. As usual, copyrights and trademarks are the legal sticks, but the real issue is sharing code contributions.
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Government
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In addition, the Conservatives propose to bring in a £100m cap on IT contracts so that the largest and riskiest contracts are broken up into smaller components. This will open up the market to small and open-source companies, which the party believes will benefit the taxpayer because it is cheaper.
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Health
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A blue-chip information technology industry recommended the Veterans Affairs Department reengineer its decade-old electronic health record system based on open source models and offered as the international standard for hospitals.
The recommendations have implications for the Obama administration’s push for a national network for health records, which faces a roadblock of incompatible systems nationwide. Open source theoretically could provide a solution.
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“We think the standardization generated by VistA 2.0 will actually enhance the adoption of Connect and use of the NHIN,” Meagher said, who also envisioned VistA 2.0 as a “guide star,” around which users could steer the development of the NHIN.
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Licensing
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Aleman said he chose the AGPL as the license for this release because of its simplicity and because of the hosted nature of many Servoy-based programs. The AGPL requires source code be made available for derivative works that are hosted as a network service. Thus, the AGPL encourages ISVs hoping to build software-as-a-service applications to engage with companies like Servoy for a commercial license.
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Openness
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Open source hardware, aka open hardware, is an extension of the open source culture. Hardware that is designed for free, in the same way as open source software, is known as open source hardware or open hardware. The research and development information, like schematics, bill of materials (BOM) and PCB layout of an open source hardware design is open to all.
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Finance
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Membership in the EU comes at a price. That price is a limit on deficits. This aspect of the EU treaty was meant to insure the solvency of its member nations and so support the Euro currency itself. No member can unilaterally revalue its currency as it is, by treaty, an abstraction of the net worth of the various member’s ability to back it. This severely limits the unilateral options for dealing with sovereign debt by member countries, which in turn opened up unusual opportunities for member countries to be exploited by international banking.
While there are treaty limits on debt incurred by member countries, there are no constraints on banks lending to them. What evolved in the Greek sovereign debt crisis is a massive short opportunity on the Euro, had you known it was developing. And who would know outside of Greek government and the banking and finance community like Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan?
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The shorts circled like sharks in the Greek bond market, following a highly suspicious downgrade of Greek debt by Moody’s on Monday. Ratings by private ratings agencies, long suspected of being in the pocket of Wall Street, often seem to be timed to cause stocks or bonds to jump or tumble, causing extreme reactions in the market. The Greek downgrade was unexpected because the European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund had just pledged 120 billion Euros to avoid a debt default in Greece. Strategically-timed ratings downgrades of this sort are so suspicious that Indian market regulator SEBI recently created a stir by asking the rating agencies operating in India for periodic reporting concerning their fees and rating norms.
Markets were roiled further on Thursday, when the U.S. stock market suddenly lost 999 points, and just as suddenly recovered two-thirds of that loss. It appeared to be such a clear case of tampering that Maria Bartiromo blurted out on CNBC, “That is ridiculous. This really sounds like market manipulation to me.”
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The fear that began in Athens, raced through Europe and finally shook the stock market in the United States is now affecting the broader global economy, from the ability of Asian corporations to raise money to the outlook for money-market funds where American savers park their cash.
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Years of national denial about looming bankruptcy have turned to resentment as Greece is told how it must tackle its debt crisis
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German Chancellor Angela Merkel abandoned hopes Monday of pushing through tax cuts for Europe’s biggest economy after what she called a “bitter defeat” in an election overshadowed by the Greek debt crisis. She said her government would now concentrate on keeping Germany’s debt down.
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The UK has been so immersed in political fever that another highly significant election has gone almost unnoticed. When Germans go to the polls in state elections today, at stake will be not only the future of Angela Merkel’s ruling coalition in Berlin, but also the direction of Europe’s biggest economy.
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The European parliament is expected to toughen regulations for hedge funds and private equity despite UK and US opposition
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European leaders agreed on Monday to provide a huge rescue package of nearly $1 trillion in a sweeping effort to combat the debt crisis that has engulfed Europe and threatened markets around the world.
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Having waged a battle against financial mayhem for the past two years, the Federal Reserve is tentatively declaring victory. As it guaranteed debt and swapped cash for all sorts of assets, the Fed’s balance sheet grew — from about $850 billion in assets before the crisis to about $2.3 trillion this spring. The binge included the purchase of $1.25 trillion of mortgage-backed securities issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
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Fannie Mae has again asked taxpayers for more money – this time $8.4 billion – after reporting another steep loss for the first quarter. The taxpayer bill for rescuing Fannie and its sibling Freddie Mac has grown to $145 billion – and the final tally could be much higher.
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But Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) remained on the deserted Senate floor last Tuesday evening, looking sullen. The Senate had just approved July 9, 2010, as “Collector Car Appreciation Day.” What it had not done for days was make headway on a 1,400-page bill to overhaul the nation’s financial regulations.
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Payday lenders and check cashers blanketed Capitol Hill last week to challenge the scope of the financial reforms under debate in Congress and combat the industry’s reputation as the pariahs of the financial system.
During the “Hill Blitz” organized by the Financial Service Centers of America, a trade group, about 40 industry executives pushed to exempt check cashing from the purview of a proposed bureau that would oversee consumer financial products. Meanwhile, Democrats launched a new effort to contain the industry by limiting the number of payday loans that consumers can take out.
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A move to break up major Wall Street banks failed Thursday night by a vote of 61 to 33.
Three Republicans, Richard Shelby of Alabama, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and John Ensign of Nevada, voted with 30 Democrats, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, in support of the provision. The author of the pending overall financial reform bill in the Senate, Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd, voted against it. (See the full roll call.)
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The one main benefit to the financial reform effort so far is that it helps further do away with the false paradigms of “left” or “right” and “Democrat” or “Republican” – fewer and fewer people are falling for those lies anymore. Try to get an ideological conservative to explain why Republicans love spending and so eagerly give welfare to banks. Try to get your local liberal to explain why it was a good idea to make backroom deals with abhorrent corporations and drill, baby, drill. Heck, even try to get a Tea Partier to explain choosing bailout-lover Sarah Palin to keynote their convention, especially when that movement once had at least some pre-astroturf roots in protesting government giveaways.
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The essence of his piece was that Wall Street lobbyists had been banking on the Financial Regulatory Reform bill getting pared down behind closed doors as it got closer to a vote. Over the course of 900 words or so Dennis quoted one lobbyist after another talking about how politicians were getting too emotional about this whole ruined-economy thing, and were proceeding with “crazy” and “insanely unproductive” proposals.
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Most of us dislike the official poverty lines used to determine who, exactly, qualifies as poor. Most of us can recite at least five reasons why these measures (based on a mid-1960s assessment of the costs of a minimal food budget) are narrow, out of date and downright misleading.
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To make mattes worse, all this gambling is currently supported by the Federal Reserve and backed by the taxpayer guarantee. If I lose my money when Angelina has her kid, I lose. When the big bank bids go awry, the taxpayer can be stuck with the bill in the form of big bank bailouts. As financial reform advances in the Senate, it’s clear that the top priority for legislator is to make banking boring again.
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Investigators seeking an explanation for the brief stock market panic last week said Sunday that they were focusing increasingly on how a controlled slowdown in trading on the New York Stock Exchange, meant to bring about stability, instead set off uncontrolled selling on electronic exchanges.
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The Federal Reserve late Sunday opened a program to ship U.S. dollars to Europe in a move to head off a broader financial crisis on the continent.
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The Obama administration has sent Congress a proposal to create a $30 billion support program to unfreeze credit for the nation’s small businesses.
NASA Connect – SF – Aviation Safety (1/9/2001)
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05.09.10
Posted in News Roundup at 4:24 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Taking a break from Mumbuntu blog posts. I mentioned this on the latest epsiode of the Ubuntu Podcast that we released yesterday. I see Fab from Linux Outlaws has blogged about his geekbox.
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Three hotkeys are fitted on the chassis, just above the keyboard. The Assist button helps you diagnose and solve any issues you may have with the laptop, while the Web button lets you boot up a secondary, Linux-based operating system for browsing the web without starting up Windows 7.
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Server
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An “ultra-fast” link between the datacentres of the London Stock Exchange and Turquoise has gone live, gearing the dark pool trading venue for a big-bang Linux migration.
Traders with hosted systems at the LSE are now able to access Turquoise on the free fast link, ahead of Turquoise’s migration to the Millennium Exchange platform, which is Linux and Sun Solaris Unix-based, with Oracle databases. Turquoise currently runs on the Java-based Tradexpress platform from supplier Cinnober.
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Today large ERP implementations are running on enterprise Linux. ERP applications by their nature are mission-critical as enterprises depend on ERP applications for their business models. Many enterprises right from Verizon, Hilti, Banco Pastor, YPF globally to Indian Express, Carnation, Great Offshore, Hikal and Sheela Foam in India run their SAP, Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft etc. on Linux.
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According to Drew, the website for the ARM Linux Internet Platform is “running on a Marvell-based very small cluster of chips”.
“We switched it in about six months ago — it’s going OK,” Drew said. “It’s one of these things where you don’t know what you don’t know until you try it.”
The trial is giving ARM an idea of the performance, power management and cooling implications of running a website off the company’s low-powered architecture, Drew added. He noted that “a lot more” had to be done on creating a LAMP (Linux Apache MySql Perl/PHP/Python) open-source software stack for the architecture.
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Kernel Space
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The benchmarks may be flawed due to the following assumptions which is not ideal setup for Ubuntu
Reasons
1. Compiz is enabled by default in Ubuntu, whereas the games in Windows disable Aero to gain that extra FPS. I doubt if the games in Ubuntu disable compiz before running
2. Biggest flaw is cpufrequency is controlled by Ubuntu to run as ondemand instead of utilizing full processor power. The ideal Ubuntu Setup would be to run all the cores with cpufrequency governor performance. Windows 7 by default runs in full gear and kudos to it. But that does not answer this question, why the benchmarks were done when running ondemand governor in Ubuntu Lucid?
How do I assume cpufrequency has something to do with performance, well I will try to prove it ( though you may try for yourself by changing cpufrequency to run with different performance governors and check simple benchmarks)
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As of this writing, the current kernel prepatch is 2.6.34-rc6. A couple more prepatches are most likely due before the final release, but the number of changes to be found there should be small. In other words, 2.6.34 is close to its final form, so it makes sense to take a look at what has gone into this development cycle. In a few ways, 2.6.34 is an unusual kernel…
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Datalight announced support for Linux version 2.6.33 with its flash file system. The software offers improved mount times and faster writes over standard Linux flash file systems such as UBIFS, YAFFS, and JFFS2.
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Instructionals
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Games
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A group of independent game developers are selling the “Humble Indie Bundle” until Tuesday, May 11, allowing buyers to set their own price on the five-game package. The bundle includes World of Goo, Gish, Lugaru HD, Aquaria and Penumbra Overture. All games are available for Windows, Mac or Linux, and are DRM-free.
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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Anyone following the commits in the kde svn repo will notice that there has been some action on the mobile front in KDE PIM over the last few months.
[...]
This project is the result of a collaboration of KDAB, (my employer) with Intevation, crypto specialists G10Code, and interaction specialists Apliki known to KDE for recent usability testing work on KMail icons.
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German developer Klaas Freitag says Kraft is aimed at small companies, driven by a boss and maybe a few people. He started working on the software in 2005 after having worked on similar applications for many years. He says, “The KDE platform under C++ is the most effective platform to build native GUI applications I have ever worked with, and KDE has a strong, friendly, open, and helpful community that’s fun to work in.”
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Konsole is the app that probably almost every KDE developer uses on a daily basis, but there hasn’t been much development on the user interface front during the last releases. The two brave souls Robert Knight and Kurt Hindenburg are busy triaging and fixing bugs. So to say Konsole is more maintained than developed due to a simple lack of manpower. Nonetheless some recent changes may be worth blogging about.
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On startup, you are presented with a big upper part which contains icons for the available media modes, right now: local music, local pictures and local video. The bottom part is covered by a thin panel which holds an exit button (do not ever touch this or god will kill a ladybug and you will cry in shame!) Also, this panel shows you small icons for modes that are currently active in the background. Clicking on these will fast forward you to that mode.
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Not sure how to run a class? The Fedora wiki has a few suggestions. Classes are a good way to provide a question and answer session on everything from how to file bug reports, to explaining how to package software or do testing.
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Ubuntu
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Last word is ubuntu 10.04 is refined product with three year LTS support from ubuntu its seems a great option for home and even Enterprise. Its neatly packaged and is amazingly fast you also have the standard compiz 3D Desktop affects which adds the glamour and the standard administration and configuration options which are fairly easy to use. Overall undoubtly the best Linux desktop ever.
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Variants
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Ubuntu 10.04 LTS has just been released and, with it, the big number of distros based on it start pouring in. Ultimate Edition is an Ubuntu-based release that aims to be, well, ultimate, packing in as much functionality and apps as possible. Ultimate Edition 2.6 bundles proprietary drivers, to get things running out of the box, and plenty of packages for the power users. If you like flashy themes, as many Compiz effects as your graphics card can handle and having everything plus the kitchen sink pre-installed, then this is the Linux distribution for you.
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My overall impression of Easy Peasy has been very good. It installed quickly and easily on a very old netbook, it left me about 1 GB of free space out of a 4 GB disk, and it seemed to work flawlessly. The combination of EasyPeasy and the original EeePC reminded me of what netbooks were really all about when they first appeared. While 1 GB of space is not a lot, it would be easy enough to put a 4, 8, 16 or whatever GB card in the SD slot for your own documents, files, photos and such. If you still have one of these laying around somewhere, it might pay you to dig it out, load a very nice modern Linux distribution on it, and use it as a very small, very light, very portable netbook.
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QNAP Security, a world class manufacturer of Linux-embedded, stand-alone Network Video Recorder (NVR) solutions is pleased to announce its participation at IFSEC 2010.
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According to various reports in the media, there has been a rise in the number of Wi-Fi-cracking kits being sold online in China, which include USB adapters, a Linux operating system, password-breaking software and a detailed instruction booklet.
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Nokia
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January 2010 — Opens a version of its software store for its flagship N900 model which runs the Linux operating system. The Linux Maemo operating system is seen as key in its rivalry with the iPhone.
February – Says to merge its Linux Maemo software platform, used in its flagship N900 phone, with Intel’s Moblin which is also based on Linux open-sourced software.
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Android
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The mobile application for Android got updated today with the ability to snap a picture of some words and instantly translate them into the language of the owner.
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It’s not too surprising that Android 2.0 and 2.0.1 numbers have begun to shrink, especially considering the fact that Motorola recently released the 2.1 update for it’s popular Droid (also known in Europe as the Motorola Milestone) devices – one of the few phones to include the 2.0.x branch of Android. By comparison, the first smartphone to use Android, the T-Mobile G1, will not officially run versions later than 1.6 for technical reasons. Although Google says that it simply doesn’t have enough internal memory, unofficial releases of Android 2.1 are available online.
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Wang said that next up is audio support: “We’ve already laid the groundwork for audio support on the 3G and gotten it working in our homemade bootloader, so support for audio in Linux/Android will be coming in a few days.”
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Sub-notebooks
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But first, let’s try to define the smartbook. By some definitions it is simply a Netbook that runs Linux and uses processors based on a design from U.K.-based ARM, as opposed to Windows software and Intel chips, respectively. By another definition, it is all of the above but also an always-on, always-connected device, just like a smartphone. The latter definition is the one we’ll use here because it’s the original definition as provided by Qualcomm–a major smartbook player–and the closest match to most first-generation smartbooks. (Another definition includes tablets but we’ll leave that out of this discussion.)
Indeed, smartbooks remain a murky product category because no major device maker has announced one yet in the U.S.–at least as defined above. And on Wednesday, Ian Drew, the chief marketing officer at ARM, expressed dismay at the lack of products, according to a report from ZDNet UK. That report cites, among other reasons for the delays, the current lack of Adobe Flash optimization for smartbook operating systems.
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Drupal is a free and open source content management system written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. It’s used as a back-end system for many different types of websites, ranging from small personal blogs to large corporate and political sites, such as whitehouse.gov. It is also used for knowledge management and business collaboration.
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GNU
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The Emacs 23.2 release is out.
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Main features of the new release include downloading of remote packages (for projects hosted on smalltalk.gnu.org), a new browser based on GTK+, a callgraph profiler and incremental garbage collection. This version can also run the Iliad web framework (http://www.iliadproject.org/).
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Open Access/Content
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For the last several years, the US’ National Institutes of Health has implemented a Congressionally mandated open access policy. Within a year of the publication of any work that’s derived from NIH funding, the papers have to be sent to the NIH in digital form so that they can be made available online for anyone to examine. Although there have been sporadic attempts to reverse the policy, it has been considered so successful that the US Office of Science and Technology Policy requested public input on an extension of the rules to all federally funded research. Now, a consortium of US research institutions is putting its weight behind an effort to turn the potential OSTP policy into law.
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Standards/Consortia
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Right now nobody’s interested in a mobile solution that does not contain the words “iPhone” and “app” and that is not submitted to a closed environment where it competes with approximately 2,437 similar mobile solutions.
Compared to the current crop of mobile clients and developers, lemmings marching off a cliff follow a solid, sensible strategy. Startling them out of this obsession requires nothing short of a new buzzword.
Therefore I’d like to re-brand standards-based mobile websites and applications, definitely including W3C Widgets, as “HTML5 apps.” People outside our little technical circle are already aware of the existence of HTML5, and I don’t think it needs much of an effort to elevate it to full buzzwordiness.
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Science
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“The American people — even before they are born — are bombarded continually with myriad combinations of these dangerous exposures,” they wrote in a letter to President Barack Obama at top of the report.
“The panel urges you most strongly to use the power of your office to remove the carcinogens and other toxins from our food, water, and air that needlessly increase healthcare costs, cripple our nation’s productivity, and devastate American lives.”
A White House spokesman indicated he had not yet seen the report and the National Cancer Institute declined comment.
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Environment
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A web tool originally set up to keep track of political violence in Kenya is being used to monitor the fallout from oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico.
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Finance
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But more than a day after a nearly 1,000-point drop in the Dow, the government had not publicly pinpointed the reasons.
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After one of the most wild days on Wall Street, Nasdaq canceled trades of 296 stocks whose prices fluctuated the most.
At around 2:45 p.m. ET on Thursday, trades of a number of stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange were slowed for about a minute due to excessive volatility. During that short time, those stocks were opened up to electronic markets like the Nasdaq.
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The finger-pointing continued Friday between the Nasdaq Stock Market and the New York Stock Exchange in the wake of Thursday’s 1,000-point intraday stock market plunge — despite calls from both sides for a stop to all blame-finding.
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What Paulson jammed into Abacus was mortgages lent to borrowers with low credit ratings, and mortgages from states like Florida, Arizona, Nevada and California that had recently seen wild home-price spikes. In metaphorical terms, Paulson was choosing, as sexual partners for future visitors to the Goldman bordello, a gang of IV drug users, Haitians and hemophiliacs, then buying life-insurance policies on the whole orgy. Goldman then turned around and sold this poisonous stuff to its customers as good, healthy investments.
Where Goldman broke the rules, according to the SEC, was in failing to disclose to its customers – in particular a German bank called IKB and a Dutch bank called ABN-AMRO – the full nature of Paulson’s involvement with the deal. Neither investor knew that the portfolio they were buying into had essentially been put together by a financial arsonist who was rooting for it all to blow up.
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The situation is particularly acute in Greece, where massive debts have forced the government to propose widely unpopular cuts in salaries, bonuses and pensions coupled with significant tax hikes. Interest rates have soared, and deadly riots have broken out in Athens.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Blogs and personal web pages, such as on MySpace and Facebook, provide a broad stage to spread potentially defamatory statements. Thus, care must be taken when posting content on social media. Postings can take just seconds to compose and frequently little thought is given to what is being stated and its consequences, especially where such communication may reach an audience of millions, virtually instantaneously.
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Flickr. Diigo. Evernote.
Everybody wants me to work on my machine but then synchronize my data to their site for safekeeping and social functions. I can understand this for situations where I want others to see my photos or my links, but what happens when I have ten or twenty of these services, all of which have separate interfaces, separate logins, separate passwords, and separate liklihoods to still be around in 5 years?
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The South African media’s concerns about Fifa restrictions on coverage of the World Cup have gone unheeded by the soccer world body for two years, veteran newsman Raymond Louw said on Friday.
Media groups Avusa, the Independent Group and Media 24 are now trying to “engage in a constructive way” with Fifa, through their lawyers, over the terms and conditions for accreditation.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski claimed power to regulate companies that provide Internet access, opening a fight with cable and telephone companies and sparking opposition from Republicans.
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First of all I will continue to boycot DRM’ed devices. The main motive for Digital Restriction Management promotion is financial. If we do not give them money, they will have to stop to threat us like that. I am a customers, not a prisoner. Secondly I will continue to explain people why they should not give money to people who want to control their data.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The company was sued by independent record label Blue Destiny Records last year, which claimed that Google — along with Microsoft’s (NASD: MSFT) Bing — was violating copyrights by linking to unauthorized content hosted on RapidShare.
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ACTA
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An attorney for Google slammed a controversial intellectual property treaty on Friday, saying it has “metastasized” from a proposal to address border security and counterfeit goods to an international legal framework sweeping in copyright and the Internet.
The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, is “something that has grown in the shadows, Gollum-like,” without public scrutiny, Daphne Keller, a senior policy counsel in Mountain View, Calif., said at a conference at Stanford University.
Both the Obama administration and the Bush administration had rejected requests from civil libertarians and technologists for the text of ACTA, with the White House last year even indicating that disclosure would do “damage to the national security.” After pressure from the European Parliament, however, negotiators released the draft text two weeks ago.
NASA Connect – ISS – Virtual ISS (1/4/2001)
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05.08.10
Posted in News Roundup at 9:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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One of the coolest things you can do with linux is control a show laser.
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During the last three years, my Macbook Air has been kinda depressed. Every time i tried to install my free GNU programs using ports it has silently played this tune for me.
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Ballnux
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Continuing with another round of pictures from the Venezuelan FLISOL, i bring here a small recopilation of pictures from galleries of the main site, Caracas, where openSUSE has presence like in the other 19 sites.
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I just installed milestone 6 to test our SELinux functionality… it works! 
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Applications
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One of the good things about EiskaltDC is the flexibility it provides for manipulating GUI according to your needs. It gives you 7 different themes to choose from, you can even go for a sidebar instead of a tool bar.
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Proprietary
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The Wine development release 1.1.44 is now available.
What’s new in this release (see below for details):
– Many more new icons.
– Support for 32-bit prefixes with a 64-bit Wine.
– Many additional msvcr80/90 functions.
– Improvements to Bidi handling.
– More complete mmdevapi (Win7 audio) support.
– Improved handling of MSI patches.
– A number of fixes for desktop menus.
– Optimizations in OLE storage.
– Various bug fixes.
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Wally is an easy to use program with an incredible functionality. It might be the ideal program for you if you are looking for a desktop wallpaper changer that supports local and remote sources.
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Chrome
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The first thing you’ll notice with Google’s new beta of its Chrome Web browser is that it’s faster — much faster — than the last version. You don’t need any fancy tests to see that. All you have to do is use it, and you’ll see that it blows other browsers away.
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This is something I have never heard of. I was trying to install Google Chrome in Ubuntu and in the download page a small note came into my notice. It goes something like this “Installing Google Chrome will add the Google repository so your system will automatically keep Google Chrome up to date”.
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Instructionals
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Games
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Wolfire Games is running an innovative pay-what-you-want promotion for five great indie video games with some proceeds benefiting EFF! Normally the five games would be valued at $80, but from now until Tuesday, 5/11, you can pay what you want for the entire game bundle including:
* World of Goo
* Aquaria
* Gish
* Lugaru HD
* Penumbra Overture
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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A little more than two weeks ago we released Kraft version 0.40, the first version of Kraft based on KDE 4 software platform. The release went fine as far as I can tell, no terrible bugs were reported yet. Some work went into the new website since then, but in general I need a few weeks break from Kraft and spend my evenings outside enjoying spring time.
Today, Sourceforge posted a blog about Kraft after they kind of mail-interviewed me. It’s nice, it really focuses on the things also important to me. This might be another step towards a broader user base for Kraft. I say that because one could have the impression that the number of people actually really using Kraft could be larger. A high number of users is one of the fundamental criteria for a successful free software project and thus I am constantly trying to understand whats the reason for the impression or the fact.
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GNOME Desktop
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* GNOME 3.0 Website: there’ll be a specific GNOME 3.0 website to introduce this new version of GNOME, and get people excited about this new version. In the long term, the content will be moved to the main website, but we feel a separate website is the best way to build momentum for the 3.0 effort. The target audience is existing GNOME users and there is already a good sitemap. Work is ongoing for the exact content and design, and the hard work will be the creation of videos. If you’re interested in helping there, raise your hand
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As we have mentioned with the first of the early GNOME 3.0 development packages getting checked-in (such as the improved Totem Movie Player), the first GNOME 2.31 development milestone is this week in the road to GNOME 3.0 (a.k.a. v2.32) that will be reached this September. Joining this round of new GNOME development packages that are looking for testing is GTK+ 2.21.0, which is leading up to the 2.22 release of the de facto standard tool-kit for the GNOME desktop.
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Red Hat Family
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Another big change in the RHEL 6 beta is the wide selection of disk formatting options, including ext4. You know a Linux feature has arrived when it makes its way to the conservative enterprise releases like RHEL and such is the case with ext4 file system, which is now the default filesystem format in RHEL 6. In addition to ext4, the XFS filesystem is now supported.
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Fedora
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Virtualization technology has long found a home in Red Hat’s Fedora community Linux distribution. Ever since Fedora 4 emerged in 2005, virtualization technologies have continued to advance in the distro and that remains the case with the upcoming Fedora 13 release set for later this month.
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Ubuntu
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Its possibilities like this which I have always held as a reason why I don’t want mass migration away from Windows to the Linux platform. If Linux is to get a wave of disillusioned Windows users, we have to keep in mind that they will bring their demands (and their voting power) to a platform near you which has been going quite happily without Windows users turning up after finally working out that PC does not just mean Microsoft. Now please don’t get me wrong, I am happy that anyone would want to come to Linux after a Windows experience, but what these people need to remember is that Linux/FOSS is != Windows/Microsoft, Linux should never be looked as the OS of choice only for it to still depend on 3rd party Windows apps. Linux and FOSS are unique (and for me) better in their own right, why should we lust over anything Windows offers either natively or via 3rd party apps?
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3.Try to become an answer
Ubuntu Studio, Lubuntu, Edubuntu, Ubuntu server among others are part of what I call the Canonical suite which helps to gain more users in that it is able to meet more needs. Do not narrowly focus on being just an OS, try to be an answer to more specialized needs.
4.Clearly define the role of your community
It is necessary to clearly define the role your user community will play in the growth and development of your OS. The faux pas that happened following the change of the window buttons from right to left in the Lucid Lynx could have had a devastating consequence had it been a smaller distro.
5.It does not hurt to apply marketing to Linux
If there is any one Open Source company that does marketing right, it is Canonical. And as is clear now, it does not hurt at all to invest some time and if possible some money to marketing your distro, it really pays.
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Variants
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In January I received a call from a friend: Her laptop hard drive had crashed leaving her in a bind. I was able go install a new one and reload Her OS that evening. She was very grateful and wanted to do something for me. The one thing I had been wanting was a scarf with the Linux Mint logo. So it was agreed She would do this for me. I most admit that I got the better end of the bargain, it only took me a few hours one evening and my part was done. The knitting of this scarf took much more time.
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Four distributors have begun shipping the open platform, Linux-ready Hawkboard single board computer (SBC) for as low as $89. Based on the Texas Instruments OMAP-L138 system-on-chip (SoC), which combines an ARM9 core and a DSP, the community-driven Hawkboard project is structured on the TI-sponsored BeagleBoard project, and is similarly designed for hobbyists and general testing.
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Phones
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Android
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UK customers with Motorola Milestone owners take notice. Your Android 2.1 upgrade started rolling out today!
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The ARCHOS 7 home tablet comes preloaded with select Android apps including eBuddy, Aldiko, and DailyPaper. Archos’ own AppsLib is also installed allowing for users to customize their tablet with even more applications.
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Motorola is acquiring LiMo-linked middleware and Web 2.0 app software company Azingo, according to several reports. Several hundred India-based software engineers would be focused on lessening Motorola’s dependence on Google, suggests The Register, while GigaOM speculates that Motorola is building its own OS and SFGate sees a China connection.
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Sub-notebooks
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Ubuntu Netbook Remix (reviewed version 10.4) is Linux like you’ve never seen before. It has a smooth, attractive, interface that works very well with the netbook form factor. It is a clear winner, as good as if not better than operating systems from enormous corporations. There was a gotcha on my HP Mini installation in an otherwise great work. Digg this article
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Tablets
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Adobe has demonstrated a prototype Nvidia Tegra 2-based Android tablet from Google running Adobe’s Flash, say industry reports. Meanwhile, Samsung is preparing an “S-Pad” Android tablet, and Bill Gates tips new Microsoft tablet projects, say other reports.
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This is no doubt the Year of the Tablet computer. As such I began searching some months ago for a tablet I could add to my ever growing list of gadgets, I researched and played with many different devices before deciding on my Asus T91MT. I have had my tablet for a couple of weeks now and it amazes me how many people do not even know they exist when they released almost a year ago! The iPad on the other hand got more press than you can shake a stick at and everyone under the sun knows what it is after just a few weeks.
The following is my list of reasons why Asus’s T91MT tablet/netbook hybrid is better than Apple’s iPad:
#1 – It is also a Netbook
Touch screens are fantastic, don’t get me wrong but honestly some things are much quicker to do with a physical keyboard and a mouse. Having the option to flip my T91MT around and use it as a netbook is a wonderful option to have. Plus I personally feel my device’s screen is much safer when I can “close” the screen instead of just sliding it into a case.
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Android smartphones are giving Apple’s iPhone a run for its money and may soon overtake it. If Android tablets follow suit, will Flash get its mojo back?
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If you use open source software, and aren’t a programmer, you may wonder how you can give back to the community that provides you with such marvelous tools at no-to-little cost. At the same time, maybe you’ve run into a problem running some piece of open source software, clicked F1 or otherwise looked for some help in doing something—and found little or no help on offer. There’s a way to solve both these problems: Check out, and get involved with, the FLOSS Manuals project.
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AS OPERATING SYSTEMS increasingly become visual feasts, those who want to create useful interaction enhancements are having to bend over backwards thanks to closed source software in order to bring innovation to the user’s environment.
Two bright young men from the University of Washington recently presented Prefab, a technology which they say will facilitate the implementation of “advanced behaviours in graphical interfaces”. That in itself isn’t particularly new but the route Prefab takes to implement well documented graphical user interface (GUI) techniques are a clear example of the lengths engineers have to go to circumnavigate the limitations posed by closed source software.
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Server
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Lucid Imagination, the commercial company for Apache Lucene and Apache Solr search technology, today announced the launch of its Global Partner Program, a channel sales and support offering which enables VARs and Integrators experienced in selling search technologies to reach new customers and markets through Lucene/Solr open source search. The program’s inaugural participants have all previously sold and supported traditional commercial enterprise search products. With the help of Lucid Imagination, they are now extending their offerings portfolio to meet the demand for Lucene/Solr.
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Databases
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Oracle
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The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today announced a project to assemble a replacement extension library for OpenOffice.org, which will list only those extensions which are free software, at http://www.fsf.org/openoffice.
“OpenOffice.org is free software, and an important contribution to the free software community. However, the program offers the user a library of extensions, and some of them are proprietary. Distributing OpenOffice.org in the usual way has the effect of offering users the nonfree extensions too,” said FSF executive director Peter Brown.
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CMS
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The Midgard Project has released the first release of Midgard2 10.05 “Ratatoskr” LTS. Ratatoskr LTS is a Long Term Support version of Midgard2 Content Repository.
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Education
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Those who’ve been waiting for the release of Moodle 2.0 are getting their open source just rewards this week. The release, which has been met already with several delays, is a “beta preview” — which is to say, not yet a stable release, but a functional template of what’s in store for early adopters (note that Moodle HQ will be releasing weekly updates as the code matures as a series of beta previews leading up to the stable release¹).
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Business
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I’m reminded of an article Dana Blankenhorn wrote a few years back, where he noted that trust lies at “the heart of open source.” Trust is what motivates software coders to open up their projects to communities of strangers. It drives a CIO to choose an open source vendor, who won’t lock them into a particular technology or brand. And it is broken when a social networking (and advertising) business repeatedly strongarms its users into pushing their private information out to the world.
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BIRT is an Eclipse Foundation open source project that was founded by and continues to be co-led by Actuate. It is used by about 750,000 developers worldwide and has become the de facto open source environment for presenting compelling data visualisations on the web.
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SpringSource
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Another week, another important announcement. The SpringSource division of VMware today announced that we have entered into a definitive agreement to acquire GemStone Systems, a leader in data grid technology.
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Releases
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Rapid-I, a leading provider of open source solutions for predictive analytics, data mining and text mining, is launching RapidMiner 5.0: The new version allows enterprises to map and manage the entire business intelligence process chain from analytical ETL, data mining and predictive reporting with a single solution. The fully revised user interface offers a significantly simplified operation, meaning that even newcomers to analysis can be given vital support with tasks that come up frequently.
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Government
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A Veterans Affairs requested VistA Modernization Report is now available. The good news: it prominently features and recommends open source and discusses the prospect of VA VistA as a national standard.
[...]
Among the reports issues, it calls the GNU General Public License ‘restrictive’. Restrictive of what? Restrictive of the ability of proprietary vendors to establish and maintain vendor lock-in at the great expense of taxpayers and patients? The report at times treats open source and proprietary EHR software as equals instead of proprietary EHR software as a destructive invasive species. The report probably understates the number of private sector VistA deployments as measured by the 2008 AMIA Open Source White Paper. Finally, it makes the common error of subdividing open source vs commercial when open source is certainly commercial. They probably mean open source vs. proprietary.
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Economist
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Economist logoThe online team at The Economist recently set up a Launchpad project, using a commercial subscription. I asked Mark Theunissen, from The Economist Group, about their plans.
Mark: We’re migrating the existing Economist.com stack from Coldfusion/Oracle to a LAMP stack running Drupal. At present, we’re about half way through — if you visit a blogs page, channel page, or comments page they will be served from Drupal, but the home page and actual articles are still served from Coldfusion. There’s a migration and syncronisation process happening in the background between Oracle and MySQL.
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The world renowned Economist Magazine is migrating its infrastructure from proprietary to an Open Source stack. According to this blog post on Launchpad, The Economist is migrating its existing stack “from Coldfusion/Oracle to a LAMP stack running Drupal,” says Mark Theunissen from the Economist Group.
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Programming
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In December of 2008, the Ruby on Rails community was at a crossroads. The mainline Rails project was losing ground to Merb, an alternative open source MVC framework for building Ruby applications. The community was fragmenting. Yehuda Katz was the creator of the Merb framework, and rather than continue on with that project, he and his fellow contributors decided to merge Merb and Rails. The decision sparked a number of Rails homecomings for other outside projects, and in February the first beta of an integrated Rails 3.0 arrived. We sat down with Katz to discuss the past, present and future of Ruby on Rails.
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Law & Order
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The judgment was awarded by Magistrate Judge Elizabeth D. Laporte of the US District Court in Northern California. It comes in a case filed against the principals of a business called Find a Quote. A four-employee ISP in Garberville, California, Asis said it receives about 200,000 junk messages per day and spends about $3,000 per month to process them.
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A school spokesman said it’s possible the student who recorded the cell phone video could get in trouble as well because students are not supposed to use their phones during the day.
School officials said they are not allowed to record video in locker rooms because of privacy.
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The investigation into the fraudulent use of red light cameras in Italy last week concluded with prosecutors preparing charges against thirty-eight public officials and photo enforcement company executives. Prosecutors claim that three photo enforcement companies formed a cartel that operated in collusion with public officials for the purpose of generating revenue. The officials accepted bribes in return for approving lucrative contracts and shortening the duration of yellow lights at intersections equipped with red light cameras.
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If ISPs should be subject to “net neutrality,” should companies like Google be subject to “search neutrality”?
When we wrote recently about the idea of “search neutrality,” some readers seemed to believe that we had coined the term, but nothing could be further from the truth. “Search neutrality” now fills the FCC filings of companies like Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and AT&T, all of whom see no reason why their businesses should be picked out for regulatory scrutiny while Google goes about its business unmolested.
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A court decision ruling that the supply of software through a digital download mechanism is not a supply of “goods” has been upheld in the Supreme Court of NSW, setting a precedent that software downloaded via the internet is not protected by the Sale of Goods Act.
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Science
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There is a little Neanderthal in nearly all of us, according to scientists who compared the genetic makeup of humans with that of our closest ancient relatives.
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NASA’s Mars Meteorite Research Team reopened a 14-year-old controversy on extraterrestrial life last week, reaffirming and offering support for its widely challenged assertion that a 4-billion-year-old meteorite that landed thousands of years ago on Antarctica shows evidence of microscopic life on Mars.
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Security/Aggression
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A teachers’ body at the Aligarh Muslim University has demanded immediate removal of CCTV cameras installed at the campus, calling the measure as an “unacceptable encroachment” into privacy of people at the premier institute.
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A Miami airport screener, agitated at continued ribbing after colleagues saw his body parts in an imaging scanner, attacked a colleague, police said.
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Unlike some systems, the Vue doesn’t use a Wi-Fi network to carry its signals. Instead, it creates its own network between the gateway and cameras, like cordless telephones communicating with a base station.
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Environment
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Over the next few days cranes will attempt to lower the 100-tonne contraption around 5,000ft (1,500 metres) to the sea floor and position it over a leaking pipe that has been gushing 210,000 gallons of crude a day into the Gulf.
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I’ve seen this movie before. In 1989, I was a fraud investigator hired to dig into the cause of the Exxon Valdez disaster. Despite Exxon’s name on that boat, I found the party most to blame for the destruction was … British Petroleum. That’s important to know, because the way BP caused devastation in Alaska is exactly the way BP is now sliming the entire Gulf Coast.
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White House lists actions taken to contain the disaster as BP says robot submarines have blocked one leak
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John Browne, the former chief executive of energy giant BP, used to brag about his company’s relative lack of political involvement, saying the London-based conglomerate purposely shied away from spending too much on lobbying and campaign contributions.
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So it’s not exactly surprising that the executive director of such a group would have a nonchalant view of the impact of oil spills on the Gulf. What is maybe a little surprising is that the New York Times would present a coalition of offshore drilling interests as neutral experts on the environment.
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Der Spiegel captures standoff between Obama, Sarkozy, Brown and Merkel and developing country negotiators
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Finance
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The lenders, notorious for high fees and interest rates, have been pressing vulnerable customers to help them kill the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency.
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There are now two stories based on two completely calculations munged together into one sound bite. The explanation will likely turn into “more people are looking for jobs now.” But why is the denominator shifting around? Weren’t those people already jobless (unemployed), even though they weren’t looking for jobs? Oh – wait, if we include the people not looking for jobs in the historical unemployment calculation, the unemployment rate goes up, maybe by a lot. Eek – wouldn’t that be more scary.
It’s a simple game the government is playing with the numbers. Occasionally I’ll run into a company that does this – usually around revenue vs. gross margin dynamics, or bookings vs. revenue, or GAAP accounting vs. actual cash flows (where what really matters is cash flows.) Picking the better number vs. dealing with reality is disingenuous at best; presenting them in conflicting ways that obscure the message is bullshit.
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Federal regulators reviewing yesterday’s stock plunge will try to determine if the fivefold increase in the number of American equity exchanges has left them unable to manage the biggest surges in volume.
The selloff erased $700 billion from U.S. markets in eight minutes after actions by the New York Stock Exchange to slow trading increased volatility on other platforms, said Joe Ratterman, chief executive officer of the five-year-old alternative exchange Bats Global Markets Inc. NYSE Euronext Chief Operating Officer Larry Leibowitz said the Big Board prevented a bigger decline.
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Almost 24 hours have passed since the stock market had its momentary freakout, and it’s still unclear what happened to trigger the sell-off.
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The stock market’s slump this week reflects a widespread concern among many economists that the European debt crisis could slow the U.S. economic recovery.
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The SEC and CFTC have ultimate oversight of financial markets, but they generally rely on the markets to write and enforce their own rules.
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You could say let’s just not have any rating agencies. But we’d have a problem if we didn’t have rating agencies at all. I think what you want are rating agencies that do a good job.
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This smells like a little payback for Goldman’s role in the AIG collapse.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Bita Ghaedi, who feared her life was at risk if returned to Iran, wins interim reprieve
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There is a current campaign on the internet for users to not log into Facebook for a whole day on June 6th, 2010. This comes in response to the recent changes made by Facebook to their privacy settings, especially to the one leaving the default “on” instead of “off.” Basically it became quite apparent that Facebook is in fact, a business, and that your so-called “personal” data was for sale. To economists and investors, this was no surprise at all. They all expected Facebook to make a genuine attempt to make money at some point, and what better way than demographic targeted advertising?
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As noted earlier by PC World, the social networking site silently adds apps to profiles whenever a user is logged in and browses to certain sites. Facebook displays no dialogue box or notification window asking permission, and there is no easy way to opt out of the process.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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To be clear: this shouldn’t be confused with pure “billing by the byte.” The low cap and high overage model (which Time Warner Cable tried — and failed — to impose in the U.S. last year) simply jacks up prices “thousands of multiples beyond what the costs are” on top of the already high flat rate price — ensuring that consumers wind up paying significantly more money for the same service.
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That logic is backwards. Basically, Hollywood is saying that it held the public hostage until the FCC let it break your TVs, and because the FCC caved in and Hollywood will release the movies it easily could have released before, consumers win. When someone is taken hostage and the family pays up, that’s not a “win” for the family. As Public Knowledge points out, this appears to be the FCC doing this just as a favor to Hollywood.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Librarians, digital activists, ISPs, music managers and other associations and trade bodies have called for the relaxing of copyright law in the EU to allow more people to access and re-use copyrighted material.
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Canada has long had a blank media levy on things like blank CDs, which is a sort of “you must be a criminal” tax on things. Of course, what it really does is drive down the usage of blank CDs by making them ridiculously expensive — such that, in some cases, it accounts for 90% of the price of a blank CD.
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Particularly notable: WAPO’s “collection of national copyright laws”, where each country’s page is linked to a “Disclaimer” in which UNESCO claims copyright on the content of the collection and restricts its use to educational, non commercial purposes – even though in most cases, they simply downloaded the copyright law from the official site, renamed the file and re-uploaded it on the UNESCO server.
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So, the question is do we not use Brittany’s painting, the piece that 18 months of design work have been crafted around, because the Manager of Intellectual Property of a famous Pop artist who also appropriated from the same source image says we can’t? Brittany’s painting certainly appears to be an appropriation of the uncopyrighted(?) graphic novel piece as opposed to an “adapted…Roy Lichtenstein image” as Ms. Lee has stated. We haven’t pressed the album yet, so we just need to know whether or not we CAN use the image based on its appropriative properties. What IS the answer here??????
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That’s simply not true. McArdle is making the same mistake that many politicians and reporters make, despite it being pointed out as an error time and time again: she’s confusing the recording industry with the music industry. The music industry is actually doing quite well when you look at the numbers. Switching back and forth between the two, as McArdle does throughout the piece, and pretending they’re the same thing at some points, and different at others is really weak reporting. Yes, the numbers for the recording industry are worse, just as the numbers for the horse buggy industry got worse and worse each year as the automobile industry ramped up.
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Stuart Hamilton from the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) alerted us to the news that his organization, along with “a broad based coalition of European groups, representing consumers, creators, libraries, civil society and technology companies” have put together a declaration in the EU Parliament for Copyright for Creativity — with the goal being to reform copyright law to bring it back to its original purpose, while updating it for the internet age so that it “fosters digital creativity, innovation, education, and access to cultural works.”
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NASA Connect – ISS – ISS Basics (1/4/2001)
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Send this to a friend
05.07.10
Posted in News Roundup at 5:52 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The photo caption reads: “A Smartmatic worker inserts one of 76,000 CF cards recalled for glitches and formatted in its warehouse in Laguna.” He is clearly using Ubuntu Linux so I wondered if the system used by Smartmatic Inc. is entirely based on Linux and other Free and Open Source software.
I once wished for an Open Source and Linux-based automated voting system in order to help minimize election fraud, but since our corrupt politicians will do whatever they can to cheat and win, I’m losing hope. Before I’ll go, I would like to quote this comment from our reader:
“All electronic systems do is add another layer of potential fraud, which is harder to spot than before. Also it’s far harder to identify who has committed the fraud than when paper votes are used. What’s the point? Linux would do best to stay well clear – why get tarred with that brush eh?”
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With the rise of virtualization and the concept of a lightweight, Just enough Operating System (JeOS), the traditional OS could become a thing of the past.
JeOS is stripped down to the bare essentials necessary to run a particular application — a perfect fit for virtualization, which allows many operating systems to run concurrently on a single host. The actual components in a JeOS implementation may vary from one guest to another, but the concept remains the same: If it does not serve the needs of the application, it doesn’t need to be in the OS.
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Audiocasts
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Randal and Aaron talk with Scott Maxwell and Paolo Bellutta about driving the Mars rovers.
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Kernel Space
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I am not against their conclusion whatsoever. What I have a problem with is the way the story is titled. I find it very unfair to title a story this way only to have conducted a series of game tests on the two OS to reach such a conclusion. Would it have been so difficult to title it to reflect the fact that the conclusion is based on a series of tests in a gaming context.
I would be woefully unfair to Windows 7 should I claim Ubuntu 10.04 has more eye candy than the former without making it known afore-hand that I have Compiz running. It should be made clearly known that there is no way Windows 7 can be faster than the Lucid Lynx (yes I am sticking my neck here) in a general purpose context.
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How do you use Linux? At work? At home?
Fernandez: I had dabbled with Linux in school, but I really only got into it at university. With the exception of my partner, very few things excite me as much as open source software; and Linux, as an open source operating system, struck a chord with me. These days I use Linux on several machines at home for development, email and web browsing; as a server; as a media center; and on my phone.
You recently joined The Linux Foundation as an individual member. Can you share with us why you joined and what you hope to get out of membership?
Fernandez: I joined because I’ve been using Linux for years. I find it an inspiring community and I had $99 to spare! Kernel development is something I’d like to get into eventually and The Linux Foundation provides some great resources for learning more about the kernel and the developer community. Membership with the Foundation (from my few weeks of experience) is a great way to stay on top of new developments in Linux and connect with the Linux community. To be honest, more than any of these reasons, I joined to give something back to a community that has made such a big difference in my daily life.
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Graphics Stack
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Last year a new set of DRI2 extensions came about for sync and swap support of display buffers to better reduce potential “tearing” that may appear on displays in some composited environments. This work that’s exposed to the client through OpenGL/GLX extensions also can lead to improved performance, video memory savings, and other benefits as talked about extensively on the Composite Swap Wiki page. A new GLX swap event extension also came about out of expressed needs by the Clutter/Mutter developers.
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Applications
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Sometimes you want an application with a ton of options, and sometimes you just want to simplify. Many audio players, for instance, come with equalizers and visualizations, but if all you want is just to play the music, all you need is Neformal. Neformal doesn’t support playlists, podcasts, or other cool modern stuff. It just plays the files, one after another, in a selected directory.
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Instructionals
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Games
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Frictional Games, which produced the successful Penumbra Game Series have announced recently, that since the Humble Indie Bundle is such a great success (close to 50000 contributions so far) they offer Amnesia: The Dark Descent for pre-order at 50% discount (which amounts then to 10$) until May 11.
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One of the companies behind The Humble Indie Bundle, Wolfire Games reports that GNU/Linux users contribute twice as much as Windows users !
This is not the first time the GNU/Linux gamers prove that they are excellent costumers, a while ago I posted that when 2dboy the developers of World Of Goo which BTW is also a part of the Humble Indie Bundle, made the birthday sales week, GNU/Linux users chose to pay more the the Mac and Windows users.
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Alien Arena 2010 has been released today!
The latest edition of this open sourced, freeware FPS has been updated with new levels, several new weapon models, and a host of bugfixes, gameplay tweaks, and client improvements.
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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But ever since Amarok discontinued the visualizations all the other media players seem to have followed their lead. I do not understand this.
[...]
If I find a decent Media player that is stable and has nice visualizations I will drop Amarok in a heart beat.
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Red Hat Family
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The company advises all users to upgrade to a later release. Under the standard 7 year life-cycle, RHEL 5, for example, will be supported until March of 2014. The next version, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, is currently in development and is available as a pre-release beta. The latest stable release is version 5.5 from the end of March.
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Last week marked the release of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, this week there was the releases of PCLinuxOS 2010.1 and a new openSUSE 11.3 milestone, and planned for unveiling in just over a week is the final release of Fedora 13. This week the Fedora 13 release candidate is available via their compose system as all hands are on deck to prepare for the release of Goddard.
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Ubuntu
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A week ago, on April 29, Linux distro Canonical released Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx) in Desktop, Server and Netbook editions. It featured a new look that some rate more attractive and up-to-date than Snow Leopard’s. “Lucid Lynx’s” new graphics card drivers and other consumer-oriented innovations front a Linux-based operating system package containing all the essential productivity applications you need, all for free: a web browser, office suite, media apps, instant messaging and much more, and is being pitched as an open-source alternative to Windows and Office or Mac OS X and the iApps. Ubuntu’s core applications are all free and open source.
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If you are looking for a lightweight alternative to install in your old PC or netbook, Lubuntu is a great choice. You won’t get any eye candy or special graphical effects, but what you get is fast speed at a low cost. It’s time to put your old PC back to work.
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We also talked about the open source model and how it applies to a proprietary networking vendor like Riverbed.
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Development/Documentation
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Those days are long over, and I wonder if that’s a good thing. SourceForge, for all its flaws (and it had plenty), set some expectations for projects that other services do not. For example, SourceForge provides Web hosting, mailing lists, bug trackers, and most of the tools that projects need to grow and succeed. In short, not just the development tools, but also the community tools needed to discuss and promote the projects. For many projects, that set an expectation of using those tools.
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When he realized that custom documentation for Free Software is needed for vision-impaired users, Tony Baechler offered to launch a dedicated service. I asked Tony what exactly he hopes to set up and how it should work.
[...]
Stop: When I first read Tony’s offer, I decided to contact him because I thought that such a good idea deserved as much exposure as possible. After reading this plan and the rationale behind it I’m even more convinced and also have one more reason to invite all readers who want to know more or could help in any way to contact Tony or visit audio.BatSupport.com, the website on which he will host these tutorials: follow Tony’s guidelines and you’ll produce audio tutorials very useful for all potential Linux users, not just those with vision problems!
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Mozilla
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Firefox 3.7a5pre now has an option to place the browser’s tabs on top of the controls, similar to Google Chrome. This is likely part of Mozilla’s plans to redesign Firefox for version 4. The new option can be found in the right-click menu as “Tabs on Top” below “Navigation Toolbar” and “Bookmarks Toolbar”.
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The Mozilla Foundation and the Shuttleworth Foundation support dynamic leaders with new ideas that drive openness and innovation. In particular, we share an interest in how open technologies and open education can foster creativity, participation and fresh thinking that improves the world. For this reason, we have decided to jointly offer an Education for the Open Web Fellowship. This is the call for proposals.
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Oracle
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Karen Tegan Padir is an evangelist. Her gospel is open source software, and she recently changed denominations when she left Sun Microsystems Inc., where she was in charge of running the departments that determined the future of such ubiquitous Internet software as Java and MySQL.
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VirtualBox 3.2 Beta 1 brought experimental support for Mac OS X guests, memory ballooning, CPU hot-plugging, new hypervisor features, RDP video acceleration, and much more. With VirtualBox 3.2 Beta 2, Oracle has introduced Java bindings for VirtualBox, numerous GUI enhancements, fixes for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS guests, new icons, performance optimizations, and various other fixes.
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Business
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Daley told me that it has around 45,000 “active” members – that is, people that do something rather than just visit. The community also contributes to the overall project – mostly QA, but also bug-fixes.
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BSD
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The Bordeaux Technology Group released Bordeaux 2.0.4 for FreeBSD and PC-BSD today. Bordeaux 2.0.4 is a maintenance release that fixes a number of small bugs. With this release we have changed the Bordeux UI from a GTKDialog to a GTKWindow, the “OK” button has also been re-named to “Install”. We have upgraded our Wine bundle from 1.1.36 to 1.1.41, updated to the latest winetricks release, added support for the new Steam UI, and changed the progress bar back to Zenity.
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Releases
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OpenDLP runs on an Apache Web Server using a MySQL database. This version only works on Windows computers via an installed agent. The project is hosted on Google code and is licensed under the GPL v3.
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Government
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The challenges to government’s adoption and participation in open-source communities is often thought to be a simple culture clash, but in reality it goes deeper than that, according to NASA’s newly-appointed chief technology officer.
“The issues that we need to tackle are not only cuture, but beyond culture,” said Chris Kemp, formerly chief information officer at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. “And I think we need new policy and support from the administration and Congress to help us tackle” them.
[...]
And open source is a key element of Kemp’s strategy. “We’re actually creating a new Open Source Office under our Open Government Initiative under the Chief Technology Officer’s office,” he said. “We’re really taking this seriously, and we’ve never had this sort of visibility and interest from headquarters before.”
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The Parliament has adopted a new digital strategy called 2015.eu which outlines its ambitions for internet policy for the next five years and beyond. It has passed a resolution adopting the plan and demanding that the European Commission make it work.
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Openness
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The smart grid shopping spree keeps going this week. Building automation giant Honeywell said on Friday that it has bought demand response firm Akuacom, for an undisclosed price. The news comes days after Swiss electrical giant ABB said it plans to throw down more than $1 billion for smart grid software player Ventyx (The Smart Grid Acquisition Tally . . . So Far).
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Open Access/Content
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There are several thousand new plant species described every year, published in a range of plant taxonomy journals and other venues. Publishing another description might not be seen as a particularly earth-shattering event but we are enormously proud to be able to publish Sandra Knapp’s new paper on four new vining species in PLOS ONE today as it represents a turning point for PLoS and for botanical nomenclature. The paper is a botanical pioneer: it is the first to be published in an online-only journal whilst adhering to the strict botanical code that sets out how new species can be named.
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Standards/Consortia
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Kim has already written a quick blog post on the launch, highlighting the Egyptian Ministry of Communications and IT, which is at the end of one of three top-level domains that have gone live.
It is hard to describe the importance of this step. It has been years, literally years, of conversation and discussion and engineering to get to this point. And that point is: the Internet’s core infrastructure can now deal with non-ASCII language. Which means that the Arabic-speaking world, the Chinese-speaking world, the Hindi-speaking world, in fact the majority of people on the planet can finally use the Internet natively without this strange American structure that makes you puts, for example, “.com” at the end of every domain.
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Today, Scribd is changing the way you read documents online. Over the next few weeks and months, Scribd will convert our entire content corpus — tens of millions of documents, books and presentations — into native HTML5 web pages so that we can offer the best online reading experience. Scribd documents in HTML5 load instantly, support native browser functions (zoom, search, scroll, select text), and deliver an impressive reading experience across all browsers and web-enabled devices, without requiring add-ons or plug-ins.
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After reading the report, I was inspired to throw out (recycle!) all of the pthalate and BPA-laden cheapo plastic food storage containers from my kitchen, and order replacements made from glass with silicone seals. I already buy mostly organic foods, and drink mostly filtered water. I don’t microwave my food at all, but if even storing cold leftovers in certain types of plastic containers might up your risk, this seems an easy and cheap enough change to make. Can’t hurt.
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Business Models
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I’d like to advance a hypothesis. Maybe, just maybe, business isn’t why companies exist anymore. Maybe 21st century companies are no longer just in business, but in “betterness.” Here’s what I mean.
A fool and his wallet, they say, are soon parted. Consider yours truly. Recently, I ordered furniture from IKEA. It’s just for a spare room, I thought, and I’ll save a few bucks. What I forgot? The hidden costs. Comically torturous self-assembly with hilariously absurd diagrams, to begin with. But I never even got that far.
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Hardware
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Intel’s version of the technology is called Turbo Boost, while AMD’s is called Turbo Core.
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A hypervisor is a software technology used in virtualization, which allows several operating systems to run side-by-side on a given piece of hardware.
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Science
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When the New Scientist’s 1964 series of predictions for “The World in 1984” was published by Penguin Books the following year, I added tables at the end. They summarized what seemed to me the main expectations of the scientists and scholars (about 100 of them) who contributed to the project. The first table concerned “Major Technological Revolutions” and I reproduce its contents below, reformatted to fit the page but otherwise unmodified in any way. The question marks denoted explicit disagreement or implicit controversy on important points.
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Security/Aggression
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As the details of the Times Square car bomb attempt emerge in the wake of Faisal Shahzad’s arrest Monday night, one thing has already been made clear: Terrorism is fairly easy. All you need is a gun or a bomb, and a crowded target. Guns are easy to buy. Bombs are easy to make. Crowded targets — not only in New York, but all over the country — are easy to come by. If you’re willing to die in the aftermath of your attack, you could launch a pretty effective terrorist attack with a few days of planning, maybe less.
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Radly Balko of Reason posted this video of a SWAT raid on a family in Missouri. The officers found a small amount of cannabis, and so they arrested the parents on a charge of child endangerment, naturally.
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Environment
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Premier Wen Jiabao on Wednesday vowed to realize the country’s green goal to cut energy intensity by 20 percent between 2006 and 2010, amid the strong economic recovery.
In a nationwide video and teleconference, Wen told governments at all levels to work with an “iron hand” to eliminate inefficient enterprises.
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It was hailed as a breakthrough in the fight to cut carbon emissions. In 2007, researchers found that heavy electricity users cut their consumption after being told that they used more energy than their neighbours. Almost a million US households have since received similar feedback and have cut electricity use by an average of 2.5 per cent.
But a new study has identified a wrinkle in the plan: the feedback only seems to work with liberals. Conservatives tend to ignore it. Some even respond by using more energy.
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Researchers from Purdue University and the University of New South Wales, Australia, have for the first time calculated the highest ‘wet-bulb’ temperature that people can tolerate – and have found that it could be exceeded for the first time in human history under reasonable worst-case climate change scenarios.
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European Union ministers on Wednesday vowed to overhaul their 840 million euro-a-year fishing subsidies policy by next year to avoid overfishing and make the industry more sustainable.
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Residential and commercial energy use have remained pretty flat for the last three years, but transportation started a gradual decline in energy consumption in 2007. Although 2008 saw a huge decline in driving due to fuel prices, the cost of fuel dropped in 2009. As one might expect, total miles traveled rose, although only by a small fraction of a percent. Nevertheless, total fuel consumption was down from 2008 for every month of the year, spurred in part by an increase of 1.5mpg in the average fleet fuel economy. Given that the fuel economy is set to rise rapidly through 2016, this sector is likely to continue to improve.
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The European Union likes to think of itself as the unrivalled champion of eco-governance but, argues Derrick Sutter, it is far from living up to its image.
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Finance
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Economists have spent the past 70-plus years trying to figure out what caused the Great Depression. They’re likely to spend the next 70 analyzing the causes and lessons of this decade’s devastating boom and bust.
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The Senate on Thursday rejected an effort by liberal Democrats to break up some of the biggest banks, defeating an amendment to financial regulatory legislation that would have imposed new limits on the size and scope of financial companies.
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Lawmakers are trying to learn the causes of the drastic stock market sell-off to ensure that high-tech trading is monitored and average investors are protected in the wilds of Wall Street.
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Hardly any. Legally, they have already lost ownership. If they do not respond to the carrot the lenders offer — as much as $5,000 in cash in exchange for leaving the house in good order — he employs the stick: the county sheriff, who evicts them.
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It is easy to dismiss Thursday’s 30-minute, 1,000-point boomerang on the Dow Jones industrial average as a freak event that resulted when everyday human error collided with high-speed, high-volume computerized trading.
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James Glassman, a senior economist at JPMorgan Chase & Co., said it was a mistake for him to call members of a Senate panel ignorant and to call for “grownups to step in” to the financial reform debate.
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But whether it should be the law is the subject of debate on Capitol Hill as the Senate prepares to vote on legislation to overhaul financial regulation. It is also one of the key issues underpinning the recent controversy regarding Goldman’s role in the financial crisis.
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The effort to audit the Fed got a big boost last night when Senator Bernie Sanders reached an agreement with Chris Dodd, the chair of the banking committee. Under the deal, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) would undertake a full audit of the special facilities created by the Fed since December of 2007. GAO would make the findings from its audit available to the Congressional leadership. It would also make most of the details of the Fed’s transactions available to the public.
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Senate Democratic leaders cleared two major obstacles Thursday to winning passage of a Wall Street reform bill, beating back a Republican effort to curb the reach of a new consumer agency and striking a compromise on a watered-down bill to shine a light on Federal Reserve activities.
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As its legal troubles mount, Goldman Sachs is losing a big corporate client: the American International Group.
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Has Congress suddenly grown a collective spine? Between the SEC case, the recent hearings held by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, and the current turmoil in the euro zone (exacerbated, some say, by derivatives deals), even Republicans can read the writing on the wall now: the public wants action against Wall Street. Will there be—mirabile dictu!—an actual bipartisan vote in favor of financial reform?
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Break up Goldman Sachs Group Inc., he says. Consider banning collateralized debt obligations. And why not compensate traders with slices of their own exotic securities instead of with cash or shares?
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Goldman investors are converging on lower Manhattan for the firm’s annual shareholder meeting. Typically a rather mild-mannered affair, the gathering is poised to turn contentious given the scrutiny Goldman has been under in recent weeks.
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Just like Goldman Sachs, BP acted irresponsibly by recklessly pursuing profits at the expense of the American people. Both companies gambled, both companies lost, and both companies expect the taxpayer to clean up their mess. It’s time both companies are held accountable.
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Charlie Gasparino of Fox Business Network is reporting that the SEC’s highly publicized civil fraud charges against Goldman Sachs are likely to be settled for $1 billion to $5 billion.
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Former eBay CEO Meg Whitman’s lead in the Republican race for California governor has shrunk dramatically as the billionaire candidate has been battered by her ties to Goldman Sachs, new Republican and Democratic polls suggest.
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The California Public Employees Retirement System, the largest U.S. public pension fund, voted to split the roles of chairman and chief executive officer currently held by Lloyd Blankfein at Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
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Under Mr. Blankfein, Goldman’s reputation has gone from Teflon to Velcro. Criticism that used to beguile other firms without nicking the Goldman now seem to only stick to Goldman. Once the pinnacle of banking, Goldman is now the butt of jokes across Wall Street and Main Street.
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A drilling platform at the corner of Wall Street and Broadway exploded and sank today with sticky red ink spreading across the land. It is impossible to estimate the damage this will do as it begins to wash up on Main Street. Senator John Kyle of Arizona denied that any Republican in the Senate ever favored more financial drilling, “Some candidate may have had said something two or three years ago like ‘the fundamentals of the economy are sound’ but that was never our policy”.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Commissioner Malmström has been explaining to the European Parliament and to the press that her Internet blocking proposals are “only” about child abuse websites and “only” the kind of blocking that is in place in countries such as Sweden. At the same time, however, her officials have been convincing the EU’s national home affairs ministries to agree in principle to measures to develop legal powers to destroy web resources outside the EU anywhere in an area covering the majority of the northern hemisphere.
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Some fantastic news: in response to the waves of criticism toward the proposed notice and takedown regime that might have curbed online speech in Brazil – see my prior blog post – the Brazilian Ministry of Justice has announced a completely different system for online service provider liability and content removal.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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A World Intellectual Property Organization committee tasked with finding an international instrument to prevent the misappropriation of traditional knowledge, folklore, and genetic resources has begun in earnest text-based discussions and is now working to find an agreement on extra meetings intended to speed the process towards creating an international legal instrument.
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Copyrights
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In what seems like a role reversal, Google has filed a lawsuit against Blue Destiny Records in an attempt to assert that it has not infringed the record label’s copyrights. Blue Destiny Records had previously sued Google but then withdrew the suit, saying that it would refile at a later date.
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The British High Court ruled Friday that “fixtures” (a fancy British word for schedules) showing when and where soccer matches are being played can properly be subject to copyright.
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ACTA
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So what is this 60 page document (which you can download here) all about? As ICTSD’s website explains:
“The detentions of generic medicines in transit as a result of the implementation by certain countries of border measures, which go beyond the minimum standards set by the TRIPS Agreement, have attracted international attention. At the same time, such measures are often considered, by these countries, as instrumental in the fight against the circulation of “counterfeit” medicines [The Kat thinks these countries, in so far as they are personified, are concerned with counterfeits, not "counterfeits". The agenda of specific rights owners may be a different matter]. Clearly, the border measures in question raise complex legal and technical issues under the rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO).
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In the aftermath of its success in promoting release of the ACTA draft text, it is interesting to see the European Parliament becoming increasingly vocal about the ACTA negotiations. Canada has remained generally silent on these issues and the EP resolution may help coax out a response.
Functions and Statistics – International Space Station – Up To Us (1/4/2001)
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Posted in News Roundup at 2:36 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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I’m sure that Symbian development on Linux is near, and it will be massively adopted when those tools became part of QtCreator for linux. For those who can’t wait, or think that VIM is the best IDE ever, I hope those tips can help you. =)
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One reason I chose this area was the amazing congruence between the battle between free and closed-source software and the fight to place genomic data in the public domain, for all to use, rather than having it locked up in proprietary databases and enclosed by gene patents. As I like to say, Digital Code of Life is really the same story as Rebel Code, with just a few words changed.
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The Philippines 2010 Election will be using an electronic counting machine for the first time. The Linux-powered machines were provided by Smartmatic and the ROMs are managed by (and supposedly programmed in) Ubuntu.
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Desktop
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1: Assuming they are using Windows
Although this might seem way too obvious, it’s not. The average user has no idea there are even different operating systems to be had. In fact, most average users couldn’t discern Windows XP from Vista from 7 (unless they are certain Windows 7 was “their idea”). Because of this, new users might believe that everything works (or doesn’t work, as the case may be) as it does in Windows. Make your end users aware that they are using a different operating system — and that it works differently.
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I could build my own computer with truly kick ass components and enjoy Linux far more than with Sony’s already aging and relatively puny videogame console. And I could easily swap out older components for newer components, thus making a DIY box last far longer than a silly videogame console.
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Kernel Space
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While EXT4 has regressed a fair amount (as we have talked about in countless articles) since it was deemed stable in the mainline Linux kernel, it’s looking like it’s still able to hold its ground against Windows 7 and NTFS at least with this synthetic disk benchmark. It will be more interesting to see how Apache, SQLite, PostgreSQL, and other real-world applications perform between the two operating systems — especially as that’s where EXT4 has had a challenging experience with recent kernel releases that try to improve data safety at the cost of speed.
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Having renamed Linux kernel 2.6.34-rc5 Sheep on Meth, late last week Linus Torvalds released the sixth pre-release version of Linux 2.6.34. The rate and scope of changes is, as usual at this stage in the development cycle, slowly declining, but, apart from a vague suggestion that 2.6.34 is close to completion, Torvalds has given no indication of when it will be released – expectations are that it will be out in one to three weeks.
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For those looking to run any sort of automated benchmarks on Linux, Mac OS X, OpenSolaris, BSD, or even Windows 7 x64, the beta 2 release of Phoronix Test Suite 2.6 “Lygen” has been released this morning.
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Applications
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When a text editor’s catch phrase is “Scribes: It’s about the experience, not features.” you have to wonder what you are in for. However, Scribes is a very different editor. Scribes is all about making you productive. In fact, the developers of Scribes declare you will become exponentially more productive when using their tool. Why? Because they have implemented only features that focus on productivity. That is why you won’t find a collection of features that, in the grand scheme of productivity, do nothing.
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Instructionals
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Games
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Winch Gate Properties Ltd, the developer and publisher of massively-multiplayer online science-fantasy role playing games, is proud to announce the release of the source code and artistic assets of the popular MMORPG Ryzom to the Free Software Development Community.
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Ryzom, a popular massively multi-player online role-playing game (MMORPG), is being entirely open-sourced and even the artwork is going to be provided freely too. The Ryzom game is being put out under the GNU Affero GPL and the artwork is going under the Creative Commons.
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The Steam Linux client still appears to be heavily in development, but the real breakthrough came on May Day when members within the Phoronix community managed to get the Steam Linux client running up to the point of showing the log-in window. This came after several independent enthusiasts were tracing the calls made by the closed-source content delivery program and making modifications to fix certain issues to get the client running further along.
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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Am no follower of the Pomodoro technique nor do I know its specifics but before you go ahead and try out those multiple Adobe AIR applications or use the GNOME-oriented Workrave, please try out this software called RSIBreak which was built for KDE specifically.
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Ten years ago a simple twin panel file manager was released. It had a few small glitches like showing rrr instead of rwx for permissions, had some compatibility issues with Debian and Solaris, did not save keyboard settings, but it was, in spite of many bugs, sort of usable for everyday work. Ten years ago Krusader started on the path to becoming a top file manager for a large range of operating systems and users.
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I am Mehrdad Momeny, a Persian Free Software enthusiast and the developer of Choqok, currently serving conscription. I am 24 years old and live in Mashhad, Iran, east of Tehran. I’m also one of the developers of Blogilo (KDE Blog client) and MDIC (a simply dictionary application).
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Which is why I feel that those who push for and praise distribution differentiation through distinct visual branding are engaged in an act of sabotage against F/OSS. What makes this tragic is that this is not their intention in the least and the act is, in that sense, completely innocent. The effect, however, is no less for that innocence. The question is: can our eyes be opened?
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For tinkerers, one of the coolest and slickest distros out there is probably Slax. I don’t mention Slax much, because it’s one of those things I have to actively veer away from — it’s too entertaining to modify and adjust and tweak and realign and … and that takes up a godawful amount of my time. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a lot of fun — but I become focused and lose track of events while adding this or subtracting that. One must know one’s limitations.
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KahelOS has much to offer but only for intermediate or advanced users. Beginners should steer clear of it until the install routine is improved significantly. That’s a shame because, once you get past the install, KahelOS can be used quite successfully as a desktop operating system.
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New Releases
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WeakNet Labs has just released the latest version of its highly customized WeakNet Linux, a penetration testing Linux distribution packed with goodies for security experts and sysadmins, but not only. WeakNet Linux IV brings the first release of the custom WeakerThan Linux kernel with built-in support for packet injection and a faster boot time. It also comes with a lot of tools for testing a network’s strength to attacks and other types of security-related testing.
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Other OSes
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NexentaStor 3.0.2 Community Edition is now available. The major change is inclusion of many fixes to OpenSolaris b134 from later releases. These include many ZFS fixes.
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Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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PCLinuxOS 2010 is available with the Enlightenment E-17 Desktop which focuses on providing plenty of eye candy without all of the bloat.
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Ubuntu Variants
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Kubuntu is an official derivative of Ubuntu, which focuses on using the KDE desktop rather than GNOME, and applications built with Qt over GTK. In the past, Kubuntu was new and fresh, and had that extra bit of attention paid to it that made a real difference. In fact, Kubuntu is mostly responsible for my giving up the GNOME desktop and preferring KDE, because Kubuntu implemented it right, though later on quality of this distro fell through the cracks. I tested the latest release on my Dell Latitude D630 laptop, an oldie but still one of my favorite machines.
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To me, Linux is still largely about community, and my experiences with Peppermint and my interactions with the team of individuals responsible for putting it together have done nothing if not reinforce that.
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Android
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Verizon, one of the biggest cell service providers (and not a member of the Alliance, which says something in itself) is dropping the Nexus One. HTC, which is an Alliance member, isn’t sharing the code for its custom Sense UI layer for Android, as would normally be expected in, you know, an open source alliance.
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Sub-notebooks
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Linux Netbook Manglement:
Ubuntu Netbook Remix and Moblin were very responsive, offered great battery life (about 2 hours with everything kicked on, and no noticeable draining of the battery unless viewing video or something similar), were insanely stable, and supported all of the hardware out-of-the-box. My issue with Moblin was in the interface, and the same with UNR. I felt a little bit nerfed on these systems, and both seemed geared toward single tasking.
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Tablets
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What you’re seeing to the left is Eken’s Chinese release of their new 7″ Android based tablet. Why’s that noteworthy, you ask? Because it’s coming to the states via air shipment for about 130$ USD, shipped.
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A new open source project dubbed Guacamole allows users to access a desktop remotely through a Web browser, potentially streamlining the requirements for client support and administration.
Guacamole is a HTML5 and JavaScript (Ajax) VNC viewer, which makes use of a VNC-to-XML proxy server written in Java.
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Just after Adobe released videos showing off the content-aware feature of Photoshop CS5, the GIMP community answered by showing the resynthesizer plugin, which has been available for some time and can do a similar job.
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LOVEFiLM has stuck with open source throughout the company’s growth, but there have been changes along the way.
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I recently had the honor of spending time with Cory Fields, the Public / Business Relations Manger for XBMC. XBMC is the premier free and open source, cross-platform home entertainment system. XBMC was originally created for the first-generation Xbox, but has evolved to now be primarily available for Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows. As proof to their success, the XBMC project has recently been accepted by the SFLC as clients. A perfect way to test XBMC is to download the live CD.
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Browsers
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CelticKane has designed and provided a Javascript test, which I ran both browsers through. The results? Midori beat out Chrome in all but 3 categories, some by huge margins. Chrome scored a 388, Midori a 441. I ran this test a whole bunch more times, closing all the tabs, going over and over. Midori kicked the crap out of Chrome every single time, without fail. If you want to take a look at his test, click that link up there, and I think it pretty well explains itself.
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Whether you want it or not, your Web activities are tracked and analyzed in many different ways. But you don’t have to put up with this, especially if you are using Firefox as your primary browser. There are a few handy Firefox extensions that can beef up your favorite browser’s privacy features. Here are my three personal favorites.
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CMS
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There are a lot of open-source solutions that would be perfect for enterprise use, if only you had a reliable support and training partner to back up your development efforts.
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Government
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The agency tasked with spearheading the White House’s open-government efforts ranked nearly last in a survey of open-government practices, according to a new report.
In an audit of those plans, which all federal agencies released in April, the group OpentheGovernment.org found that the Office of Management and Budget assembled one of the poorest open-government strategies across the entire Obama administration.
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Licensing
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Opera has switched its Dragonfly open source debug tool to an Apache 2.0 license to include a promise that users are protected from patents owned by Opera or any other contributor to the project.
Dragonfly – similar to Mozilla’s Firebug tool – completed its open sourcing in February, when it was moved from Opera servers to BitBucket. It was originally under the BSD license.
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* 60% of respondents use open source in mission-critical environments;
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Programming
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Science
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The recent discovery of an asteroid wrapped in a layer of water ice has revived the possibility that some space rocks would be great potential pit stops – as well as destinations – for manned or robotic exploration missions.
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Security/Aggression
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Iraqi families who believe their children’s deformities are caused by the deployment of the weapons have now begun legal proceedings against the UK Government. They accuse the UK Government of breaching international law, war crimes and failing to intervene to prevent a war crime.
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Naturally I am opposed to the snooping and the creation of yet another enormous state database; but even worse is that it is being done simply to wring more money out of us.
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Environment
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British Petroleum and government disaster-relief agencies are using a toxic chemical to disperse oil in the Gulf of Mexico, even though a better alternative appears to be available.
As the Deepwater Horizon oil spill spreads, BP and the U.S. Coast Guard have conducted tests with Corexit 9500, a chemical designed to break oil slicks into globules that are more quickly consumed by bacteria or sink into the water column before hitting shore.
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Though the investigation into the explosion that sank the Deepwater Horizon site is still in its early stages, drilling experts agree that blame probably lies with flaws in the “cementing” process — that is, plugging holes in the pipeline seal by pumping cement into it from the rig. Halliburton was in charge of cementing for Deepwater Horizon.
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The reclusive Blackwater founder tries to ban journalists and recorders from his speeches in front of friendly audiences. This time he failed.
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Jackye Carroll was walking along the beach that runs outside her home in Pass Christian, Mississippi, early this morning when she came across a curious sight. The sun had just come up and the white sand beach was looking at its most beautiful, but there, just above the gently lapping sea of the Gulf of Mexico was a grey-brown mound of flesh about two to three feet in length.
She put on the gloves that she had brought along in anticipation, and turned the mound over to find that it was a Loggerhead, one of the five threatened species of sea turtle found in this region. The sand around it was being stained red by blood seeping from its nose and underbelly. It was dead.
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Records of fish landings dating back to 1880s show UK trawlers, then fishing closer to port, landed twice as much fish in 1889 as today
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Finance
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Europe may need a broad cure to its debt crisis, but the increasingly awkward pairing of the European Union and the International Monetary Fund makes such action unlikely.
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Liberal Democrats in the Senate, emboldened by a wave of populism, are trying to make financial regulatory legislation far tougher on Wall Street, potentially restricting or breaking up the biggest banks and financial companies.
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The Senate on Wednesday approved two amendments to the financial regulatory bill that both Democrats and Republicans claimed would end the prospect of taxpayer-financed bailouts for companies deemed “too big to fail.”
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It’s past time to break up the big banks. They take on too much risk and endanger the financial system. They benefit from unfair subsidies and the assurance that the government will bail them out in times of trouble. They have far too much political influence and threaten our democracy.
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Angelides is ripping Cox for claiming that the SEC’s law enforcement operations were effective.
“To suggest that the SEC was effective in those enforcement actions, frankly, is ludicrous,” Angelides said.
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World markets plunge over fears that Greece’s economic crisis will spread to other countries despite austerity measures
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In an interesting side note to the much more publicized businesses involving John Paulson, Greece, and whatever else Goldman is currently getting tarred and feathered for, the bank was quietly slapped on the wrist by the SEC for violations related to naked short-selling.
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The former chief executive of the collapsed Icelandic bank Kaupthing has been arrested, authorities say.
Hreidar Mar Sigurdsson is suspected of embezzlement, trading irregularities, and other breaches of banking laws, the special prosecutor’s office has said.
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Outlook It is the dreaded vote of confidence so feared by football managers worldwide. The markets will have shuddered when Jean-Claude Trichet, president of the European Central Bank, said: “Default is, for me, out of question, so it’s as simple as that.” Increasingly few people accept that Greece can escape this crisis without restructuring its debts. Mr Trichet’s attempt at reassurance thus has the opposite effect: his categorical vote of confidence in Greece yesterday simply left him looking out of touch.
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Whoever wins the election must make sorting out the public finances the top priority, the European commission warned on the eve of the poll, as it predicted the British budget deficit would swell this year to become the biggest in the European Union, overtaking even Greece.
[...]
Economists warn that if the next UK government drags its feet in reducing the deficit it could spark a downgrade from one or more of the ratings agencies that have been so swift to reassess Greece and Spain’s creditworthiness. The commission’s forecasts fanned those fears.
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The UK was warned yesterday that it is among the European Union states that faces the risk of contagion from the Greek crisis, with “very real, common threats” to its financial systems.
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The eurozone’s leaders have finally woken up to the fact that, in the Greek debt crisis, they have an existential challenge on their hands. Yet for all the drama of this week’s plea by Angela Merkel for the German parliament to sanction the Greek financial rescue package and yesterday’s vote in Athens on a new round of cuts, the signs are that Europe’s leaders are still not on top of the situation.
The €110bn IMF-eurozone funding package to remove Greece from the international capital markets for three years is better than nothing – but it is still not enough. It is becoming increasingly clear that Greece will need some form of debt restructuring to ease the burden of its borrowings.
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The size of the Berkowitz stake in Goldman Sachs depends upon where you read. StreetInsider.com called it a ‘giant stake’ in the firm. Morningstar.com noted that “details were scarce, including the type of investment taken, the size, and when Berkowitz bought shares…”
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This talk is going on in private, among partners, managing directors and other current and former executives, and there do not seem to be any immediate plans to change management, the newspaper says.
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Chief Executive Officer Lloyd C. Blankfein may take comfort from Wall Street’s legal history: Even after being sued for fraud by regulators and paying multimillion-dollar fines, the biggest financial firms rarely depose their leaders.
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The owners of the bigdough.com.inc institutional investor database sued Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N) on Wednesday, accusing the company of theft of information and copyright infringement.
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Anyone listening to members of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations drill representatives of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. last week had to wonder which of the two teams was the smart money.
It wasn’t so much that subcommittee Chairman Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, wouldn’t let go of the question on the appropriateness of Goldman betting against securities it was selling to clients; or that Goldman Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein repeatedly failed to give the right answer, defined as the answer Levin wanted. What was remarkable was the failure of either party to the Q&A to convey an understanding of the market mechanism at the root of our economy.
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First, the Securities and Exchange Commission files a civil suit, citing fraud over mortgage securities deals. Then, the Senate publicly scrutinizes the firm’s executives, including CEO Lloyd Blankfein, in a heated hearing. Next, the Justice Department and the state of New York announce they are launching a criminal investigation into the the deals. Now, Goldman Sachs has disclosed that six lawsuits have been filed by its own shareholders in the wake of the fraud allegations. And these plaintiffs aren’t limited to big-name investors.
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The upshot of the analysis by McClatchy D.C. Bureau reporter Les Blumenthal is that Murray did take $28,000 from the firm and a total of $515,000 from the securities and investment community, but not in the current election cycle.
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The characters were prepped and suited, the props—thick binders holding embarrassing insider E-mails—were set prominently in place, and the cameras went live as what MSNBC proclaimed to be the “hearing of the century” played out on Capitol Hill. Last Tuesday’s 11-hour showdown between senators and top officials of Wall Street icon Goldman Sachs may not have quite lived up to that billing, but it was dramatic political theater (with a certain expletive bleeped out for TV viewers). And it did produce some quick political fallout: Senate Republicans dropped their opposition to opening debate on the Democrats’ proposed financial regulatory reform legislation.
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General counsel Gregory Palm of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. late Monday made a rare filing with the government, revealing at least six shareholder suits against the company over its dealings in the subprime mortgage market, and one highly critical letter from an institutional shareholder.
The filing made no direct reference to a rumored Justice Department criminal investigation. But it did say the company anticipates that additional shareholder actions “and other litigation may be filed, and regulatory and other investigations and actions commenced, with respect to offerings of collateralized debt obligations.”
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It has been nearly three weeks since the federal government stunned Wall Street by bringing civil fraud charges against Goldman Sachs.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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The bottom line: the patent holders on parts of video compression technology are trying to use their patents to tell us what we can do with content we create using their recording devices.
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Don’t these conditions sound reasonable, conditions for sharing SWIFT financial transaction data with the United States for anti-terrorism purposes…
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On Wednesday, users discovered a glitch that gave them access to supposedly private information in the accounts of their Facebook friends, like chat conversations.
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What’s interesting is how little attention these issues seem to be getting — even though they can have a pretty large impact. And, even though this may seem like legal details, it applies well outside the legal field as well. While it won’t be the key focus, we’re even going to include a short section on these kinds of legal issues in the cloud in our upcoming webinar on cloud security (register here). While this might not seem directly like a security issue, if you’re in charge of keeping data secure, it’s pretty important to know what it means when the feds knock on your door… or the door of the third party “cloud” provider to whom you outsourced your company’s data.
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Should a caregiver ever Google a patient? Would you ask your physician to be a Facebook ‘friend’? Ethical questions abound, and the doctor-patient relationship is at stake.
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A federal judge has struck down a Florida law prohibiting the publication of a police officer’s name, phone number or address, calling the statute an unconstitutional restraint on speech.
The decision leaves Arizona, Colorado and Washington state with similar laws on the books. Florida authorities said Wednesday they were mulling whether to appeal.
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Two U.S. lawmakers have released a draft bill that would require companies that collect personal information from customers to disclose how they collect and share that information, but several privacy and consumer groups said the proposal would legalize current privacy violations online.
The draft legislation, released Tuesday by Representatives Rick Boucher, a Virginia Democrat, and Cliff Stearns, a Florida Republican, would apply to information collected online and off.
The bill would require companies collecting personal information to allow customers to opt out of the collection, and would require companies to get permission before sharing customers’ personal information with third parties.
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The IT department of the Pennsylvania school district accused of spying on students using their school-issued laptops took the brunt of the blame in an independent report released Monday.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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And, if you were an AT&T DSL subscriber, but the company’s records show that nothing improper was done to your line, you can still get money. The proposed settlement says that those who “believe that your DSL Service has not performed at satisfactory speeds” may still be eligible for a “one-time payment of $2.00.” Yes—$2.00.
In addition, AT&T will dole out $3.75 million to charity and has agreed not to contest attorneys’ fees of up to a whopping $11 million.
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In a move that will stoke a battle over the future of the Internet, the federal government plans to propose regulating broadband lines under decades-old rules designed for traditional phone networks.
The decision, by Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski, is likely to trigger a vigorous lobbying battle, arraying big phone and cable companies and their allies on Capitol Hill against Silicon Valley giants and consumer advocates.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Commenting on the results of a new survey which found that most people who download movies, music and TV shows would do so legally if they were available via a reasonably-priced and convenient platform, the boss of the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft says that the industry won’t compete until rampant online piracy is seriously reduced. And so the deadlock continues.
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Copyrights
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Months of public debate over the future of Canadian copyright law were quietly decided earlier this week, when sources say the Prime Minister’s Office reached a verdict over the direction of the next copyright bill. The PMO was forced to make the call after Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore and Industry Minister Tony Clement were unable to reach consensus on the broad framework of a new bill. As I reported last week, Moore has argued for a virtual repeat of Bill C-61, with strong digital locks provisions similar to those found in the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act and a rejection of a flexible fair dealing approach. Consistent with earlier comments on the need for a forward-looking, flexible approach, Clement argued for changes from C-61.
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What a goddamned disaster. The Tories have shown — yet again — their utter contempt for public opinion and Canadian culture and small business when these present an invonvenience to more windfall profits for offshore entertainment giants.
NASA Connect – WFS – Tethers (1/2/2001)
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Softpedia Linux Weekly, Issue 95
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Business Credit Card allows UK Businesses to support open source with every purchase
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Integrator Kyle Chase has begun to experience first-hand the benefits of OPC Unified Architecture (UA). Designed to allow for cross-platform compatibility, OPC UA delivers on the promise of performance and reliability. Chase explained that, although a fan of Linux, until now he could never use it in automation control systems because OPC relied on Microsoft’s Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM).
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BlueWave Security selected XPort Pro, ‘The World’s Smallest Linux Server,’ to future-proof its next-generation security product line with best in class networking capability, and to enable secure, remote access to equipment behind firewalls.
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Desktop
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The only difference with this change is I’m using Linux with Oracle’s VirtualBox as my hypervisor, which in your own response to my column you agree has a superior security architecture and is less vulnerable to attack than Windows.
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Wi-Fi USB adapters bundled with a Linux operating system, key-breaking software and a detailed instruction book are being sold online and at China’s bustling electronics bazaars. The kits, pitched as a way for users to surf the Web for free, have drawn enough buyers and attention that one Chinese auction site, Taobao.com, had to ban their sale last year.
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Tony and Vicki Houlbrooke are Linux evangelists, but it seems the Whakatane couple’s customers are far from sold on the platform.
The company claims to use Linux more extensively than other businesses by using it on desktops and servers. “Our heart is very much in open source software,” says Tony, adding he also promotes Gentoo for servers and Ubuntu for desktops.
[...]
The bulk of the work comes from repairing problems associated with Windows, but Tony is optimistic about the prospects for Linux growth alongside cloud computing; saying the cloud could free customers from being chained to particular operating systems.
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Server
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An “ultra-fast” link between the datacentres of the London Stock Exchange and Turquoise has gone live, gearing the dark pool trading venue for a big-bang Linux migration.
Traders with hosted systems at the LSE are now able to access Turquoise on the free fast link, ahead of Turquoise’s migration to the Millennium Exchange platform, which is Linux and Sun Solaris Unix-based, with Oracle databases. Turquoise currently runs on the Java-based Tradexpress platform from supplier Cinnober.
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Cloud.com describes CloudStack as “an integrated software solution that enables enterprises and service providers to quickly and easily build Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS) clouds.”
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It was initially offered by many companies including major Linux distributors such as Red Hat and Novel, Virtual Iron (bought by Oracle), Oracle and Citrix but there’s been some consolidation in the market. Red Hat and Novell steered away from Xen and committed to rival open-source KVM while Oracle-Sun-Virtual Iron and Citrix stuck with it.
The Linux players still have to support their own operating system distros – the main part of their businesses – so that’s what they wanted to focus on. The development effort around Xen didn’t leverage the development of their OS products as much as they liked. Their mainline Linux development diverged from the hypervisor too much and they wanted to bring that back together.
KVM makes more use of operating system developments than Xen, which is more focused on the hypervisor. So it’s useful for Oracle where the operating system is a secondary business.
If your interest in a pure hypervisor is more important than Linux per se, Xen is more relevant.
But if you’re more interested in Linux, that’s where KVM comes to bear.
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Google
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IBM
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One of IBM’s current goals is to “accelerate the maturation of KVM as a world class hypervisor.” That may not sound like much to the uninitiated but IBM has picked its targets well in the past. Of course it’s now ten years ago that it announced its backing for Linux.
Dan Frye, IBM’s VP of open systems development, commented on IBM’s commitment to help mature KVM during his address to the Linux Collaboration Summit in San Francisco April 14. KVM is the hypervisor first produced by the Israeli company, Qumranet, and added to the Linux kernel in February 2007; Qumranet was acquired by Red Hat in 2008.
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Kernel Space
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Jon Corbet is a highly-recognized contributor to the Linux kernel community. He is a developer and the executive editor of Linux Weekly News (LWN). He is also The Linux Foundation’s chief meteorologist, a role in which he translates kernel-level milestones into an industry outlook for Linux. Corbet has also written extensively on how to work within the Linux kernel development community and has moderated a variety of panels on the topic. Today, he gives us an update on the Linux “weather forecast,” why sharing your code upstream is critical, and the state of virtualization in the kernel.
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Philipp Reisner, CTO, LINBIT notes that LINBIT continues to boost its dedication to open source and High-Availability by adopting Heartbeat: “Apart from DRBD, LINBIT now also maintains another important component of the Linux-HA stack. In the past, LINBIT has repeatedly contributed to other parts of Linux-HA including Pacemaker. One can say that if you are relying on Linux-HA, you are also relying upon LINBIT. If you want to achieve High-Availability in Linux, it’s impossible without LINBIT!”
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Research
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The hierarchical organization of the transcriptional regulatory network of bacterium E. Coli, left, shows a pyramidal structure compared to the Linux call graph, which has many more routines controlling few generic functions at the bottom.
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I suppose the prevailing question is this: Why the hell would anyone compare Linux to a rod-shaped bacterium that is commonly found in the lower intestine of warm-blooded organisms? According to study author and Albert L. Williams Professor of Biomedical Informatics Mark Gerstein, there was little or no alcohol involved in coming up with the idea.
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Applications
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Proprietary
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eScan has recently unveiled its latest version of antivirus solution for the Linux platform.Called eScan for Linux version 3.0, the antivirus software is designed for both Linux desktops and file servers.
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Instructionals
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In a post on his blog, Puppy Linux founder Barry Kauler has announced the release of version 1.0 of Quirky. Kauler says that, while the Quirky Linux distribution is in the same family as Puppy Linux, it’s a “distinct distro in its own right.”
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New Releases
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SystemRescueCd 1.5.3, a live CD/USB Linux distribution based on Gentoo, has been released with updated kernels and a few updated packages. It also includes the NetworkManager GUI network configuration tool to make it easier to set up network connections. This should help a great deal, especially with wireless connections that should be detected automatically and be easier to manage.
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Red Hat Family
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The Mezeo storage-cloud management tools run on Linux and Apache with databases controlling file access stored in PostgreSQL.
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Ubuntu
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Although Launchpad has provided sizes larger than 1 GB on special request earlier, this move ensures that you will get 2 GB from the very beginning. Existing PPAs larger than 2 GB will remain unchanged.
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But even armed with this intelligence, I’ve been pretty cavalier about my exposure to net-based security risks. I run an up-to-date version of a very robust flavor of GNU/Linux called Ubuntu, which has a single, easy-to-use interface for keeping all my apps patched with the latest fixes. My browser, Firefox, is far less prone to serious security vulnerabilities than dogs like Internet Explorer. I use good security technology: my hard-drive and backup are encrypted, I surf through Ipredator (a great and secure anonymizer based in Sweden), and I use GRC’s password generator to create new, strong passwords for every site I visit (I keep these passwords in a text file that is separately encrypted).
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Variants
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The Linux Mint development team have announced a release candidate for what will become Linux Mint version 9, code named “Isadora”. Linux Mint aims to be user friendly and to provide a more complete out-of-the-box experience by including support for DVD playback, Java, plug-ins and various media codecs. It is also the third most popular distribution on DistroWatch.com behind Ubuntu and Fedora.
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DEFT Linux is a highly specialized Linux distribution aimed at forensic computing. It comes with a number of dedicated tools and is a computer investigator’s best friend. The latest release, DEFT Linux 5.1, is a small maintenance update, which brings some newer packages and fixes a couple of bugs. The project’s leader, Stefano Fratepietro, announced the release earlier today and the distro is available for download from the link below.
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The array comes with EMC’s LifeLine software, a management utility based on Linux and designed for cross-platform support of Windows, Mac, Linux and UNIX computers and is HCL certified for use with VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer.
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Granite Bay, Calif. – At ESC San Jose, CodeSourcery announced the release of Sourcery G++ for ARM, ColdFire, IA32, MIPS, Power Architecture, Stellaris and SuperH processors. The latest release features enhancements that boost application performance and make it easier to get started with GNU/Linux application development.
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Business requirements, especially in the context of technology available under an open-source license, can be compelling for both technology managers and corporate executives. This list is not meant to reflect all Android drivers but certainly some compelling reasons for choosing embedded Android.
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Robotics
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While not exactly an embedded processor, the little box can run GNU/Linux and is powered by 12V, making it handy for certain types of robots.
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Robosoft out of Bidart, France is releasing the open source software version for its RobuBOX-Kompaï at-home assistance robot. The mobile platform includes navigation and communication capabilities and is now open to tinkering around by developers trying to extend the potential tasks the robot can perform.
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Willow Garage will offer 11 research teams free use of its PR2 robots for two years. The robots, built with an open-source software platform, can be programmed to do many tasks.
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Intel
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Despite Intel’s encouraging announcement, devices slated to show off Moorestown are not expected to hit production until the second-half of 2010. One such device will be the recently delayed LG GW990, a smartphone that features the “MeeGo” operating system. Also the foundation for Moblin, MeeGo is a heavily optimized Linux variant built specifically to take advantage of the Atom platform.
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Moorestown, like all Atom processors, is based on the x86 architecture, and is expected to run MeeGo or some other Linux variant, meaning devices can be more versatile than current smartphones.
“These devices are handheld computers that can also make calls,” Kedia explained. With a 1.5GHz core speed, they’re fast, too: Intel demonstrated the Linux version of Quake III running unmodified at over 100fps on a Z600-based prototype smartphone. In another demonstration, an animated 3D graphical scene played in one window while a second streamed 1080p video.
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The chipset is set to be compatible with Google Android and Nokia’s MeeGo OS, while support for Moblin Linux based systems and other operating systems look likely to follow.
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Unveiled at CES in Las Vegas, the first mobile phone based on an Intel chip Moorestown will remain finally at the stage of concept. LG will not commercialize GW990 ,the hybrid terminal halfway between a MID and a telephone.
Preview at CES in Las Vegas, then at MWC in Barcelona, the GW990 will not ultimately marketed. We hope that LG will reuse this prototype as a basis for the development of future smartphones.
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Phones
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Thanks to the open sourced nature of Linux, apps created by this major cross-company team up will be made available across various platforms –which means that developers would have a reason to create apps for the systems: because the market is possibly larger than anything else available.
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Azingo says its next-generation Linux platform and engineering services ‘significantly reduce development costs and shorten delivery schedules for chipset and handset manufacturers, integrators, and operators’.
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Nokia
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The Nokia N900, a sophisticated gadget from Nokia is based on the Linux-based Maemo platform. It is also observed to be dubbed as a pocket computer. This advanced gadget is helpful for the users in a number of ways as it comes loaded with multifarious features and technologies
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Android
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2. Source code: Android provides a comprehensive set of source code, specifically created by the Android team, that leverages existing open-source projects to provide a complete and cohesive software stack. There are currently more than 200 separate Git trees in the public Android repository. Not only is there source for the core packages, but many hardware-component vendors have decided to provide source code for specific drivers. This source is also actively managed by a vibrant community. Clearly, this is a benefit for anybody wanting to optimize these components for a specific target.
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Tablets
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The Atom chip also delivers impressive performance and is supposed to render web pages faster than other chips do. The Atom chip is also supposed to support different operating systems, including Intel’s Moblin, Nokia’s MeeGo, and Google’s Android. The first two operating systems mentioned are Linux-based.
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convened recently at Florida International University in Miami. The Federal Health Architecture’s open source development event drew a range of participants, demonstrating the growing interest in CONNECT.
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Open source is the ‘buzz’ word in the IT fraternity these days. From bigwigs like Google or Yahoo! to SMEs, everyone is embracing open source with open arms. The main stumbling block is a severe talent crunch for most players. Shortage of enterprise-ready professionals who can be put on the job from day one and keeping the current resource pool up-to-date on the latest technologies are the twin issues faced by open source adopters. To tide over this problem, Taashee Linux Services, an open source software and training company, has opened a new Red Hat Training facility at Hyderabad, a city that is poised to become the next IT and electronics hub of India.
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The global financial crisis that began a few years ago has had an impact on every industry, organization, government, etc. ICT departments facing this crisis have had to seek low cost alternatives and solutions to ensure business continuity. Because of its unique model, costs-saving and robustness, Open Source software has become the alternative that ICT executives have turned to. Since it is flexible and provides several capabilities, Open Source software has made way into the enterprise so fast that its impact has been felt significantly on economies, especially during the recent financial crisis. Because of this, it has become ubiquitous in the ICT industry.
[...]
Open Source Software provides a multitude of options that can be used in the enterprise. Linux, Apache, MySQL, PostGre, Java, PHP, etc., are a few of the many low cost software options that Open Source provides to enterprises. Proprietary software like Windows, Internet Information Server, SQL, Microsoft.Net are software with prohibitive cost that a nation like Liberia, still struggling to build an ICT sector, should consider implementing after exploring more cost-effective options.
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Events
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Moodlerooms, Inc., trusted provider of managed open-source solutions wrapped around the world’s most widely used open-source learning management system, Moodle, has today announced an upcoming four-part webinar series sponsored by Dell and Intel.
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SaaS
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One of the key thinkers in the free software world is Eben Moglen. He’s been the legal brains behind the most recent iterations of the GNU GPL, but more than that, he’s somebody who has consistently been able to pinpoint and articulate the key issues facing free software for two decades. Recently, he did it again, noting that cloud computing is a huge threat to freedom.
Even if you don’t use social networks like Facebook, your children probably do (or will). And the push to move practically *everything* “into the cloud” means that the issues are not just about personal information: businesses, too, will find that they are essentially placing key competitive information about themselves on somebody else’s computers a long way away, with little real control over what happens to it once it’s “there”.
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Morphlabs is able to provide the EC2 compatible APIs by piggy-backing on the work of two open source projects: Eucalyptus.org, which issues the APIs in code under the GPL, and Open Nebula, which issues them under a BSD-style open source license allowing greater latitude of for-profit implementation, said Damarillo.
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We’ve taken note of the up-and-coming players in open source cloud computing numerous times, as have our buddies over at GigaOM. We’ve also talked extensively with the folks over at Eucalyptus Systems, one of the most promising open source cloud startups.
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CMS
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This conference is a cross between a training session and a user community support group, and this year had over 600 attendees. (@technorin tells me 800.)Moreover, it is only one of 45 already scheduled to be held this year all over the world. Last year, there were 48 all year; they’ll pass that number this year for sure. People gather around WordPress
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The site has also gone open-source with a content management platform called “Drupal”: The Nation explains the far-reaching implications:
“Open source” software code is published and made freely available to the public, enabling anyone to copy, modify and redistribute it without paying or earning royalties or fees. It’s like a song that a musician can sample or remix for free. This creates a community of global web programmers who can share and improve the platform. The idea is rooted in community: One person creates, another person improves, and the knowledge is widely shared. If he understood open source, Glenn Beck might well denounce it as a socialist practice.
The remaining updates are more conventional. The new site introduces verticals — “Politics,” “World,” “Books & Arts,” etc. — to categorize stories and make them easier to find. The site also features tighter integration with Twitter, enhanced multimedia offerings and an improved mobile user experience.
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Buytaert (31) is the main driver behind the wildly successful open source Drupal CMS and the CTO of Acquia.
Place of Birth
Antwerp, Belgium
Education
I’m a techie. I obtained a PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Ghent. Prior to my PhD, I got a Licentiate in Computer Science from the University of Antwerp.
Professional Highlights (What are You Proud of?)
Being invited to the White House (which now runs on Drupal).
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Business
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“Quality. Price. Service. Pick any two,” said a very succinct placard in Damodar’s tailor shop. Back in the days when clothes were tailored, Damodar was one of the best in the business and he definitely knew what he was talking about.
However, in the software industry, the emergence of open source software (OSS) has turned this dynamic on its head. It is no longer about, “Pick any two,” but “Pick ALL three.”
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As we all know measures of success are subjective. I believe commercial open source is proving to be a viable and successful model based on its ability to deliver real value to both customers and investors.
[...]
So we are constantly asked about why we put our software out as open source. The advantages of the commercial open source approach for the vendor, users and business community have become clear and include:
• Users can try the product before buying, eliminating much of the sales activities of ordinary enterprise software
• Lower cost of development through use of other open source components and contributions
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The new OXrate pricing program has five SaaS partner levels based on the providers’ customer base which ranges from less than 1,000 to more than 250,000 customers. Each level offers two options of pricing, flat rate and guaranteed revenue.
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Last week, I got on the phone with HD Moore to ask him how things have been going since he sold Metasploit to Rapid7, sending the open source security world into a frenzy some six months ago. Rapid7 had just released the commercial version, dubbed Metasploit Express, of Moore’s much beloved open source penetration testing tool.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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“SnapScout and SnapScout Reports are produced and developed by MiniTru, LLC. Created in 2008 by George Parsons and Winston O’Brien, MiniTru LLC leverages modern technology to address the timeless threats to democracy and freedom. Using a transparent, open source approach — all applications will eventually be released under a GNU license, and all content is copyrighted via Creative Commons — we empower real Americans to connect and share the mini-truths we can’t always say out loud, but keep America the greatest country in the world.”
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Releases
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A new open source project, OpenDLP, aims to detect data loss in organisations by automated scanning for potentially confidential information. The system consists of a management server, written in Perl, and an agent, written in C, which is deployed to users’ systems to carry out the scanning.
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Government
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V3.co.uk: How does the Liberal Democrat party plan to increase open-source take-up in the sector?
John Thurso: The Labour government spends £16bn a year on IT, but has a very poor record on IT procurement and has regularly been criticised by the National Audit Office. The Liberal Democrats will improve government IT procurement, investigating the potential of different approaches such as cloud computing and open-source software.
Does the party believe that open-source is a better alternative to proprietary software, and if so why?
Open-source software can be cheaper than proprietary or bespoke software and we believe that government should consider open-source solutions in all IT procurement. The Liberal Democrats will conduct a full review of IT procurement procedures, and work with industry to improve cross-government working practices and save money.
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Licensing
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These are just a few of the many open source tools that help with compliance. I also like RANCID for network device configuration management and Nagios for IT infrastructure monitoring. Don’t forget about the many IT policy resources, such as the templates available from SANS.
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Openness
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The growth of the internet, with all the associated changes it has brought to our lives, has been driven in large part by freely available, non-proprietary technology. The ethos of sharing, formalised by carefully worded open source licenses, has allowed inter-connectedness to flourish in ways that we once never dreamed of. Could adopting a similar approach for carbon-mitigating technologies have the same effect in tackling climate change?
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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ALTHOUGH THERE HAVE BEEN RUMOURS that the FCC was going to walk away from reclassifying Internet access as a telecommunications service, it looks like that strategy will go ahead.
By classifying Internet service providers (ISPs) as telecommunications services, the FCC can make them subject to tougher net neutrality rules. The telcos will go into a spin over this plan and have already been spending shedloads on lobbyists to prevent it from happening. They are terrified that net neutrality rules will stop them from throttling traffic or selling higher quality service to some content providers, and could mean that they will have to spend money to upgrade the bandwidth on their networks. It might also mean that they will not be able to charge people extra to get the bandwidth they promised.
NASA Connect – Crash – Graphs and NASA Langley (1/10/2000)
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