IRC Proceedings: May 19th, 2013
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IRC Proceedings: May 20th, 2013
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IRC Proceedings: May 21st, 2013
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IRC Proceedings: May 22nd, 2013
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IRC Proceedings: May 23rd, 2013
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IRC Proceedings: May 24th, 2013
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IRC Proceedings: May 25th, 2013
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Some desktops are featured because of their widgets, while others because they’re full of useful data. This week’s featured desktop, from Lifehacker Chookstar, gets the nod because it’s simple, elegant, and uses smart GNOME tweaking to bring everything together neatly.
Tis the season for college graduations, and that means there are countless fresh grads out there looking for their first real, professional jobs.
Those in IT would be hard-pressed to come up with a better area to focus on than Linux, which is consistently shown to offer higher salaries and more opportunities than do other parts of IT. There’s tremendous demand for Linux skills today, so those who possess them are in a nice position as they enter the job market.
Last week I had announced in the LXer forums that I would be a contributing author to Linux Advocates. That was followed by a post on the site announcing that I would be joining their team. I was honestly excited about this. I felt that writing for Linux Advocates would add credibility to my stories and bring me back some of the wider audience I had when I wrote for O’Reilly Media. The additional exposure would help me market my consulting business which brings Linux and FOSS solutions to businesses and organizations looking to reduce IT costs and enhance the reliability, stability and security of their IT infrastructure.
Today it became clear that I wouldn’t be writing for Linux Advocates after all. I’ve learned a lot in the past week and I’ve come to the conclusion that this is for the best.
First, a number of prominent writers and developers in the Linux community tried to get me to reconsider. The big issue for them was what they saw as heavy handed moderation by Dietrich Schmitz, including banning a number of them from the site entirely. I’ve argued that website owners have the right to moderate and control the content on their sites. I’ve made clear that such editorial control is most definitely not censorship as some have claimed. The dispute between Mr. Schmitz and those who felt they were unfairly treated, including several former Linux Advocates writers, spilled over into five different threads in the LXer forums and several Google+ pages and included a great deal of rather heated language.
[...]
Mr. Schmitz’ response was direct and to the point. If I can’t accommodate how he chooses to run his site then I should go elsewhere. Once again, he was getting writing from me on a voluntary basis on a website were he is currently begging for money to make ends meet. This is a Linux advocacy site. You’d think he’d be the one to accommodate an aversion to proprietary tools that aren’t in any way necessary for him to publish my writing. I guess not.
So.. no, sorry, Mr. Schmitz, I won’t be accommodating you. I’ll find ways to bring traffic to my blog which don’t require sacrificing my security, privacy or principles. I still have other outlets who would like me to write for them as well.
Welcome to the club of refugees from some tyrant on an ego-trip, Caitlyn. You and others might be more comfortable at GNU/Linux Advocates.
While IDC had counted GNU/Linux as 3% of desktop PCs back around 2003, StatCounter today showed that level on USA daily webstats:
LTSI Kernel Maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the latest version of LTSI Kernel (3.0.79-LTSI and 3.4.46-LTSI) on May 21.
The open-source AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver is beginning to work when it comes to running simple OpenCL programs on the Radeon HD 7000 series graphics cards.
The open-source AMD OpenCL support is in even worse shape than the lacking and not-always-fast OpenGL support, but in the past few months for the HD 5000/6000 series hardware with the R600g driver it’s begun to work for simple and small OpenCL programs, including open-source Bit Coin mining. Now the RadeonSI Gallium3D OpenCL support is beginning to run small OpenCL exercises too, and the ability to run “bfgminer” for those into open-source currency mining.
Following a period in the relative wilderness, the Tracktion DAW got new ownership and a welcome version 4 update for PC and Mac earlier this year.
I found clcal by accident the other day, while trying to track down something called lcal, which may or may not exist as an independent project.
Looking to woo more app publishers to its Android Appstore and away from Google Play, Amazon has announced new tools that allow developers to track user engagement with their apps.
The new Engagement Reports announced on Friday provide a variety of metrics, including daily and monthly average revenue per device, average revenue per paid user for in-app purchases, user retention rates, number of active devices and sessions, and daily app installs and uninstalls.
Wine 1.5.31 has been released as the latest bi-weekly development milestone.
Wine 1.5.31 isn’t too exciting for Linux users with most of the noted work being on the Mac OS X support. However, Wine 1.5.31 does update its built-in Gecko rendering engine to what’s found in Mozilla Firefox 21.
Tripwire the developers behind Killing Floor had an email chat with me recently about the possibilities of Red Orchestra 2 and Rising Storm coming to Linux and why it currently won’t. It gives us a small bit of info on Unreal Engine 2+3.
Even though there are many top-quality open source games available for Linux, the operating system is still vastly underrated as a gaming platform. Encouragingly, we have seen developers of some of the most popular commercial gaming titles embrace Linux. The welcoming hand that Valve has extended, developing a Linux native version of their Steam client and porting their back catalogue, should accelerate takeup of Linux as a real gaming platform. But it is important that Linux developers do not neglect what has made it a success; high quality open source software.
You may be a bit confused as to what Calligra Suite is, in fact you may not have ever even heard of it before now. Essentially Calligra Suite is a fork of the KOffice project from back in 2010 and has now become the de facto group of KDE publishing/office applications, as KOffice isn’t really being developed any more. It consists of the following applications:
This year we also have a KDE Paris Dinner on Tuesday evening, at 21h. Location has not been defined but it will be in Paris (of course).
Linpus Lite is a desktop distribution published by Linpus Technologies, Inc., a Linux software solutions provider headquartered in Taiwan. It is based on Fedora, but with a focus towards modern hardware and mobile computing.
The latest edition, Linpus Lite 1.9, was released back in early February of this year, and was updated in the first week of this month. The last edition before this latest round of releases, was Linpus Lite 1.7, which was released in March of 2012, and reviewed here. This article presents a detailed review of this latest release, based on test installations on real hardware and in a virtual environment.
For technology demos and testing, the “first true Wayland LiveCD” has been released that can start Wayland directly without depending upon an X.Org environment.
For those that still hold some nostalgia for Mandriva/Mandrake, there’s good news. The OpenMandriva project was able to obtain a lot of the files before their server was scrapped. An archive has been set up by the OpenMandriva gang for all to share.
The distro formerly known as Cinnarch gets a new name and a new direction, but keeps its Arch Linux core
Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced a lineup of keynote speakers featuring executive thought leaders from Accenture, Cisco, HP, IBM and Intel for the ninth annual Red Hat Summit, to be held June 11-14, 2013 in Boston. Red Hat Summit brings together a diverse group of senior business and technical leaders to learn, network and experience open source and to discuss the innovative technologies and best practices organizations are applying to drive innovation and business.
OpenStack has hundreds of backers. But the Red Hat OpenStack distribution, still under development, could emerge as the preferred open source platform for public and private clouds. Here’s why.
Fresh on the heels of his talk on achieving total data center victory at Collaboration Summit in April, John Mark Walker, Gluster community leader at Red Hat will show us how to get there at the Gluster Workshop at LinuxCon Japan on Friday, May 31 in Tokyo.
The Debian Project today is mourning the loss of legendary Linux developer Ray Dassen. Ray Dassen served the Linux community and Debian at large for nearly all of Debian’s life, having joined the project in the very beginning working hand-in-hand while the project’s founder, Ian Murdock.
In an interview, community manager Jono Bacon reveals strength — and risk — of Canonical’s bold challenge to Google and Apple
For those people who have made the switch to a laptop as their primary system, Linux has presented a bit of a problem. Some integrated devices have less than stellar support and even the proprietary binary graphics drivers have left something to be desired. Worse, modern laptops that contain the ‘Optimus’ technology (multiple GPU configurations – NVidia and Intel) either had to be used in one mode or the other (one or the other X Server, but not both). Enter the ‘bumblebee’ project. This project allows you to compile support onto your system to allow you to designate certain applications to use the discrete driver (NVidia) for better video/game performance but did not address the ability to use both video cards for desktop display of multiple monitors. Today, we will address that shortcoming.
Canonical’s Kevin Gunn shared a status update for the advancements made by their team this week on the Mir Display Server and next-generation Unity 8 interface.
Pinguy OS 13.04 (based on Ubuntu 13.04) beta has been released recently, this being basically the final 13.04 version because Pinguy has decided to keep the 6 month releases as betas and only the LTS will be considered stable.
If you can’t communicate to your BBB from Browser, Use Google Chrome Browser. There is Some Problem with Firefox. Never use Internet Explorer.
Days after releasing version 2.1 of the Linux-based Tizen mobile operating system, Samsung confirmed an upcoming GT-I8805 Tizen smartphone, and Intel demonstrated a laptop running Tizen 3.0 in a GNOME shell. Other developments around this week’s Tizen Developers Conference include a Tizen App Challenge and 2013 phone launch promises from NTT DoCoMo and Orange.
This guest column by BeagleBoard.org co-founder Jason Kridner introduces the BeagleBone Black’s cutting-edge Linux 3.8 kernel, up from the original BeagleBone’s 3.2 kernel. The new kernel incorporates a new Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) display driver architecture, as well as full support for the Device Tree data structure introduced in Linux 3.7 in order to streamline ARM Linux development and hardware support.
Epiq Solutions announced a handheld software defined radio (SDR) device with an RF transceiver that tunes from 300MHz to 3.8GHz, plus a built-in 1PPS GPS. The Matchstiq Z1 is built around a Linux-ready iVeia Atlas-I-Z7e computer-on-module equipped with a Xilinx Zynq Z-7020 SoC, which integrates dual ARM Cortex-A9 cores along with FPGA circuitry.
For mobile app creators in the Tizen community, blinkx has developed an open source HTML5 video player to help developers incorporate a fully functional video player into their applications. The lightweight and easy-to-use code allows developers to build a single- or multi-video player experience with their own videos in multiple formats. As a result, creators of new and existing Tizen apps will be able to easily incorporate a video player with customisable playlists and configurable settings.
Tizen is a Linux-based operating system that’s backed by Samsung and which is expected to ship on Samsung smartphones this year. But the OS isn’t just for mobile devices like phones and tablets.
Tizen, the mobile operating system that has yet to see a device launched with it, is already widening its reach to laptops. Tizen, a Linux Foundation project with Intel and Samsung collaborating on development, is due to appear on smartphones in the latter part of the year with Tizen 2.1, which uses a Linux base layer with a user interface built using Enlightenment libraries to run HTML5-based apps. At the Tizen Developers Conference held this week though, Intel showed an early version of what will become part of Tizen 3.0 later in the year. Tizen Experts recorded a video of the Intel Tizen variant running on an i7 Ultrabook.
ou could be forgiven for thinking there’s not much going on with Tizen, the Linux Foundation’s open source mobile OS. It’s been two years since the project was launched and there still are no Tizen devices on the market. But that’s about to change – and there has been a lot happening behind the scenes, as well.
HTC may follow Samsung’s lead and produce a “Google Edition” of its latest flagship smartphone running stock Android. According to sources that spoke to Russell Holly at Geek, work on a version of the HTC One without its Sense software customizations is underway, with a US launch said to be “imminent.” Holly previously leaked accurate information on the Galaxy S4 Google Edition ahead of its announcement at the I/O conference.
How does Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) CEO Meg Whitman feel about Windows 8 vs. emerging Google Android and Chrome OS tablet and notebook alternatives? The answers emerged indirectly amid HP’s Q2 2013 earnings call yesterday.
The open source community offers a wide array of options to assist you, whether you’re tracking your personal bank accounts, managing your small business, setting up an online shop or monitoring finances for a large enterprise.
Like much of the software industry, financial software is in the midst of great change. While many consumers and companies still use traditional software that they have installed on their PCs and/or servers, many are turning to cloud-based solutions. In addition, many users are looking for solutions that include mobile capabilities.
At the time of its creation, I had thought that it would competitive with Sourceforge (which it was), but as it turns out Sourceforge will now get the last laugh.
Google has released a beta version of Chrome 28 that introduces a number of new developer features and performance improvements. The increased page rendering speed is, Google says, due to a new threaded HTML parser that is part of its WebKit fork Blink. The company claims the new parser improves page loading times by ten per cent, mostly through pipelining DOM content. The parser also has to stop less during parsing which also reduces load time.
If you have upgraded the Firefox web browser to version 21, the most recent version at the time of writing, you may have noticed that it is missing the All Tabs preview feature that was included in previous versions of the browser.
There are lots of people in the U.S. gearing up for a long Memorial Day weekend, and if you happen to have extra time on your hands this weekend you may want to consider entering Mozilla’s Firefox Flicks contest. It’s a global video contest designed to give budding filmmakers the opportunity to create and submit short videos about letting people discover “the power of the web on mobile devices.” (We covered it when it launched.)
You may remember that back on March 22, Christine Hall penned an article here on FOSS Force concerning worries expressed by Alex Limi, a project design strategist at Mozilla, over configuration issues with Firefox. It seems that Mr. Limi expressed concerns on his blog over the fact that was possible for a user to “render the browser unusable to most people, right in the main settings.”
Mention the words “open source” to IT pros interested in adopting cloud computing, and their ears likely will perk up. Open source software offers a solution to the vendor lock-in concerns many enterprises have with committing to a cloud platform. And cloud platforms like the OpenStack Foundation, which fosters ‘coopitition’ among seeming competitors in the hot cloud computing market, give companies the option to build interoperable open source clouds. But what options do enterprises have when seeking open source PaaS?
Big Data is becoming a big deal beyond the United States, and it’s time for the international channel to pay attention. The latest evidence: DataStax, which provides enterprise database management services based on open-source software. The company is making an aggressive push into the European market in what may be the first move toward a greater presence throughout the EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) region as a whole.
OpenStack is a cloud software stack designed to run on commodity hardware, such as x86 and ARM. It has no proprietary hardware or software requirements, and it integrates legacy systems and third-party products. In other words you can adopt it into your existing tech infrastructure without disruption.
San Francisco-based company Cloudscaling is the latest small company focused on the open source OpenStack cloud computing platform to score some meaningful venture capital. The company has raised $10 million in Series B funding from partners including Trinity Ventures, Juniper Networks and Seagate. That’s some pretty solid backing, and Cloudscaling–which provides infrastructure-as-a-service support–is just the latest Northern California company to get solid funding.
From the mind of a 19-year-old to the world’s most popular content management system (CMS) — WordPress has done some serious growing up in 10 years. Used by major publishing houses such as CNN and the New York Times and influential blogs like TechCrunch, the CMS has making publishing easy for a decade.
Not everyone has a computer. And, not all schools have access to the types of technology that are second nature to many of us at our workplace. It is also true that many people in the general public don’t know about open source and the free alternatives that are available to them, like LibreOffice instead of Micrsoft Word.
The Kramden Institute is doing something about it by refurbishing computers and installing Ubermix on them, which is an open source operating system preloaded with over 60 educational, science, and learning applications for students.
What if I told you could work on open source projects full-time and make a living from that? You would get to do what you love and make money for it. That’s what Chad Whitacre is looking to accomplish with Gittip. The site, which uses the tag line: inspiring generosity, is doing just that. With over 1,110 active community members on Gittip in under a year, they are currently exchanging over $3,000 every week. While it’s not necessarily at the point where you would be able to quit your job and work on open source projects full-time, the site has been continually growing.
Josh Smith has announced the initial launch of the PC-BSD hardware store. This resource is meant to make it easier to find hardware that has been tested to work on PC-BSD.
I’ve just uploaded GNUBatch 1.8
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the guest blogger and those providing comments are theirs alone and do not reflect the opinions profileof the Sunlight Foundation or any employee thereof. Sunlight Foundation is not responsible for the accuracy of any of the information within the guest blog.
Estrin talks about how this is a big departure from traditional medical research. “Instead of relying on federal grants or venture capital, we want to bring rapid prototyping to this field, innovating on modular software methods so that clinicians can borrow, blend and adapt mobile tools to transform chronic disease management.”
Will Cornell Tech work at reinventing CS grad school? Will Estrin’s Open mHealth project bring open source down to the cellular level? It is certainly worth watching both efforts to see her progress.
I got bitten at camp this weekend, but indifference would have been the only relevant repellant and thankfully, I’m allergic to that. Here’s what I learned as a first-time camper.
The release of LLVM 3.3 along with its sub-projects like the Clang C/C++ compiler front-end and Compiler-RT is imminent. A second release candidate was posted just prior to the weekend to usher in some last minute testing.
Facebook’s popularity is slumping in the UK as users become fed up with being bombarded with advertising, a YouGov survey has revealed.
In a report examining social media use among web-savvy Brits, the market research firm found a 9 per cent drop in Facebook usage since April 2012.
No, I’m not referring to the army of ‘Bielbers’ with posters of the singer hanging in their bedroom. I mean ‘bots’ or fake Twitter accounts. Of the international pop sensation’s 37.3 million followers on Twitter, 53% are so called ‘bots’. And he’s not alone. Recent news has exposed many celebrities with a significant percentage of their Twitter followers coming from inactive or automated accounts. This doesn’t stem solely from Hollywood either. Supposedly, President Obama’s Twitter audience is made up of around 70% inactive or fake profiles, totaling over 21 million. That’s more than the population of the state of New York (which has 29 electoral votes!).
The Scripps Howard News Service recently reported on a data leak it had found which exposed the sensitive information of up to 170,000 phone company customers who had applied for discounted phone lines. But instead of a statement from the data’s owners, the authors got a cease and desist.
Google will update its certificate infrastructure and has, as a precaution, warned of potential problems. Starting in August, the company will replace its SSL certificates to implement new, longer keys. The change will also affect the root certificate that Google uses to sign all its own certificates.
We could believe that Goldman Sachs is now taking on new ethical standards if they even mentioned how they would change the old unethical standards used before the financial crisis. When a bank does not have to even admit wrongdoing, why in the world would they stop doing wrong ? The whole effort by Goldman is really a public relations exercise that investors will probably believe but we don’t.
Truly disgraceful behaviour by the Swiss authorities.
I was not among those who believed the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision would open the floodgates of corporate money to influence elections and public policy. While the decision enables corporations to call for the election or defeat of federal candidates, those expenditures have to be reported and few corporations will take the risk of losing customers by getting involved in politics so publically.
Police fired volleys of rubber bullets at striking South African miners at a mine owned by Lanxess Chrome Mining Ltd on Tuesday, near the city of Rustenburg. Some 500 miners had assembled at daybreak, taking action without union approval. At least 10 miners were hospitalized, and police forces subsequently took control of the mine.
This article was first published by PRwatch.org on December 31, 2012, while we were writing our report “Dissent or Terror: How the Nation’s Counter Terrorism Apparatus, in Partnership with Corporate America, Turned on Occupy Wall Street,” published by DBA Press and the Center for Media and Democracy in May 2013. We re-release it now as part of a PRwatch series on the new report.
Summary: Another attack on GNU/Linux results in payment to trolls and silence from Red Hat, which keeps the FOSS community in the dark
ACCORDING TO this concise and cryptic press release of Acacia, “Acacia Research Corporation (Nasdaq: ACTG) announced today that its subsidiary, Business Process Modeling Solutions LLC, has entered into a settlement and license agreement with Red Hat, Inc. This agreement resolves patent litigation that was pending in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas.”
No word from Red Hat. Late on Friday it was just dropped onto the wires, as before. Red Hat’s situation with Acacia was covered here before [1, 2, 3] and the problem here is the same. Red Hat offers no transparency and continues to feed a troll. The main problem is not the latter, but Red Hat chooses its self interest over the interests of FOSS by not challenging the troll.
Hopefully, with the looming arrival of new legislation, trolls will become easier to beat. A new report explains what the ‘Patent Abuse Reduction Act’ is about by stating: “The legislation, if passed, will make it hard for patent trolls to persist with their tactics of using corporate chimeras to launch multiple instances of litigation against the same target. It will also force trolls to pay all parties’ costs if they lose a patent case.
“Response to the bill has been positive. Rackspace, also based in Texas, has declared the Bill a fine idea and naming it “a very powerful weapon” in the fight against trolls.
“The Internet Association also likes the Bill, calling it “a valuable contribution to the ongoing discussion about how best to put an end to abusive patent litigation practices and to promote, rather than burden, real innovation in today’s Internet economy.””
Trolls, however, are not the only problem. Consider what Microsoft’s deal with Novell accomplished in order to keep spreading SUSE patent tax to more and more places at the expense of Red Hat. Consider the patent attacks of Microsoft and Apple on Android, too. Apple started suing Linux-based device makers about three years ago, starting with HTC. Since then Apple has been trying to ban or tax sales of such devices and now that a Samsung device is breaking all records Apple steps in with some patents again. To quote Pamela Jones’ coverage of this: “The judge in Apple v. Samsung II asked the parties to narrow their claims, so they did but now Apple would like to add more claims [PDF], specifically to include the Galaxy S4. Samsung just sold 10 million S4s in less than a month, and Apple’s hair must be on fire.
“Would you like to know what it thinks of all you 10 million users of the new Samsung Galaxy S4 phone? It thinks you are infringing their stupid patents too, meaning, I would imagine, that if it is successful in this case, it will ask for an injunction against the phones you want and bought.
“I’ll show you what this stupid case is all about and what Apple thinks about you for buying the phone you want to buy and use, which Apple would like to make illegal to buy and use in the US by means of some infuriating software method patents. If you don’t see why software shouldn’t be patentable subject matter after watching Apple go for Samsung’s throat with these patents, I give up.”
The problem is, inherently, patents. It’s not patent trolls in isolation. Apple and Microsoft are in these fights together and their combined effort is a proprietary mess. Once Free software leapfrogged them, as expected, they decided to use patents, their backup/insurance plan. Acacia is one of Microsoft’s patent proxies of choice by some people’s assessment. There is former Microsoft staff there. █
Summary: Not only is XBox eliminating the notion of owning and controlling one’s console; new XBox paradigm aims to reduce one’s control over purchased games, reducing buyers to temporary, transient consumers
There is some PR campaign coordinated by Microsoft’s PR agencies which portrays Microsoft’s ‘XBox One’ as an innovative thing even though it kind of imitates the Linux-powered Ouya, minus freedom aspects. There is already some backlash associated with revelations about licensing, harming the already-damaged XBox brand. “For many gamers’” says the British press, “swapping among friends is a free and legal way of experiencing more games for less hard-earned cash. But for Xbox users, that may be all about to change.”
The same trend can be seen amid the rise of DRM-laden eBooks, which changes the notion of ownership even further. It take away from the customers’ rights that we took for granted. Previously, it was evident that XBox machines could only ever be rented and now the same applies to games. It’s also a renting paradigm, but people pay the full price as though they buy games. They don’t.
Microsoft helps turn technology against users, yet again. In Germany, based on this new report, this would result in a lawsuit. Maybe it’s time for a lawsuit against Microsoft, not Steam. █
LinkSmart’s audience and link management platform for publishers was built with big data at its core. So when management decided to migrate the cloud-based application to their own hardware, there was no question it would be completely powered by Linux.
Linux-based infrastructure allows the 3-year-old startup to cut costs, both by avoiding the licensing fees of proprietary systems and by tapping the community’s collective knowledge base instead of paying for expensive support contracts, said CTO Manny Puentes.
LinkSmart’s audience and link management platform for publishers was built with big data at its core. So when management decided to migrate the cloud-based application to their own hardware, there was no question it would be completely powered by Linux.
Linux-based infrastructure allows the 3-year-old startup to cut costs, both by avoiding the licensing fees of proprietary systems and by tapping the community’s collective knowledge base instead of paying for expensive support contracts, said CTO Manny Puentes.
If I was the type to have heroes, Richard Stallman would be near the top of my list, not far below John Lennon and Abbie Hoffman, and way out ahead of Tom Hayden or the several-times-over reinvented Bob Dylan, though the freewheeling Bob Dylan who took it down Highway 61 will always be near the top of the list.
Little by little, OEMs are coming to the realization that if they don’t sell FLOSS, someone else will do it. Being an M$-only OEM is no longer good business.
GNU/Linux had a huge double spike, doubling ~April 15 and again on May 18. What’s with that? It’s bigger than possible with most organizations. Could it possibly be Dell’s selling Ubuntu GNU/Linux? How could that shift display itself overnight like that?
Last month we held the 7th Annual Collaboration Summit and as usual, there was a lot of interest in The Yocto Project. For those who don’t know, The Yocto Project provides a multitude of templates, tools and specific methods you can follow that make it easier than ever to create a custom Linux-based system for a product, regardless of the hardware architecture (read highlights of the new Yocto release here).
A month ago, Amanda McPherson and Greg Kroah-Hartman from the Linux Foundation asked me to coordinate an internship program aimed at getting more women to participate in the Linux kernel. In order to be considered for an internship, the applicants need to submit patches to the Linux kernel, and get them accepted.
It was just last month that there was an X.Org Server security issue dealing with hot-plugging of input devices. Being announced today is a new round of security problems, this time multiple issues dealing with X.Org client libraries.
NVIDIA released today the 319.23 Linux graphics driver, which supports the just-released GeForce GTX 780 graphics card. There’s also a couple of other changes to this certified Linux driver update, including 4K HDMI support.
Around this time every year, a ton of action-packed movies hits the cinema that helps make summer taste just a little bit sweeter. This year, it’s Fast & Furious 6 that’s on my radar. The speed… the fun, the hot women. Actually, that reminds me of something: a new top-end graphics card, much like NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 780, priced at $649.
CCE, a leader in advanced interoperability technology, announced that in response to a growing demand from customers in the CAE space, it has successfully completed porting of its 3D CAD interoperability technology to Linux platforms.
Rktcr (“rocket car”) is a physics-based action-platformer-turned-puzzle-platformer; that is, it’s an action game meant to be played thoughtfully at much slower than real-time. Rktcr is played in a side-view world consisting of zones linked by portals.
Reptile games have announced via twitter that their game Megabyte punch will be available on Linux as well as Mac and Windows. Looking at the video it reminds me of super smash bros in multiplayer mode which is only a good thing. Megabyte punch is also a single player platformer searching for upgrades to battle other creatures.
Welcome to another edition of The Cheapskate’s Corner. This time with significantly less stuff to tell you, as many of last week’s bundles have already ended and there’re no new ones to occupy their place. Let’s recap what happened in the last seven days, first.
Tripwire the developers behind Killing Floor had an email chat with me recently about the possibilities of Red Orchestra 2 and Rising Storm coming to Linux and why they currently won’t. It gives us a small bit of info on Unreal Engine 2+3.
Digia has announced a new commercial endeavour that pairs a lightweight Qt stack atop an Android kernel/base operating system.
Boot To Qt is Digia’s new solution for developing “slick user interfaces on embedded devices.” This new stack consists of a UI component driven by thr Qt Framework, ready-made developer images, full Qt Creator integration, and a VirtualBox-based simulator. Android is being used as the base layer to the OS.
For those that didn’t hear already, KDE 4.11 will be the last Plasma Workspaces feature release in the KDE4 series and this upcoming version will be maintained for a period of two years.
I have done some improvements in the plugins: python_console_ipython, python_autocomplete, python_utils, js_utils, xml_pretty and django_utils. These plugins I added a month and a half ago (except python_console_ipython) to the kate repository. I have done two improvements and a new feature:
KDE developer and Plasma team leader Aaron Seigo has announced that version 4.11 of Plasma Workspaces will be a long term support (LTS) release. Seigo says the developers are close to a feature freeze for the next version of KDE’s desktop shell and that, once Plasma Workspaces 4.11 is released, there will be no more feature developments in this branch. However, as part of their stabilisation releases, the developers will provide bug fixes and translation updates for two years after the 4.11 release.
A recent poll on Hacker News asking about Linux distributions of choice got me thinking, what can can we learn from a bigger picture of the distro landscape than a single HN poll? I went looking around and dug up a couple of other sources of information — Linux Journal’s annual reader’s choice awards, and data from Google Trends.
What makes these three particular choices interesting is that they span a broad swathe of user types, from the hacker (Hacker News) to the enthusiast (Linux Journal) to the “average” Linux user (Google). That means we can learn from the trends across these three user types — considering which communities may be more predictive or more technical vs which represent broader adoption today.
Pre-release version of Zorin OS 7 Core available for testing, the RC including Linux Kernel 3.8 and an overhauled graphical interface
Unfortunately, while Pidora looks to be a very interesting distribution for the Raspberry Pi, with many features taking advantage of the board’s unique properties, the Fedora team made one critical error during its development: they forgot to Google their intended name.
As it turns out, Pidora has a rather embarrassing meaning to some members of the community: in Russian, “pidora” is a derogatory word for a male homosexual. It’s closest translation into English would be “faggot”.
Fedora and the Seneca Centre for Development of Open Technology released an optimized Fedora 18 Remix for the Raspberry Pi, and unveiled a new name for the remix. “Pidora 18,” based on a new build of Fedora optimized for ARMv6, features speedier performance and includes packages from the Fedora 18 package set, says the Pidora project team.
You can now add another Linux distro to the list that will run on the Raspberry Pi. The core distro for the small device is the Debian based Raspian and there is also an Arch based Linux for the Pi too.
As the diminutive $25/$35 Linux-based Raspberry Pi devices continue to contribute to imaginative applications, they’re also emerging as shining examples of new ways Linux can be deployed. Tinkerers have already put all flavors of Linux on the devices, and now, Fedora and the Seneca Centre for Development of Open Technology (CDOT) have announced the release of Pidora 18, a custom version of Fedora specifically for the Raspberry Pi. Here is more on it.
The Fedora Project has been supporting Raspberry Pi, the diminutive $35 computer, for some time. Today they’re making the Pidora “remix” of the core Fedora distribution available. Like the Raspbian distribution of Debian, Pidora is compiled specifically to take advantage of the hardware already built into the Raspberry Pi.
The Raspberry Pi mini-computer is to be served with new “Pidora” build of Fedora packaged for ARMv6 architecture.
NOTE: Fedora is a free and open source Linux-based operating system sponsored by Red Hat — it is typically classed as the second-most commonly used Linux distribution, after Ubuntu.
That is where my time with Korora 18 “Flo” KDE ended. The odd error message in the installation of Skype may cause other people to reconsider entirely, which is why I can almost but not quite recommend Korora for newbies. Given the popularity of Skype and given that the helper package in the repositories conflicts with a core system package (making it useless now), it might be good if developers in that community could come together to write a more current tutorial on how to deal with Skype. Also, the stunted nature of Mupen64Plus means I wouldn’t use this for myself. But really, it only needs a tiny bit more work before I can comfortably recommend this.
You can get it here.
It is surprising to most people who understand Linux and Unix that you are allowed to Hard Link to any file on the OS as long as it is on the same file system.
With its Distrowatch ranking falling faster than Man Utd now that Sir Alex Ferguson has departed, Ubuntu is no longer the all-conquering force that it was. So what’s happened? Has it, in fact, lost it, or is there a more subtle game afoot? We answer this conundrum (sort of) in the latest Linux Format.
Ubuntu Community Manager Jono Bacon discusses Ubuntu Phone and where the development is headed.
In some respects, the Xfce Desktop Manager looks a little bit dated. Overall though, I think the Xubuntu team has done a great job with the system theme to make the desktop look modern and sleek while maintaining a traditional desktop paradigm. In the time I spent with Xubuntu 13.04, I ran into a few small glitches, but I think it went much more smoothly than the typical fresh install of the most popular prorietary OS.
Who says you need a few million bucks to build a supercomputer? Joshua Kiepert put together a Linux-powered Beowulf cluster with Raspberry Pi computers for less than $2,000.
Arduino announced the first open source Arduino hacker board with built-in WiFi, and also the first to run Linux. The $69 Arduino Yún integrates the functions of an Arduino Leonardo, featuring an ATmega32u4 microcontroller and 14 GPIO pins, with an Atheros AR9331 WiFi SOC running OpenWRT embedded Linux on a 400MHz MIPS processor.
This guest column by BeagleBoard.org co-founder Jason Kridner introduces the BeagleBone Black’s cutting-edge Linux 3.8 kernel, up from the original BeagleBone’s 3.2 kernel. The new kernel incorporates a new Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) display driver architecture, as well as full support for the Device Tree data structure introduced in Linux 3.7 in order to streamline ARM Linux development and hardware support.
BeagleBoard.org has begun shipping its faster, cheaper “BeagleBone Black” SBC with a Linux 3.8 kernel, supporting Device Tree technology for more streamlined ARM development. The $45 BeagleBone Black runs Linux or Android on a 1GHz TI Sitara AM3359 SOC, doubles the RAM to 512MB, and adds a micro-HDMI port.
Modders and ROMmers rejoice, almost as soon as it reached the hands of consumers, Verizon’s Galaxy S4 has been rooted.
The creation of new Android-related open source projects picked up in a big way in 2012, radically outpacing new iOS projects, according to data released by Black Duck Software. Black Duck manages and secures implementations of open source software, and has large samples of real-world data on open source software in use and in development. Its latest study shows that new Android mobile projects outstripped iOS projects by a factor of four in 2012, expanding by at least 96 percent in each year since 2007. New iOS project growth, by comparison, was 32 percent from 2011 to 2012.
Many people will be quick to point out that it Google is a technology Company with lot of products. However, Google at heart is Advertising Company.
Google always wants developers to build apps for Android first and not iOS. Google I/O 2013 was developer’s paradise which showed that the company is committed to making tools that make things easy for developers.
To attract developers into choosing Android as the first option, Google is striving to help them take full advantage of the Android Ecosystem to generate monetary profits for themselves. Android apps have come a long way and are at par with its iOS counterparts, therefore Google can now focus on optimising the ecosystem and innovate.
Tizen, the open-source Linux software platform aiming to power everything from smartphones to smart TVs, is seemingly coming to laptops.
Intel demoed a Tizen laptop experience at the Tizen Conference 2013 in San Francisco, USA, earlier this month. And it wasn’t demoed on any old heap of hardware, either: Intel were showing off the OS newcomer on an i7 Ivybridge Ultrabook.
The Tizen OS experience is powered by ‘Tizen Shell’ – a UI built upon GNOME-Shell.
Called Joeffice, it works on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux as well as in browsers, according to the developer, Anthony Goubard. It includes a very basic word processor, spreadsheet program, presentation program and database software, Goubard said.
ProjectLibre is an open source project management solution ready to give Microsoft Project a run for their money.
In the midst of the major press blitz surrounding its annual I/O Conference, Google dropped some unfortunate news about its instant messaging plans. In several places around the web, the company is replacing the existing “Talk” platform with a new one called “Hangouts” that sharply diminishes support for the open messaging protocol known as XMPP (or sometimes informally Jabber), and also removes the option to disable the archiving of all chat communications. These changes represent a switch from open protocols to proprietary ones, and a clear step backward for many users.
The first open source office suite written in Java has been released by Japplis, a company based in the Netherlands.
Macker, the second plugin, allows specific dependencies between packages to be defined and those rules to be automatically verified. The plugin is the result of observations by the company that targets for dependencies between packages set at the beginning of a project are often not met. Macker is a fork of software of the same name from Codehaus that hasn’t been updated since 2003. The forked plugin from andrena objects has been adapted to current versions of Java.
This week’s release of the Google Chrome 27 web-browser was made known by its faster load-times. While now in beta form, Chrome 28 will also bring greater speed improvements to Google’s web-browser.
Keeping track of where Firefox is going is difficult given you have at least two horizons to keep your eyes on. Here we have a brief look at what to expect in Firefox 22, currently in beta and close to being rolled out.
The big news in Firefox 22 is either WebRTC or asm.js depending on your particular interests.
WebRTC isn’t new but now it is deemed stable enough to be on by default.
Big Data is becoming a big deal beyond the United States, and it’s time for the international channel to pay attention. The latest evidence: DataStax, which provides enterprise database management services based on open-source software. The company is making an aggressive push into the European market in what may be the first move toward a greater presence throughout the EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) region as a whole.
DataStax, which is based in California and counts 20 Fortune 100 companies among its customers, distributes an integrated Big Data platform based on the open-source technologies Cassandra, Hadoop and Solr, all of which are developed by the Apache Foundation. It focuses on database scalability and reliability, and has been particularly innovative in the NoSQL trend.
The grudge match between Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and his former protege Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce.com, has reached legendary proportions in recent years. Ellison and Benioff pepper their speeches and interviews with not so subtle digs at each other’s companies, and Oracle even went so far as to cancel Benioff’s scheduled keynote at the Oracle Open World conference in 2011.
Single-board computers (SBCs) are computers delivered as one circuit board that are powerful enough to run a real operating system. SBCs are typically inexpensive and versatile, making them an exciting tool for a wide range of applications, from education to scientific research. But there’s a problem; all of the SBCs currently available have major flaws — hardware that doesn’t work without running a nonfree program.
Google has announced that it will in future not allow direct file downloads from its Google Code hosting service. The company says that “increasing misuse” of the service has forced it to take the step in the interest of keeping the platform’s community “safe and secure”.
Germany is the most positively viewed nation in the world in this year’s annual Country Ratings Poll for the BBC World Service.
More than 26,000 people were surveyed internationally for the poll.
On May 25, 2013, there will be a worldwide March against Monsanto, protesting the giant pesticide company’s attempts to take over the world’s food supply. Vandana Shiva speaks about the movement against Monsanto and why it is necessary.
According to a report released today by GMWatch, China destroyed three shipments of GM corn imported from the US.
The United States Senate decided again Thursday that it simply does not want to let states tell people whether or not they are eating genetically modified food.
The Senate voted overwhelmingly — 71 to 27 — against an amendment to the sweeping farm bill, squashing a measure that would not have required labeling of genetically modified organisms, but merely would have let states decide if they wanted to require such labeling.
While not all of the details were shared publicly, Ilja van Sprundel did recommend using dietlibc or uClibc over glibc, which he found to be “super bloated” yet the default for most Linux distributions.
Faced with growing questions over the legality and scope of his counterrorism policy from Congress and elsewhere, President Barack Obama said Thursday that he has codified the process his administration goes through before launching a drone strike.
hursday’s speech at the National War College, which was twice interrupted by a Code Pink heckler, marks a dramatic change in how the country will wage war in the future. Obama dismissed the “large war” tactics employed in Iraq and Afghanistan. He said the United States now faces threats from small groups like al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and individuals like the ones who committed the Boston Marathon attack.
What definition of the term includes this horrific act of violence but excludes the acts of the US, the UK and its allies?
In a dramatic exchange during the final moments of a much anticipated foreign policy speech by President Obama on Thursday, CodePink activist Medea Benjamin rose from the audience and directly confronted the US commander-in-chief by challenging him on several of the government’s most controversial policies.
Investigation by British groups on the U.S. government’s terrorist detention activities has shed new light on the CIA’s methods, researchers said.
The website of The Rendition Project documents details of the rendition program secretly operated by the CIA in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, the British newspaper The Guardian reported Wednesday.
Crofton Black from Reprieve said: “This unprecedented database shows how false route filings, tarmac transfers, shell companies and the plausible deniability of executive jets masked a systematic programme of secret detention and torture run by the US with the active complicity of the UK and other European countries.”
In a classified hearing, a House panel is trying to figure out how the attack transpired. Did the attackers know that secret location, or did they learn it that night? By Eli Lake.
Most people who follow the Benghazi saga know that the State Department and the CIA got in an epic battle over who was going to accept responsibility for the attacks on Benghazi.
So the talking points had to be just right for each agency to walk away satisfied. They were of utmost importance. So important, in fact, that the CIA used emoticons in its email traffic (some of which was just recently made available to the public).
Among the questions are whether CIA missteps contributed to the security failure in Benghazi and, more importantly, whether the Agency’s Benghazi operation had anything to do with reported heavy weapons shipments from the local port to Syrian rebels.
A U.S. Federal Appeals Court for the District of Columbia anonymously ruled that photos of the corpse of al-Qaeda mastermind Osama bin Laden can continued to be kept as classified, rejecting Judicial Watch’s lawsuit to release them for public.
The spy scandal involving U.S. diplomat Ryan Fogle reveals some interesting points about relations between the U.S. and Russia.
“For the same reasons, it is hard to determine with any precision the strategic impact of the drone campaign,” the report said. “While reported signature strikes may in particular fuel local alienation, at the same time, the deaths of senior, highly experienced commanders are certainly a hard blow for the militants.”
Al-Awlaki, a radical Muslim cleric, was killed in a drone strike in September 2011 in Yemen. Holder said three other Americans were killed by drones in counterterrorism operations since 2009 but were not targeted. The three are Samir Khan, who was killed in the same drone strike as al-Awlaki; al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, a native of Denver, who also was killed in Yemen two weeks later; and Jude Kenan Mohammed, who was killed in a drone strike in Pakistan.
An AFP story reports that “the truck was carrying grenades and explosive belts” and that all the ordnance was destroyed by the missiles.
[...]
“suspected militants” are officially defined as “all military-age males in a strike zone.”
Wanted WikiLeaks founder JULIAN ASSANGE pleaded with actor BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH to drop out of the Hollywood adaptation of his story after objecting to an early version of the film’s script.
Senior BJP leader L.K. Advani has said he was greatly impressed by the revelations contained in the secret documents accessed by WikiLeaks that were serialised in The Hindu. He expressed concern at the continued confinement of Julian Assange, Editor-in-Chief of WikiLeaks, at the Ecuadoran embassy in London.
On the eve of the international release of Alex Gibney’s WikiLeaks documentary We Steal Secrets, the organization is blasting the film, leaking a complete, annotated transcript reporting dozens of factual errors and instances of “sleight of hand” from the Oscar-winning director. In the transcript, WikiLeaks points to, among other things, the use of a “crude gay caricature” to paint Bradley Manning’s decision to leak US military and diplomatic documents as “a failure of character, rather than a triumph of conscience.”
(Breitbart) An obscure November 2012 Wikileaks email dump points to former White House counterterrorism adviser and now-CIA chief John Brennan as the person behind the “witch hunt” of journalists who reported unflattering Obama administration leaks.
Military lawyers tell last hearing before trial they have dropped one of 22 counts but will still press most serious accusation
A coalition of activists and journalists, including WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, filed a lawsuit Wednesday against the Department of Defense and the military judge overseeing the case of Army Pfc. Bradley Manning. The suit aims to open up access to the military trial, in which Manning is fighting to avoid a life sentence after admitting to leaking hundreds of thousands of sensitive documents to Wikileaks.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has claimed that “spies” at one of the UK’s intelligence agencies openly discussed his predicament over instant messenger, with one suggesting allegations against him were a “fit-up”.
Staff working at GCHQ, the government’s communications intelligence agency, have been scolded for saying WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange may have been framed over rape charges.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said messages he got from a British agency included speculation he was framed by Swedish officials seeking his extradition.
GCHQ acknowledges that the messages are real, but, “The disclosed material includes personal comments between some members of staff and do not reflect GCHQ’s policies or views in any way.”
Rep. Stephen Fincher (R-TN) agitated against food aid for poor Americans included in the Farm Bill during last week’s House Agricultural Committee debate, accusing the government of stealing “other people’s money.” Funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) has already been decimated in both the House and Senate versions of the Farm Bill, cutting off nearly 2 million working families, children, and seniors from food assistance.
Citing an explosive 2011 Swiss study published in the PLOS ONE journal on the “network of global corporate control,” Hudes pointed out that a small group of entities — mostly financial institutions and especially central banks — exert a massive amount of influence over the international economy from behind the scenes. “What is really going on is that the world’s resources are being dominated by this group,” she explained, adding that the “corrupt power grabbers” have managed to dominate the media as well. “They’re being allowed to do it.”
Governor Scott Walker seeks to “radically” overhaul Wisconsin’s education system using several pieces of American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) model legislation, and to do it through the budget process, meaning this privatization agenda could be enacted with minimal public discussion or debate.
…protest government intrusions on press freedom and to condemn bad journalism…
…the odds that you will suffer any kind of violent attack are thankfully pretty remote.
The data center itself is coming up over 1 million square feet and should be running up a bill of around $40 million every year on energy bills. Add to this is the fact that there is a 6% tax and the NSA is not a happy customer right now.
As detailed in “Dissent or Terror: How the Nation’s Counter Terrorism Apparatus, in Partnership with Corporate America, Turned on Occupy Wall Street,” through 2011 and 2012, “fusion centers” and other “counter terrorism” agencies engaged in widespread monitoring of Occupy Wall Street activists. This article examines some instances of this counter terrorism monitoring of activists.
Adam Jaskowiak was one of the men targeted and said he pleaded with police to be able to keep his things but was ignored.
He was sleeping with eight other people finding shelter for the night in the former Ilford Baths in High Road, Ilford.
All of their belongings were bundled into a police car leaving the men, one in his 60s, stunned.
A police chief told the Recorder the operation was carried out to “reduce the negative impact of rough sleepers”.
This week, four House Armed Services Subcommittees begin their markups of the 2014 National Defense Authorization Act. And thus begins the debate over how to program the American war machine.
portions of the annual NDAA are crafted behind closed doors
The liberal press was so caught-up in this cult of personality that was so much a part of the Obama phenomenon, it did not see or choose to ignore that the Obama administration’s approach to civil liberties turned his administration into act three of the Bush administration. So While the Obama administration used the espionage act to clamp down on whistle-blowers, its’ Department of Homeland Security coordinated the national repression of Occupy Wall street and its’ lawyers defended the Bush administration’s position that opposed allowing individual suites against the government agencies and telecom companies accused of engaging in warrantless electronic surveillance, the only voices of concern came from the marginalized radical press.
During the 2013 legislative session, we saw an explosion of state nullification bills dealing with issues ranging from heath care, to the Second Amendment, to NDAA detention.
Out of this renewed interest in nullification, a grassroots movement continues to grow and flex its muscles. Realizing they need to bring more pressure to bear on reticent state lawmakers, nullification advocates have taken the movement down to the local level.
Over the last several months, led by grassroots activists across America, city councils and county commissions have passed resolutions and ordinances in support of the Second Amendment and blocking NDAA detention provisions. Some bodies have passed legally binding legislation prohibiting local cooperation with unconstitutional acts. Others have approved non-binding resolutions supporting state efforts. Both strategies send strong messages to state lawmakers and will increase pressure to pass state-level nullification bills in the next legislative session.
Thought experiment: Rip Van Winkle falls asleep sometime around George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech and wakes up in early March.
Rip would have awakened in time to see Rand Paul’s 13-hour “Don’t drone me, bro” filibuster. He would have also witnessed the president’s firmly pro-drone counter-terrorism speech.
While Code Pink remains the same, a lot seems to have changed. Most Republicans, including the leading tea party senators, proclaimed their intention to “Stand with Rand.” What happened to the party of Dick Cheney?
Yes, Virginia, there is a limit to what Verizon will let you do with FiOS’ “unlimited” data plan. And a California man discovered that limit when he got a phone call from a Verizon representative wanting to know what, exactly, he was doing to create more than 50 terabytes of traffic on average per month—hitting a peak of 77TB in March alone.
uTorrent parent company BitTorrent Inc. reports that the new advertising option in the popular BitTorrent client generates billions of ad impressions per month. Although users initially revolted against the idea of making uTorrent ad-supported, the new stats show that not too many of them turned the feature off. The next challenge for BitTorrent Inc. is to attract premium advertisers in addition to the lower tier poker and PC performance ads that are showing up now.
Nice business model if you can get it, with obligatory taxpayers-funded lobbying to kids as part of it
Summary: Some of the latest strategies used by the world’s richest man to protect his investments and amass yet more money, adding to an ever-growing wealth while pretending it’s a charity
The brainwash imposed by the Gates Foundation is not a new subject here. We have published a lot on this subject for over half a decade and we gave hundreds of examples. As a sort of corporation, with a market cap of nearly 100 billion dollars (or more), the Gates Foundation sure proves profitable. It is lobbying for Monsanto (Gates invests in this abusive monopolist [1, 2, 3, 4]) and other monopolistic enterprises that privatise what’s public, e.g. nature’s yields. Right now this monstrous body is trying to privatise US education (probably over half a trillion of taxpayers' money per year) and it is not alone although it is a clear leader in this vicious, greedy campaign of wealth passage from the poor to plutocrats. A good teachers’ blog known as Seattle Education has been slamming Gates for years, and this is coming from Seattle, i.e. near to Gates’ home (by some indications, Gates also eyes privatisation of British education when he finally around to it).
“As a sort of corporation, with a market cap is nearly 100 billion dollars or more, the Gates Foundation sure proves profitable.”“Propaganda fed to our children? Gates and his foundation are starting to feel the heat of controversy over his ideas of how public education should be managed as well as his investments in Monsanto. a company that produces GMO seeds. This pushback is happening in his own backyard and around the world,” says Dora Taylor, a lead writer in the teachers’ blog from Seattle. She is right and we saw this brainwashing/social programming for Monsanto before. Gates is investing (for profit) in this, so no wonder he spares some money to bribe schools in places like Hillsborough (see background in [1, 2]), bribing the education press and local press too (we gave a plethora of examples). It is a takeover, it’s a coup, but we mostly see public relations from the local press, stating nonsense like this lot: “Known in the school system as EET, the project is a massive undertaking, affecting some 15,000 employees. Long paid and promoted largely by seniority, teachers and administrators are making a transition to a system that rewards performance.”
No, it rewards Gates. This is not a charity, it is corporate takeover and we know whose stocks are affected. Gates’ lobbying front is acting like an investment corporations for oil, tobacco, etc. while masquerading bribes as ‘charity’ and paying no tax owing to posturing as a charity. It is a scam which feeds on media that opens its pockets/wallet in exchange for grooming/PR.
“It is a scam which feeds on media that opens its pockets/wallet in exchange for grooming/PR.”Here is the Irish paper which recently accused Gates of receiving bailout money from the Irish talking about Gates’ other investments. The Independent, says: “Filings for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which was set up for philanthropic purposes by Gates, show that it owned 49,000 shares in Paddy Power at the end of 2008. Those shares were worth just over €632,000 at the time. They would have risen more than fourfold in value to €3.1m by last week.”
Gates is an investor and lobbyist (for his investments), he is not a philanthropist and he does not give his money away. He is still getting a lot richer through his investments which he lobbies for (he got seven billion dollars richer last year alone) and he has just become the world’s richest man again [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7], reminding us all that we are being bamboozled if we ever believe that this man is distributing his wealth among the world’s population. He is a propagandist, an investor in companies that harm society (see his portfolio), and an arrogant lobbyist who pushes hard for policies that devalue the working class. Do not admire those who are looting you, writing your legislation and then buying the press you read in order to seed self-serving coverage. █
“Entryism (also referred to as entrism, occasionally as enterism) is a political strategy in which an organisation or state encourages its members or supporters to join another, usually larger organisation in an attempt to expand influence and expand their ideas and program. In situations where the organization being “entered” is hostile to entrism, the entrists may engage in a degree of subterfuge to hide the fact that they are an organisation in their own right. In some cases the alleged entryists perceive themselves as supporters of a newspaper and not members of an organization.” –Wikipedia
Summary: An aspect of Microsoft culture that ought not be overlooked because of its profound effect on society (private and public)
THE other day, a site owned by a former employer of mine said that “Bob Muglia, executive vice president of software solutions at Juniper Networks, is no stranger to the world of software. Muglia spent over two decades at Microsoft, where he helped define its software vision. Before joining Juniper in 2012, Muglia had been the president of Microsoft’s server and tools business.”
This is true, but there is a wider picture here. I am not chastising the author, who is actually one of the best FOSS-centric authors around. It just takes more guts to take journalism further. Prior to him joining Juniper the CEO of the company came from Microsoft and appointed many people around him (CxO level) from Microsoft. It was the same when it comes to VMware and Nokia (to a lesser degree in the latter). It didn’t take long for Juniper to spread Linux/Android FUD and for Nokia to attack Linux/Android with patents. The important thing here is this: it can be framed as a matter of entryism, where one earns a position of power (sometimes in exchange for money, or bribe) and then surrounds him/herself with former colleagues.
“The ‘justice’ Motorola gets in Seattle is like the Justice Samsung can get in the US when the plaintiff, Apple, is US-based.”This observation is particularly worth making in the context of the public sector. We often see the profound effects of putting a former Microsoft or Gates executive in charge of nonprofit institutions, including government institutions. It leads to legalisation of gross tax evasion by Microsoft and Gates and it influences competition or regulation policies. We gave dozens of examples over the years and it is hard to choose and highlight any particular one.
Not too long ago a discriminatory (Microsoft-only) government procurement policy was challenged by ESOP [1, 2], resulting in this press release. It is likely, although not trivial to prove, that here too some kind of bribe was involved, or at least a case of entryism.
It should be noted that not only Microsoft benefits from tax evasion loopholes Apple too does it and there are many reports about it, e.g. this one (there have been dozens more this week). Apple is at least as bad as Microsoft in many areas and Apple fans are reportedly not as happy about their “iPhones” as they were before. On the FRAND front, Apple and Microsoft work together against Android, with Microsoft relying on bias in Seattle [1, 2] courts (many in positions of power in Seattle came from Microsoft and reporters in the area try trial by media, in Microsoft’s favour of course). This summer it will be Seattle residents involved in this trial too. As Pamela Jones put it: “The next phase of the Microsoft v. Motorola litigation in Seattle will begin on August 26th. It will be a jury trial, as Motorola requested. I hope some of you are nearby and can attend. This will be the part about Microsoft’s claims of breach of contract based on its assertion that Motorola violated a RAND contract by its opening bid being allegedly too high.” The ‘justice’ Motorola gets in Seattle is like the Justice Samsung can get in the US when the plaintiff, Apple, is US-based [1, 2]. █
A message to Rob Tiller and his team
Official Rob Tiller photo from Red Hat’s Web site
Summary: Red Hat continues to ignore my plea to defang the software patents it is applying for, potentially making them weaponised like Novell’s and Sun’s patents (e.g. Java at Oracle) upon buyout or another major event
THE previous post talked about how The Guardian deceives readers when it comes to patents. It deceives readers in many other areas, pretending to be a “guardian”. Anyway, since The Guardian considers Twitter to be news, let’s recall Twitter‘s promise to make patents defensive (we already urged Red Hat to follow suit too) — a fact which The Guardian would prefer you did not know as that would weaken the smear against Kim Dotcom. It would ruin the narrative of Dotcom as a ruthless outlaw.
“Everyone should appeal, petition, and politely approach Red Hat on this subject until the danger is addressed.”The news from The Guardian and other Dotcom-hostile entities, e.g. CBS, followed this timely reminder/news (covered by ZDNet, part of CBS also), which says “Twitter has applied its new innovator’s agreement for the first time to a patent on a ‘pull down to refresh trigger’.”
Twitter has devised a licence of some kind and Google did this too (we had called for it), perhaps with Twitter’s inspiration. If Red Hat pursues software patents — and it does — then it should do what Twitter did. Otherwise, if Red Hat gets sold for instance, its patents will become chaos. I already told this to several people like Tiller, even years ago*. They did nothing, so their patents are as safe as Novell’s (first in OIN, then CPTN). Everyone should appeal, petition, and politely approach Red Hat on this subject until the danger is addressed. It’s not as though Red Hat is ignorant about it, this strategic choice is very conscious (it is beneficial only to Red Hat, but bad for FOSS) and Red Hat does not get enough PR damage for it, so nothing is changing. █
____
* It should be noted that when Red Hat’s PR was contacting me and even getting me in touch with their truly cool CEO I came to discover how unresponsive and even arrogant Red Hat’s legal team can be; they were the only ones never to respond to my polite queries, which I relayed through their PR department persistently, leaving even the PR reps rather embarrassed by lack of transparency from the lawyers in the company.
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