12.15.11
Posted in Europe, Microsoft, Open XML, OpenDocument at 6:52 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Europe’s transition to Free/Open Source software is stifled by the existence of Microsoft’s fake ‘open’ format
THE SUBJECT of OOXML/ODF was covered here thoroughly in 2007 and 2008. We showed a great deal of lies, corruption, and cover-up.
Putting aside the corruption behind OOXML, the anticompetitive aspect of it returns to haunt Europe. Ryan says that “they should get rid of it and use ODF” and notes that the “Open Source Business Alliance” has created a new working group – “Office Interoperability.”
“Business Alliance,” notes Ryan, is similar to the BSA and many times before we explained that interoperability is just a weasel word used to marginalise open standards. “I smell Ballmer,” Ryan says, but the report is not so amusing. To quote:
IT authorities from Germany and Switzerland have announced that they are working together, under the auspices of the Open Source Business Alliance, to improve the way that LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org display and process OOXML-formatted documents. The authorities involved include the IT groups from the cities of Munich, Jena and Freiburg im Breisgau, the Swiss canton of Waadt, the Swiss Federal Court and the Schweizer Informatikstrategie Bund (Swiss IT Federation) whose representatives met at a workshop in Zurich in October to launch the “Precise reproduction of OOXML documents in Open Source Office applications” project. Slides for the workshop provide more details of what was discussed.
This was the purpose of OOXML all along — throwing users back into the same loop and the same lock-in/trap. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:16 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Kernel Space
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Changes to the memory subsystem promise improved response times and performance. From Linux 3.2, device-mapper supports thin provisioning and is able to use this ability for improved snapshot functionality.
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Linus Torvalds and Greg KH announced a few hours ago, December 9th, that another Release Candidate version of the upcoming Linux kernel 3.2 and the stable Linux kernel 3.1.5 are both available for download.
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Applications
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The world of application and server load testing has traditionally been limited by the availability of on-premise resources. With a new service from startup Blazemeter, that changes as load testing can now be done via a self-service cloud model.
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I’ve compiled 25 performance monitoring and debugging tools that will be helpful when you are working on Linux environment. This list is not comprehensive or authoritative by any means.
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Once you use the open source Network Security Toolkit distribution, Jack Wallen predicts you’ll wonder how you ever did without it.
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The tools that you will be using, surprisingly, come from Lacie. Here are the three tools that you will need to download first. All of them are prepackaged .debs.
LightScribe System Software Package
LightScribe Simple Application
LaCie 4L Labeler Utility
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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With Plasma Active, KDE project has shown how you can take customize the DE for different class of devices — while traditional desktop users can use the ‘future’ perfect and advanced Plasma Desktop, space restricted netbooks can take full advantage of Plasma Netbook, the Plasma Active emerges as a great solution for touch based devices.
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GNOME Desktop
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As mentioned when announcing the survey, several months ago I was contacted about hosting the 2011 GNOME User Survey after the GNOME Foundation itself wasn’t interested in collecting the feedback from their users. The survey ran for October and November on Phoronix, and now I have finally had time to dump the results and look.
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Reboots tend to be rare with Linux. Usually, they’re due to a kernel update or an environmental issue. But regardless of the reason, it’s crucial it come back to life quickly. One issue surrounding Linux of late is boot time. Some distributions have made it a key feature to attract users. Some have even succeeded in reaching that magic 10-second number. But which distributions boot fastest? Let’s take a look.
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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Some vendors move faster than others when it comes to integrating products from an acquisition.
Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) acquired storage vendor startup Gluster in October for $136 million. Now Red Hat is already out with its first Gluster-based product, The Red Hat Storage Appliance. The new appliance integrates components from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) with Gluster.
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Fedora
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Fedora 16 is the first version of Fedora where the installer creates GPT partitions by default – in standalone installations. So if you are going to install Fedora 16 KDE or any version of Fedora 16, GPT is a new feature that you will encounter during installation. GPT, or GUID Partition Table, makes it possible to create more than four primary partitions, and partitions that are more than 2 TB in size. If you are interested in this subject, you might want to read Fedora 16 GPT disk partitioning guide.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Starting with today we will introduce new plugins for the Unity interface of the Ubuntu operating system, called Lens and Scopes, that will make your Unity experience much better.
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It’s been a long time in development, but we’re finally drawing close to releasing Paypal support in Ubuntu Pay, the payment service behind Ubuntu Software Centre. Here are a couple of screenshots to whet your appetite…
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Flavours and Variants
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The Pear OS linux is from France and it is purely based on Ubuntu and Debian. It design and look is mixture of Ubuntu and MAC OS X. The login screen, top panel and window are look like Ubuntu and the Dock at bottom gives you the taste of MAC OS X.
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Pandaboard.org has unveiled a new and small mainboard that is called the Pandaboard ES. This little board is one of the open source parts that is designed to be a development tool for running Android 4.0 ICS when it lands. The board is intended to support the Android Open Source Project. The little board is price very well.
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Adlink announced it will release a range of ARM-powered COMs (computer-on-modules) next year that sell for “far below $100,” supporting operating systems including Android, Linux, and Windows 8. The devices, which will consume less than three Watts, will employ a still-unnamed, ARM-oriented format recently announced by Kontron.
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Phones
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Android
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Meizu announced a high-end Android 2.3.5 phone equipped with an eight-megapixel, f/2.2 backside-illuminated camera with 1080p video recording. Aimed at the Chinese market for now, the Meizu MX features a 1.4GHz, dual-core Samsung Exynos 4210 system on chip (SoC), 16GB of storage, a four-inch, 960 x 640 pixel display, and a micro-SIM slot supporting pentaband 3G with HSPA+ support, says the company.
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Renault announced an in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) system that will arrive in its Renault Clio 4 and Zoe cars in 2012. R-Link is built around a seven-inch touchscreen tablet — reportedly running Android on a Texas Instruments ARM processor — and will feature TomTom navigation, telematics controls, multimedia, speech recognition, and an open SDK for third-party app developers.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Before launching into this review, which pits Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 against Apple’s iPad 2, I took a few days to familiarize myself with the Galaxy Tab’s Android 3.1 (“Honeycomb”) OS. The thing is, I’d already used iOS on an iPod Touch for two years, but was a rank newbie when it came to Android.
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I don’t know if you are a TouchWiz fan or not. If you don’t know what TouchWiz it then you probably wont care. TouchWiz is Samsung’s skin for Android devices. It offers some cool features and has its own share of fans and hater. Irrespective of that Samsung is determined to put TouchWiz on top of Ice Cream Sandwich on its Android 4.0 phones.
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Events
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The dates have been announced for our next conference — March 24th and 25th 2012, at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. A call for papers has also been announced. The conference will include talks from the FSF staff and board, GNU project contributors, and other members of the global free software community. I hope you will join us!
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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For Mozilla, sandboxing isn’t everything. A precision made following the release of Accuvant Labs study.
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SaaS
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The Apache Hadoop project has generated a lot of hype as being the poster child for the phenomenon known as Big Data. The practical reality though is that Hadoop works best with a distribution of complementary tools and applications that fully enables an effective Big Data deployment.
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Databases
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This week we have for you an interview with Simon Tokumine and Javier de la Torre from CartoDB, an open source geospatial cloud database with a business model. Enjoy the interview!
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Java platform-as-a-service cloud provider CloudBees has launched a commercial version of the Jenkins CI (continuous integration) platform, the company announced Wednesday.
An increasing number of enterprises that use Jenkins for their application development are using the software in production settings, said Steve Harris, who is CloudBees’ senior vice president of products. The company had surveyed Jenkins users and found that 80 percent deploy Jenkins in “mission critical” duties.
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Business
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JetBrains, developers of the IntelliJ IDEA polyglot IDE, have announced the release of version 11 of IDEA with enhanced performance, improved version control support, an updated UI, and platform improvements on Mac OS X and Linux. Since October 2009, when the open source version was announced, IntelliJ IDEA has been available in two editions: an open source community edition for Java, Groovy and Scala development, and a commercially supported, more fully featured “Ultimate” edition with support from frameworks like Java EE and Spring, and tools to assist deployment and debugging.
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Semi-Open Source
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Open source business intelligence vendor takes a different approach to analyzing Hadoop.
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Project Releases
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Public Services/Government
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The White House’s Open Government Partnership inched closer to maturity last week, with the release of a new open data platform, designed to help other governments set up their own Data.gov portals. On Wednesday, Data.gov developer Chris Musialek posted the first pieces of early test code for the unfortunately named “Data.gov-in-a-box” — an open source version of the US and Indian governments’ respective data portals. Both countries, in fact, have been working on the platform since August, with the Obama administration pledging some $1 million to the effort.
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Among organizations that favor closed technology development, DARPA would have to qualify as one of the most traditionally closed outfits of all. The United States’ Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency routinely pops up with new inventions, many of which would impress James Bond, but the inventions are typically shrouded in secrecy and mystery until they arrive. After all, lots of them are intended for battlefields, where the element of surprise can matter a lot. But Ars Technica reports that DARPA is exploring some new technology development models, including embracing open source principles. This makes a lot of sense.
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Openness/Sharing
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Mirror mirror on the wall, what’s the most important open source project of them all?
* Are you asking about economic impact? Then it’s probably Linux, or maybe the Apache Web server.
* Are you asking about user base? In that case I’m thinking Google’s Android, or Mozilla.
* But if you’re talking about active participation, getting people’s hands on the guts of the thing, having them donate that back to the commons, and fulfilling the idea behind open source, there can be only one answer. Wikipedia.
Wikipedia has over 100,000 active volunteers working in 270 languages. You’re probably most familiar with the English language version, with its 3.8 million articles. But that’s less than 20% of the total, which now comes to over 20 million.
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Data
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Which is essentially where the data market is today. Everybody understands that data has value; there is little consensus on how, where and via what mechanisms it should be distributed, licensed and sold.
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Open Hardware
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The Arduino is a fantastic example of multiple things–a platform for rapid prototyping (a crucial component of the open source way), a hacker ‘scratching his own itch’ (I need a platform for my students) in public where other people could adapt his creation for their own wildly different uses, a way to lower the barriers to access of technology creation.
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Security
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Finance
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The reason several hundred protesters have congregated on West Street is that Goldman Sachs can be found there. And, today, Occupy Wall Street has gone squidding just outside. The idea comes from Matt Taibbi’s “nailed-it” description of the banking giant as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Many umbrellas sporting makeshift tentacles and ad hoc hats with angry squid eyes cap the march, which leaves simultaneously from two locations: City Hall and Zuccotti Park.
The march is timed to coincide with an effort in West Coast cities to shut down ports, with New York occupiers showing solidarity with their brothers and sisters in Los Angeles, Oakland, Seattle, and elsewhere – all of whose occupations were evicted just like the de facto flagship one in New York. According to Boots Riley of the Oakland hip-hop outfit The Coup, “Occupy Oakland called for this massive coordinated blockade as a way to strike back at the 1% after their attacks on the Occupy movement and their continued assault on working and poor people.” New York couldn’t have picked a more apt 1 percent target than Goldman, as Taibbi’s depiction hints.
“Everybody pays their tax,” chant the marchers. “Everyone but Goldman Sachs.” The reference is to Goldman’s shady accounting, which allows the corporation to grossly underpay its federal taxes.
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More than two years into the five-year program, which planned to reach and nurture 10,000 small businesses, just 5 percent of that goal has been met, and Goldman is reassessing the amount of time it will need. And what of Buffett, who has maintained an active role (though not a financial one) in the plan? The often chatty co-sponsor declined to comment.
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Civil Rights
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It’s quite funny watching aghast at the news that the FBI was using Carrier IQ to spy on citizens.
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12.14.11
Posted in News Roundup at 4:24 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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A thorough performance look at the Intel Core i7 3960X “Sandy Bridge” Extreme Edition processor will be published very soon, but in this article are some benchmarks of using Gallium3D’s LLVMpipe driver on this six-core processor with Hyper Threading.
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AMD proudly announced last night, December 13th, the immediate availability for download of the AMD Catalyst 11.12 video driver for Linux platforms, brining initial support for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 operating system.
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Applications
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In the 2 former articles of this series we have saw OCSInventory and Fusion Inventory 2 software that can create an asset inventory with your computers hardware and software, they both work with agents on the remote machines that send the information on a central server, where you can see, manage and query these information.
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There’s quite a lot of changes for FFmpg 0.9 since the 0.8 series. Among the changes is a native Dirac decoder, MMSH seeking support, support for reading MPO fils, a libass filter, FLB sample-rate change support, many ARM optimizations, libspeex encoding support, hardware accelerated H.264 decoding for Google Android, libswresample support, and much more. There’s also many bug-fixes as part of this new release.
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I somehow never discovered the existence of Scribes until recently. I thought I had tried every word processor and text editor that existed in Linux. But my experiences in using Scribes the last few weeks to enter research notes and create writing drafts has convinced me of its power and usefulness.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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The first thing I found interesting was that Kris is using the project funding platform Kickstarter.com to raise the funds for developing the game. The way I understand Kickstarter to work is a project idea is proposed, a donation goal is set, and if the goal is met within the time threshold, the project is successfully Kickstarted. People that donate to the project, known as “backers”, are given all types of incentives depending on the amount they donate. Check out the incentives for this project. Donations start at $1.
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Desktop Environments
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I am using XFCE as my Desktop Environment, and that includes XFWM – XFCE’s own window manager. I could have used another one, but I find XFWM to be quite good.
I did look briefly at what other WMs are out there, and what I pretty much ended with was that a Compositing window manager would be best (XFWM is one), and not just for fun visual effects. Actually, if that’s what you’re looking for Compiz might be what you want to give a try. But I’m not really looking for all those visual effects, and XFWM offered what I needed, so I didn’t see the need to look for anything else.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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GNOME Desktop
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Here’s the second to last batch of the 2011 GNOME User Survey feedback. The last dump of the GNOME feedback will come in the next day or two so that we can then move onto publishing the rest of the results of this survey for the other questions.
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I first it tried with a beta version and spent less than 3 weeks total using it. I figured that it was beta and that the fact that the ‘shutdown’ option was missing and the configuration options missing were due to the unfinished state. Also the worst feature was the use flow, the steps needed to get anything done. Having to disrupt your work flow to go to the activities window and then go to applications to start an application was ridiculously cumbersome.
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Light Themes Evolved initially started as an Ambiance theme modification for Nautilus Elementary. Later on, it became a full package that brings fixes and improvements to both Ambiance an and Radiance themes.
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New Releases
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· Announced Distro: Ultimate Edition 3.0
· Announced Distro: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2
· Announced Distro: Chromium OS Lime 1404.0
· Announced Distro: CentOS 6.1
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Red Hat Family
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GlusterFS was introduced back in 2007, as an open source network-attached storage system that used Ethernet or InfiniBand RDMA to pool together multiple storage volumes into one colossal pool. It became a cloud storage system in 2009, meaning that it added the elasticity and self-service provisioning necessary to qualify for the official “cloud” moniker. And although it was designed for enterprises, that didn’t stop some very clever coders from reworking it into a locally-mountable cloud storage store, now called HekaFS.
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While CentOS, Scientific Linux, and Oracle Linux Server are all derived from the same upstream source (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), how does the system performance compare between these RHEL derivatives? Here are some benchmarks of each of the 6.1 releases for Oracle Server, CentOS, and Scientific Linux, as they all do not perform the same.
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Fedora
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The security features in Fedora make it one of my favorite Linux distributions. And that is partly why it is in my list of the top 6 KDE distributions of 2011, even though it takes some tweaking to get it to the it just works state. I will take the security advantages of an operating system over any user-friendliness weaknesses, provided those user-friendliness weaknesses are not show stoppers.
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Debian Family
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The release of Java update 29 from Oracle marks not only security updates, but a change to the licensing, removing Debian’s ability to distribute the non-free JVM. The clause in the Java license under which we were able to distribute Java, the DLJ, has been removed. As a result, the sun-java6 package is no longer suitable for the archive, and has been removed, as documented in Debian Bug #646524 [2]. Sylvestre Ledru suggests [3] that sun-java6 installs be migrated to openjdk, the open-source alternative, using the following command:
apt-get –purge remove sun-java6-jre && apt-get install openjdk-7-jre
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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If Mark Shuttleworth has his way we will soon be seeing Ubuntu devices everywhere – from telephones to tablet PCs to desktops – and perhaps even on our televisions.
In a recent blog post, Ubuntu chief Shuttleworth listed some of the work being done towards creating Ubuntu TV. Although still in the early days of discussion with just a few mock-ups available, ambitions for Ubuntu TV are very much in line with Shuttleworth’s apparent new focus on “Ubuntu everywhere”.
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Patrick Wright proudly announced a few days ago, on December 7th, that Canonical’s Platform QA Team have started to execute boot speed tests using the daily ISO build of the Ubuntu operating systems.
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Flavours and Variants
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The Pear OS 3.0 operating system has been released earlier today, being based on Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) and the GNOME 3 desktop environment.
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Aldebaran Robotics have launched a new version of their popular robot Nao – Nao Next Gen. Nao is an autonomous, programmable, medium-sized humanoid robot running a custom Linux OS.
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Phones
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Android
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Google announced on Monday that more than 10 million applications have been downloaded from Android market! To celebrate this milestone Android market is featuring 10 paid applications for 10 days at a cost of only 10cents! 4 days have already passed which means that there will be 60 more apps for 10cents! So you’d better check every day the 10 billion Apps page. On today’s deals you can find Talking Tom Cat 2, ADWLauncher EX and a few more games! I wonder what the next applications will be!
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Rory Cellan-Jones has blogged about Google’s Android catching up with Apple in the year 2011, and the projection that it’s going to surpass the iOS app store’s number of downloads – which stands at 18 billion now – in the next few years.
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Want to know if Carrier IQ, the dialer- and location-sniffing software installed in millions of phones, is being used by the FBI for law enforcement investigations? The FBI won’t reveal much about the controversial application. And why not? Because, the Bureau says, doing so might interfere with law enforcement investigations.
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Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is reportedly backing the Android-x86 open source project, which on Nov. 30 posted early Android 4.0 code for x86 processors, starting with AMD Brazos chips. Meanwhile, Intel — which signed a separate pact with Google to develop authorized Android-on-Atom ports, including an Android 4.0 release it now says is ready — is reportedly spurning the effort.
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Logic PD announced a modular prototyping and demonstration platform for Android, showcasing the company’s customization and integration services as well as components from third-party partners. Aimed primarily at long life-cycle customers, the “Catalyst” platform is built around a seven-inch multitouch “proof-of-concept” device loaded with wireless radios, running Android 2.3 on TI’s DaVinci DM3730 Cortex-A8 processor.
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Mathematically, if they treble cumulative downloads every year the progression will go like this:
* 2012 – 30 billion
* 2013 – 90billion
* 2014 – 270 billion
* 2015 – 810 billion
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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If you thought you’d lost hope in getting your hands on a $99 HP TouchPad, here’s your second chance- and probably your last. HP will be making available a batch of refurbished 16GB and 32GB TouchPads beginning December 11th at 6 p.m. Central Time through HP’s eBay Store. HP will also be bundling a case, charging dock, and wireless keyboard for $79, all of which will be available in the laptop section of the store.
HP has set a limit of 2 per customer and can only be purchased via PayPal. A 90-day warranty is all you’ll get on these puppies since they’re refurbished, so you’ll have to treat them nice. HP will be delaying the public announcement of the sale when it begins at 6 p.m., so that employee’s can get first dibs.
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Ainol Electronics has begun shipping what it claims is the world’s first Android 4.0 (“Ice Cream Sandwich”) tablet. Now available in China for only $99, the Ainovo Novo7 comes with a MIPS-based, 1GHz Ingenic JZ4770 XBurst processor, seven-inch capacitive multitouch screen, dual cameras, an HDMI 1.3 port, a microSD slot — and a testimonial from Google’s Andy Rubin.
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Stream TV Networks is shipping an upgraded version of its seven-inch eLocity Android tablet for $230. The eLocity A7+ is equipped with a “1.0-1.2GHz” Nvidia Tegra 2 processor, offers 4GB of internal storage, and improves the seven-inch capacitive screen to 1024 x 600 resolution — but aside from the much lower price is otherwise much the same, right down to its Android 2.2 operating system.
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Verizon Wireless announced 4G LTE versions of Motorola Mobility’s Xoom 2 tablets, running Android 3.2 — and eventually Android 4.0 — on dual-core 1.2GHz processors. The Droid Xyboard 10.1 and Droid Xyboard 8.2 respectively offer 10.1- and 8.2-inch IPS (in-plane switching) displays plus on-contract prices of $530 and $430, and both include 4G LTE networking as well as five- and 1.3-megapixel cameras.
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Fuhu announced it has begun shipping its “Nabi” Android tablet for kids, and says pre-order stock at Toysrus.com has already sold out. Running Android 2.2 on a dual-core 544MHz Cortex-A9 processor, the “Nabi” offers a seven-inch, capacitive 800 x 480 pixel screen, Wi-Fi, mini-HDMI, microSD, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth 2.1.
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BSD
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The last minute push of unique tests continues as Arendal is stressed prior to its release. Here are some benchmarks comparing Oracle Linux Server 6.1 (their derivative of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1) versus FreeBSD 9.0.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Project Releases
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The libbluray project put out its first official release a few weeks ago. This open-source (GNU GPLv2) library is intended to support Blu-Ray disc playback by media players such as VLC and MPlayer.
The libbluray 0.21 release is the first from the project and it happened on the 30th of November. This release hasn’t been widely publicized and I just happened to know about it this morning from an indirectly-related message on another mailing list. This project was born out of the Doom9 community and has been under development since 2009.
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Programming
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Standards/Consortia
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Security
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Microsoft plans to deliver a festive hamper of 14 security updates next week, three of which are designed to tackle critical remote code execution flaws.
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Civil Rights
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Early next year the government will introduce lawful access legislation featuring new information disclosure requirements for Internet providers, the installation of mandated surveillance technologies, and creation of new police powers. Public Safety Minister Vic Toews, the chief proponent of the new law, has defended the plans, stating that opponents are putting “the rights of child pornographers and organized crime ahead of the rights of law-abiding citizens.”
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ACTA
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100 years after Amundsen reached the South Pole in the Antartics our European member states sent ACTA on a mission to benefit the South. No, kidding?
Sure, an Medicines Sans Frontiers representative once indicated ACTA may generate some serious effects on pharmaceutical supply for their emergency operations in the least developed nations and patients’ access to retroviral drugs etc. But these effect he argued would be rather negative.
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Marketing, Microsoft, Novell, OpenSUSE at 10:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A critical assessment of where SUSE stands at the end of 2011 and how this interacts with the release of OpenSUSE
THE past year has been good for GNU/Linux. On the server, for instance, it carried on gaining.
According to some figures, Red Hat keeps beating Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Linux (SUSE), and Solaris. This is not especially surprising given the recent results and upgrade of Red Hat (c/f our daily links). SUSE can see the growth of GNU/Linux, but it cannot quite steal Red Hat’s thunder, not even with Microsoft’s assistance. From the news: “Even as the Linux Foundation reports on Linux jobs in the U.S., the global picture seems to be even more encouraging.”
Over in New Zealand, SUSE is looking to “re-open Linux conversation” — whatever that actually means. They cannot even get the name right. The news site says: “Suse has informed us the official pronunciation is written soo-sah – check out this YouTube video if you’re still not sure.”
At SUSE there used to be a lot of buzz over “IP peace of mind” (Microsoft FUD) and right now there is more and more of the Fog Computing (“cloud”) hype. We gave many examples over the past couple of years. Consider this new Q&A from Australia:
There are two types of Cloud — public and private, and there is also the hybrid Cloud that’s a combination of both. We’re already in the Cloud business. You can use SUSE through a number of public Cloud providers, and we use Telstra locally. We also work with IBM and Intel, Rackspace and we’ve got some more global announcements coming up shortly about this.
Joe Brockmeier, formerly of Novell/SUSE, also pumps in that type of hype:
SUSE announced its commitment to OpenStack in October, along with a development preview available via SUSE Studio. This includes the three major components in the Diablo release (Nova, Glance, and Keystone). Brauckmann wasn’t sure about specific contributions that SUSE would be making to OpenStack, but did say that the company plans to follow up with a second technology preview in Q2 of 2012. (The “Essex” release of OpenStack will come out in late Q1 if it sticks to schedule.)
At SUSE, it is no longer important to encourage software freedom; patents and decoupling one from his/her data is now a priority. On the purely proprietary side there is also IDM which Novell spreads to keep track of people. Novell’s account in YouTube promotes the proprietary Vibe [1, 2] (based on open source but proprietary) and some other proprietary software stuff that can be found in other new files like this one. The only thing which remained somewhat open is OpenSUSE, but this is a promotional move/tool for SLE*. The so-called ‘community’ is being approached for free artwork [1, 2] while others provide documentation and reviews. OpenSUSE is not unique, but this one review says: “when I read about some of the features in OpenSuse 12.1, I couldn’t resist giving it a try.”
All those features are available elsewhere. What YaST has should have equivalents elsewhere too. There is of course also the volunteer composition of weekly reports [1, 2], putting aside the OpenSUSE project site itself [1, 2] or those who took it for a spin for comparative purposes.
The bottom line is, SUSE lost to Red Hat and it is not promoting Open Source at all. OpenSUSE is being used to add the “open” angle to SUSE marketing. Nobody really needs either of those. Smart folks simply see what else is out there and let SUSE dry up inside Microsoft’s wallet. The boycott was not in vain, and it has been very effective. █
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 10:30 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Software patents. From the back door/stage.
Summary: A quick catchup with patent news, emphasis persisting on the situation in Europe
PATENT rants have become abundant and over the coming weeks we shall cover several that we missed over the past week or two (yours truly was absent).
Granting of software patents can be influenced by the proposed patent harmonisation in Europe and the “EPO can influence patent harmo[nisation] through translation, classification, PPH,” notes one person. This matter is especially sensitive because software patents in Europe are the bridge for US monopolists (including Apple and Microsoft) to take their abusive behaviour global, i.e. their embargo war becomes indisputable. In some cases even access to life-saving drugs is at stake.
Glyn Moody, a Brit, wrote about the danger earlier this month and pointed out that:
Aside from the general issue of transparency and accountability, there is also a more particular concern for readers of this blog. Despite the fact that in Europe patents may not be given for software “as such”, patents are being issued for software using a variety of legal tricks (mostly involving extremely dubious redefinition of key terms to avoid the ban on software patents.)
Just watch what happened in Germany where Apple tried to embargo Linux-powered tablets:
A German court has ruled in Motorola Mobility’s favour in a patents dispute with Apple.
The Android smartphone maker had complained that Apple failed to license one of its wireless intellectual properties.
As the FSFE’s Karsten Gerloff (in Germany) put it, there is a “Good summary of #Apple ban in Europe ur1.ca/6jiri (DE) Can we all agree now that #swpat are silly?”
In the United States, Apple cannot get its way all the time. Based on leaked documents, Apple is more vicious than its followers realise. To quote: “A person within Apple has leaked the company’s ‘Retail Blogging and Online Social Media Guidelines’ which explain that employees cannot use blogs, wikis, social networks, and similar online tools to communicate about their employer internally.” This means no complaining about Apple’s patent aggression presumably. What a lovely company, eh? In separate posts we are going to tackle what Microsoft is doing as well. Antitrust regulators get increasingly involved in what constitutes racketeering, proxy wars, and anti-competitive collusion. There are even those who say that “Patents violate the constitution in discouraging innovation”.
A more comprehensive coverage of the situation in Europe will be posted soon. Now is the time to fight back for elimination — not proliferation — of software patents all around the world. █
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Posted in Microsoft at 10:16 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Precision in targeting
Summary: Out-of-control machines (or otherwise vandals) from Microsoft Corporations target a Web site critical of Microsoft
A LOT of visitors come to this site having searched for or browsed for Comes vs Microsoft material. But there are other sites that host this type of material.
Slated.org, which famously hosts all the Comes vs Microsoft stash, has been hit by what seems like zombies from Microsoft. To use its own explanation:
Now, as regular readers will already know, Slated is a site dedicated to GNU/Linux, Free Software, Free Standards, civil and human rights, business ethics, altruism and, generally, the cause of social liberalism. This upsets certain types of people and companies, no doubt including Microsoft. So it doesn’t really surprise me when they attack Slated, although I find it rather disturbing that a global corporation like Microsoft should do it so openly.
Perhaps this “hack” is nothing more than yet another compromised Windows PC inside Microsoft’s Redmond HQ, or maybe it’s something more sinister, but either way someone or something on Microsoft’s network just attacked Slated.
Good to know I have their full attention.
There were also DDOS attacks on other Microsoft-hostile sites. The botnets sometimes come from Microsoft. Claiming and also proving that there was malicious intent bringing those attacks from Microsoft is nearly impossible because of the structural nature of botnets, but it does need to be highlighted. We have already caught some pro-Microsoft trolls in blog comments who later turned out to be Microsoft employees. Novell did the same thing and so did SCO. It is not unusual. █
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