Summary: Corruption in procurement processes, such as the ones we mentioned recently in relation to Europe, come into public awareness in the form of leaked documents
SEVERAL years go we covered Microsoft’s EDGI in India. We thought it was a fine demonstration of Microsoft’s corrosive and corrupt power over India — augmenting an agenda which was further lobbied for by the Gates Foundation. Together they have a lot of influence over the Indian government. For a little bit of background see:
Microsoft corruption has been quite rampant in India and over the years we have covered many more examples where Microsoft lied, misused the courts, and avoided tax (it was convicted of that too). One area where Microsoft has been less successful is Kerala and another — to a lesser degree — is Tamil Nadu. We have received documents (see final[PDF] and another version[PDF]) that show that there too Microsoft has managed to lobby and distort tenders/bidding processes, according to our sources. Swapnil Bhartiya dud a lot of the work highlighting the distortion. He also shows how and what was changed, so we need not do this again. “Tamil Nadu government is giving freebies as per their election promise,” wrote to us a local. “They are giving 900,000 laptop in first phase.
“If the minimum cost of operating system is calculated to 1000 RS, then the OS itself will cost above 90 crores.”
He continues: “In the first tender they had gone for dual boot system with Linux but suddenly few weeks back they came up with 2nd tender where they removed wireless cards, web cam and dual boot option. In
other way it was simply to benefit Microsoft
On another occasion, explained the same person: “they put a tender asking 4 dual boot quotation just day before they announce bidder, they revoked the tender and came with new tender where they put only MSFT as option [...] threatening vendors to put dual boot and increase dual boot”
1. The government will buy around 1 million Microsoft Windows licences.
2. Government has blocked ‘all’ competitors such as Canonical, Red Hat, SUSE and other independent vendors which develop Linux based operating systems from bidding for this huge tender.
3. Government has chosen expensive and insecure Windows, over free and open source Linux which is much more secure.
4. Government has decided to train 1 million students in Microsoft products instead of Linux and open source.
5. The Tamil Nadu government has refused to support the local economy by blocking local vendors who could offer services around Linux and went in bed with a US based company.
Why does the government even need to advertise the tender when it the end the corruption will find its way and the order will go to the favored party, blocking competitors. Will the government explain why it removed Linux and made the tender exclusive for Microsoft Windows?
We need more Anna Hazare to bring an end to the deeply rooted corruption in the Indian system.
And guess who always benefits from it? It is important to understand how Microsoft operates behind closed doors because the media hardly covers this. It’s the brave people who leak information (at their own risk) that really spread the facts. █
iSuppli has detected a huge oversupply of big RAM for those hair-driers. … Price drops for RAM are predicted to be about half over 2011 and two thirds since 2010.
This is a good sign that Windows 7 is not selling.
[non free developers use] V.i. Labs code to track when an installed application shows signs its a pirated copy. The data collected makes a record of what organizations in China are using unlicensed copies across how many different PCs. … [if the company does not pay up another firm will send] private investigators to go undercover and infiltrate companies that are allegedly using unlicensed software. The investigators will then supply whatever information they find to Chinese government regulators, which have the authority to conduct investigative raids.
People should use free software instead of nasty spyware owned by thugs who want to raid people they suspect of sharing (please don’t call it piracy).
if Google’s going to start using those +1 votes, the company is virtually inviting the world’s spammers and blackhat SEO magicians to flood its social networking system with fake profiles and fake votes
That much is true, as can be seen from what happened to Slashdot. Forbes had a critical article but pulled it and removed it from Google’s cache. It seems big media is torn between FUD for Google and a tool that gives them another tool against democracy. The Wired article also has silly anti-trust concerns, which ignore the more devious cooperation between Microsoft and Facebook.
Summary: Why OpenSUSE is not a project worth supporting and what it has been up to over the past week
AT THE beginning of the year OpenSUSE was made the property of Attachmate and at the end of last month it was made the vassal of Microsoft. The purpose of SUSE, which uses the “Open” as a recruitment tool for volunteers, is to spread Microsoft tax. That’s why Microsoft has seeded funds in the project almost every 2 years since 2006 (at least $100,000,000 at each time, serving the interests of Microsoft shareholders as it’s obliged to).
As a former SUSE fan I am saddened to see how the project was crushed. It was probably the best GNU/Linux desktop distribution at one point. Remember SLED 10? XGL?
Wyse also introduces two new SUSE Linux-based thin clients and reveals integration with the Big Three hypervisors.
As we explained over the past week (e.g. in relation to Microsoft’s deal in China [1, 2, 3, 4]), Microsoft uses its virtualisation deal with Novell to basically add Windows to environments which were GNU/Linux only. Microsoft does the same thing in HPC. So the purpose of SUSE is really to make Windows and Microsoft tax (on GNU/Linux) more widespread. That’s why Microsoft is willing to give SUSE so much money.
Stay away from SUSE to defend software freedom. It’s not about provoking or avenging, it’s about doing the sensible thing, expelling Microsoft intrusion. █
Summary: Novell (Attachmate) owns UNIX copyrights, but it is also the source of Microsoft’s “Linux tax” (through SUSE) — a tax which it markets as patent assurance
A federal appeals court has upheld a jury verdict and a lower court ruling in a trial that found Novell Inc. — not The SCO Group — owned the copyrights to the Unix computer software operating system before 1995.
The U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the jury’s verdict from last year in a lawsuit filed by SCO in 2004 as part of its broader efforts to sue IBM over alleged use of Unix code as a model for parts of the rival Linux operating system.
The court upheld the verdict against SCO, saying “ample evidence in the record supported the jury’s verdict and Novell’s position.” It also upheld rulings in Novell’s favor by U.S. District Judge Ted Stewart, who presided over the trial.
This is all very nice. However, to lose sight of the fact that Novell is now being used by Attachmate (via SUSE) to pay Microsoft for GNU/Linux regardless of copyrights would not be wise. The main problem has shifted along with Microsoft’s strategy.
The Register joined YouTube on the 9th of May (2011) and it reminds of us those ads disguised as “content” which it did back in the days for Novell and Microsoft A day or so ago it uploaded this video which characteristically spins a patent deal as collaboration. Viewer should beware and see if they can spot the spin. Novell is not the “good guy”. Like in many wars, both sides can be “bad guys”, ass Zinn (a former bombardier) once explained. █
New Intel graphics drivers for X.org already support the Ivy Bridge family of processors that is expected to become available early next year. In future, a new Linux version will be selected on an annual basis to become a long-term kernel with two years of support. Material from LinuxCon 2011 Vancouver provides development background on such topics as USB support, KVM and Wi-Fi drivers.
Both Ubuntu community manager Jono Bacon and Ubuntu volunteer and journalist Amber Graner find that, when they deliver talks based on Herbert Freudenberger and Gail North’s The Burnout Cycle, afterwards people approach them privately to talk about their own experiences with burnout.
Similarly, kernel hacker and Ada Initiative co-founder Valerie Aurora talks about sitting with a dozen women and technology activists and discovering that all of them were burned out, recovering from burnout, or else had been burned out in the past.
Last week I wrote about Samsung releasing code to a new DRM driver for one of their ARM SoCs, the Exynos 4210 that’s used by the Samsung Galaxy S II and other mobile devices. It looks like this open-source kernel driver from Samsung stands a chance as being the first ARM driver to be accepted into the DRM area of the mainline Linux kernel.
According to the press release from Unigine, Oil Rush is a real-time naval strategy game based on group control. In Oil Rush players build up defenses and upgrade oil platforms. Players progress through the game by capturing enemy platforms and oil rigs.
There are folks in the world of FLOSS just as determined to sabotage their installed base. Ubuntu Unity, KDE 4.x and GNOME 3 come to mind. Perhaps those new interfaces are “better” in some ways, but the users will notice the learning curve. I don’t doubt some will not even be able to start using them because they are used to clicking on things they can see in front of them just as they have been seeing and grasping since infancy. Unnatural may be new but it’s not intuitive. Training had better be built in or it will be resisted.
Have you experienced performance issues when using KDE? If so, then you aren’t the only one. While things have been improving as KDE 4 matures, some users still have registered complaints. And one KDE hacker is trying to address them.
Martin Gräßlin had begun working towards “rendering at 60 frames” per second. Gräßlin stated in a blog post today, “I could not imagine how a frame could take longer to render than the 16.67 msec.” But after some thought he realized where a couple of bottlenecks may be hiding.
Many people asked me at Desktop Summit about the work I’ve been doing recently on implementing the awesome Documents designs from Jon and Jakub; so here it is, I am very happy to announce the first release of GNOME Documents. Here’s the obligatory screenshot.
Aside from a few isolated instances, Mandriva generally felt quite snappy and fast. It used 400 MB of RAM at idle, which I think is about average for KDE 4.
KWin desktop effects worked well after I enabled them. The only issue I had was that there was no keyboard shortcut to directly change the virtual workspace; I had to zoom out to see the whole desktop cube to change workspaces, which is a little more cumbersome and time-consuming. What I mean is there’s no shortcut like CTRL+ALT+LEFT to switch to the workspace immediately to the left. For some reason I also couldn’t find any way to set such shortcuts to my liking.
Red Hat has chosen to announce its new cloud management software Aeolus with a fresh spin of being more community-oriented than Aeolus’ competitor, OpenStack.
Red Hat is leading a Fedora-like effort to succeed where OpenStack has struggled in building an open-source cloud founded on broad community input.
Red Hat’s engineers are building Aeolus, a software suite to spin up, manage and deploy applications from physical and virtual servers to any public or private cloud.
Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst is never one to mince words, and is often full of surprises. Recently, although his position is arguable, he contended that both the PC and fat client operating systems are headed for obsolescence. Now, he has told ZDNet which company he forecasts will be Red Hat’s primary competitor by the year 2016: VMware. There are some excellent reasons to believe that forecast.
The next major release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux isn’t scheduled for general availability for another couple of years, making this the right time for Red Hat to get started on its development.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7 is now starting to take shape as the Linux vendor begins the multi-year process that will ultimately result in a new enterprise distribution release. RHEL 6 was officially released in November of 2010 and RHEL 7 is currently scheduled for release in 2013.
2. Ubuntu is lovely. Yep there, I’ve said it. Linux for the desktop is now a great product. Not a perfect product yet, but great. How do I know? Well I installed Ubuntu 10.10 on the wife’s machine and it worked flawlessly out of the box. No having to configure networks, fiddle with arcane video driver settings or anything like that. It just worked. OK, there was one glitch later on, where her HP inkjet printer driver was incorrectly installed (so I had to hunt around on the forums to find the fix) but I said it wasn’t perfect. And even so it easily compares with the best that Windows has to offer in terms of ease of installation. Surprised? Yeah me too. Last time I looked Ubuntu was a pain. Now it’s not. ‘Nuff said?
In two days, September 1st, Canonical will unleash to the world the first Beta version of the upcoming Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) operating system, due for final release on October 13th, 2011.
With this occasion we thought it will be a great idea to inform our Ubuntu readers about some of the interesting features that will be included in this first Beta release of Ubuntu 11.10.
We also remind everyone that just like the previous release (Ubuntu 11.04), this version of the Ubuntu operating system will have two Beta releases; the second one will be availble on September 22nd.
So I was reading a recent article in NetworkWorld where once again, the “Canonical doesn’t give back” bullshit is raised. The author seems to take a couple “jabs” by bringing up Greg K-H’s infamous plumbers rant talk, the fact that Microsoft is in the top 10 of kernel contributors (and Canonical isn’t even top 30), and even says Canonical is unprofitable as “general understanding”…nice, thanks! Thankfully, it seems from the comments, that people see this as the sensationalized, we-need-click-through-traffic journalism it is. I could go into an epic long posting of how wrong the basis for the “doesn’t give back” argument is, or take jabs at other distros profitability, how they got there or why they were sold…but I won’t. Instead, I’d like to issue a bit of urban education on those of you who seem to hate Canonical/Ubuntu because it succeeds where others have failed.
The UK-based charity Raspberry Pi, which hopes to supply schools worldwide with ultra-low-cost computers, has shown off the current version of its $25 computer running Quake 3.
The device itself is only about the size of a credit card and is designed to connect to a PC, monitor, or a touchscreen to create a cheap tablet.
Linaro has released a new version of its Linaro open source Linux tools, kernel, and middleware stack for ARM Cortex-based consumer electronics. Based on the Linux 3.0.3 kernel and GCC 4.6 toolchain, Linaro 11.08 offers Android and Ubuntu images for the BeagleBoard-xM, Pandaboard, Snowball, and Samsung Origen development boards, plus a new build for the Freescale i.MX53 board.
Motorola Mobility announced an enhanced version of its QWERTY-enabled Motorola Pro phone destined for Europe and Asia. The Motorola Pro+ moves up to Android 2.3, is considerably lighter, and offers improved 640 x 480 resolution and Corning Gorilla glass for its 3.1-inch screen, but carries over a 1GHz processor, a five-megapixel camera, and business-oriented features.
Hewlett-Packard said it will manufacture more TouchPads in response to “stunning” demand following the company’s decision to discontinue the tablets.
“Despite announcing an end to manufacturing webOS hardware, we have decided to produce one last run of TouchPads to meet unfulfilled demand,” Mark Budgell, an HP spokesman, wrote in a blog post. The site appears to be overloaded and is currently unavailable, but the post has been reposted elsewhere online.
Hold on to something tight, webOS geeks. Your favorite tablet, which I can only assume is the TouchPad, might not be the last webOS tablet incarnation from HP. An HP executive and former webOS VP recently stated that the company could resurrect the TouchPad stating to Reuters, “tablet computing is a segment of the market that’s relevant, absolutely.” But let’s hope that HP’s Personal Systems Group head Todd Bradley remembers the TouchPad’s rough path to success.
Toshiba has launched its first tablet powered by the “Honeycomb” branch of Google’s open source Android mobile operating system in Europe. Like most Honeycomb-based tablets, the AT100 series tablet has a 1200×800 10.1-inch touch screen display and a 1 GHz NVIDIA Tegra 250 processor with 1 GB of RAM.
Barnes & Noble’s traditional business model is lagging, but its digital focus has helped buoy its financial performance, the company said today.
During its fiscal first quarter that ended July 30, B&N generated $1.4 billion in sales, representing a 2 percent increase over the same period last year. Its slight revenue increase becomes more impressive when one considers that the core of its operation–book sales in stores–were down during the period. In fact, the company reported that store sales decreased 3 percent year over year to $1 billion.
For a mere $199, Linux fans can buy this little netbook that offers a number of things not found with tablets. Running MeeGo, the X101 does lack the Ethernet and VGA port found on the bulkier netbooks already out there. Because the target is those considering tablets, this netbook is lacking anything that is going to add bulk to its form.
Back in April, before Toshiba had officially revealed the name of its upcoming tablet, one Babyfacemagee did some serious detective work to figure out that it would be called the Thrive – and ended up being dead-on. Fast-forward a few months, and we’re hearing rumors of a new, slimmer, sexier Galaxy Tab-fighter from Toshiba.
The company, a longtime technical computing leader often credited with putting 3D graphics workstations on the map, has purchased OpenCFD Ltd., which provides open-source computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software. OpenCFD has a large, very active user base that spans the commercial engineering, science, and public sector markets. The OpenFOAM CFD software comprises more than 80 solver and 170 utility applications. It’s used for solving everything from complex fluid flows involving chemical reactions to turbulence and heat transfer problems and engineering challenges around solid dynamics and electromagnetics.
Mozilla Mobile Team is working tirelessly to make Firefox awesome on tablets, and I wanted to take a moment to share some of the design decisions we’ve made with the UI thus far. Firefox for tablets is an evolution of its phone based predecessor, with some added enhancements that take advantage of a tablet’s larger screen size.
Google and Microsoft are heavily pushing the creation of HTML5 games for Chrome as well as IE9 and IE10. However, the opportunity is much greater for Mozilla, which isn’t nearly as active in this space as its rivals.
Google took a hit on the Lindholm email issue when the magistrate entered an order 354 [PDF] favored by Oracle requiring Google to (re)produce the emails. Google indicated its intention to appeal the ruling and to withhold production until such time as Judge Alsup makes a final determination, but the magistrate stated such delay was improper and ordered Google to produce the emails immediately.
There has been much hand-wringing of late about whether the explosion of government-run app contests over the last couple of years has generated any real value for the public. With only one of the Apps for Democracy projects still running, it’s easy to see the entire movement being written off as an overly optimistic fad.
As first-tier PC brand vendor Hewlett-Packard (HP) has recently halted all its TouchPad projects, upstream suppliers are currently suffering from the component inventory, which is prepared for the production of the upcoming TouchPad including the 7-inch model, according to sources from upstream component players.
The OpenOffice-based Bungeni was presented at the UK parliament in March this year. Those attending were from the Parliament ICT, Hansard Section, Information Management and Table Departments. The main goal of the meeting was to assess ways in which the UK parliament can provide technical assistance and support to the Bungeni project. The project states that one of its aims is to make parliaments more open to citizens, the name of the project itself conveying this idea: “Bungeni” is the Kiswahili word for “inside Parliament”.
But, with Windows 7, suddenly this no longer works. Running Explorer with RunAs, simply opens a new instance of Explorer as the currently logged in user. Back when we started migrating users from XP to 7, we searched and searched for the solution for Windows 7 that works like XP. But, even today, none has been found. The workaround? To use Switch User and log in to the PC as an administrator account, and run Explorer. But, the drawback is when trying to switch back to the regular user that is logged in, their password needs to be typed in. This is counterproductive if the user is not at their desk while the admin is troubleshooting.
We know Monsanto and other biotech giants have been pushing genetically modified crops around the globe, but new diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks last week make it clear how entangled our government is in corporate agricultural interests.
Starting in September 2007, Elliot Doxer played an elaborate 18-month-long game of cloak-and-dagger with James Cromer, a man he thought was an Israeli intelligence officer. He handed over pages and pages of confidential data to Cromer, providing a list of Akamai’s clients and contracts, information about the company’s security practices, and even a list of 1,300 Akamai employees, including mobile numbers, departments and e-mail addresses.
Spanish press associations have expressed concern about recent episodes of police violence against journalists covering demonstrations against Pope Benedict’s four-day visit to Madrid and protests staged as part of the anti-corruption 15-M movement.
Freelance photographer Daniel Nuevo was covering August 18 protests in Madrid against the Catholic Church-sponsored World Youth Days, which featured Benedict XVI and attracted hundreds of thousands of pilgrims. Grassroots church groups and civic organizations organized the demonstrations to denounce the “waste” incurred by the celebration, which is partly financed by government and corporate sponsors.
King Hamad of Bahrain said Sunday he was pardoning all those who insulted him during a month of Shiite-led pro-democracy protests, in a bid to bring normality back to the Gulf kingdom.
He also said that civilians that were being tried in military courts for their participation in the protest which was crushed in mid-March, will eventually be handled by civil courts, while those who were dismissed from their jobs will be reinstated.
Syria’s most renowned political cartoonist, who recently drew a sketch comparing President Bashar al-Assad to Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, had both his hands broken in an attack yesterday by masked gunmen who dragged the 60-year-old out of his car.
Ali Ferzat, whose satirical art once drew death threats from Saddam Hussein, was treated in hospital. He was attack as he left his Damascus studio at four o’clock yesterday morning.
Beijing is two cities. One is of power and of money. People don’t care who their neighbors are; they don’t trust you. The other city is one of desperation. I see people on public buses, and I see their eyes, and I see they hold no hope. They can’t even imagine that they’ll be able to buy a house. They come from very poor villages where they’ve never seen electricity or toilet paper.
Every year millions come to Beijing to build its bridges, roads, and houses. Each year they build a Beijing equal to the size of the city in 1949. They are Beijing’s slaves. They squat in illegal structures, which Beijing destroys as it keeps expanding. Who owns houses? Those who belong to the government, the coal bosses, the heads of big enterprises. They come to Beijing to give gifts—and the restaurants and karaoke parlors and saunas are very rich as a result.
The chief executive of the Cordoba Foundation says a WikiLeaks report which accuses the U.S. forces of killing ten people in cold blood in Iraq in 2006 is just the tip of the iceberg.
There’s been a sudden explosion of interest in Wikileaks cables down under, after every single one of the US diplomatic cables on Australia was suddenly released online to the public this week. While hardened Aussie journalists insist there are no major “bombshells,” plenty of intriguing new stories are now exploding onto the media landscape. Overall, the US cables reveal a sovereign nation absurdly subservient to US foreign policy, with Australian ministers queuing to discuss confidential party deliberations with their friends in the US embassy.
Israeli experts downplayed the security risk posed by the leaked documents, which name alleged Israeli, Iranian and Jordanian intelligence agents, but said that WikiLeaks has definitely taken a more brazen stand vis-א-vis Washington.
Australian Attorney General Robert McClelland bemoans having his department being publicly caught out, ratting out, 23 Australians to the US embassy without due process.
ATTORNEY-GENERAL Robert McClelland has accused WikiLeaks of “incredibly irresponsible” conduct after the self-styled whistleblower group released a cable that named 23 Australians accused by ASIO of having contact with Yemeni terror group al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula.
A recently released WikiLeaks cable from 2006 reveals 120 Chinese children vanished from Swedish immigration centers within a period of 18 months.
The Embassy of Stockholm believes the disappearing acts were managed by organized traffickers residing in several European countries.
The children — ages 10 to 18 — arrived in Sweden unaccompanied and, oftentimes, without travel documents, to seek political asylum. They all claimed they had relatives who were victims of religious persecution and seemed “very professionally coached” during questioning, according to a Swedish official.
SIX women living in Australia have been named by American intelligence agencies as potential targets of an al-Qaeda plot to recruit women for terror attacks, according to a diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks.
By settling for cheap technology, China has “vastly increased” the risk of a nuclear accident, claim diplomatic cables from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, The Guardian newspaper reports.
The U.S. Embassy cables from August 2008, released by WikiLeaks, warned that China’s choice of technology would be a century old by the time dozens of China’s reactors come to the end of their lifespan.
Dr. John Harte is based at the University of California-Berkeley Department of Environmental Science, Policy & Management. With a PhD in physics, his research encompasses the most serious biochemical and climate-ecosystem feedback processes of global warming and theoretical ecology. He has been at the forefront, for decades, of some of the most important studies pertaining to the biological impacts – particularly in alpine environments – of climate change, as well as humanity’s role in the disruption of critical ecosystems.
The challenges poor and homeless Americans often face accessing clean drinking water and restroom facilities violate international human rights standards, according to a report issued by a United Nations investigator this month.
Catarina de Albuquerque, a U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Human Right to Water and Sanitation, visited the United States in late February at the invitation of the U.S. government.
MATT TAIBBI: Under the authority of the enforcement division. Now, this—there’s no legal authority to do this. And, you know, apparently, according to my sources, this was illegal. You can’t just unilaterally shred any government document, no matter how insignificant. And these are significant law enforcement investigatory files that they were unilaterally destroying.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about just what the SEC does, the Securities and Exchange Commission.
MATT TAIBBI: Well, they police the financial markets. They’re the main cops on the beat on Wall Street. It’s basically a two-tiered structure. It’s—you know, for Wall Street crime, it’s the SEC and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York are the two main sort of policing organizations that prevent things like insider trading, market manipulation, securities fraud. They also make sure that all publicly traded corporations—they have to make regular disclosures, you know, every year, and they make sure that those disclosures are accurate, that you don’t have an Enron situation, for instance, where a company is reporting profits that they don’t have and hiding losses that they do have. The SEC is supposed to be the number one cop on the beat preventing all of this stuff. And if they’re not doing their job, which they apparently haven’t been, you know, what results is a situation like 2008, where just corruption overwhelms the markets, and you have this explosion of, you know, a lack of confidence all around the globe.
The first-ever audit of the U.S. Federal Reserve has revealed 16 trillion dollars in secret bank bailouts and has raised more questions about the quasi-private agency’s opaque operations.
It is a blow to the FT, whose apps had processed subscription transactions independently. Last year, 10 percent of its new digital subscriptions were taken out on iPads. But the publisher says its model is premised on owning data about customers that goes through along with transactions. This was more important to it than Apple’s 30 percent take, CEO John Ridding told me recently.
This means it’s now possible to run homebrew & backups on all Xbox 360s, no matter which firmware is loaded, in the past this was only possible on Xbox 360s with a certain firmware-level. This also opens the possibility to run quite easily Linux on your Xbox 360!
The Linux community has been united around the globe over the last few weeks in celebration of the 20th Anniversary of Linux. As we head into a new decade, many of The Linux Foundation’s members are looking for Linux talent to help advance the OS for everything from cloud computing to virtualization and super computing to embedded development and mobile computing.
Dusty Phillips certainly falls into the power user category and his answers reflect that status. Dusty runs a tight system that’s optimized for his workflow. And it’s fascinating that he does so much with just one machine.
There’s a variety of features and other enhancements to OpenBenchmarking.org that are still forthcoming. I’ve been talking about several of them over the past six months that I look forward to implementing as soon as time allows.
If you’re thinking about trying out the Ubuntu 11.10 Beta release later in the week or are beginning to wonder about what the graphics driver options for Ubuntu 11.10 “Oneiric Ocelot” when released in October, here’s a collection of information you’ll want to know about the graphics drivers to be found in Ubuntu 11.10.
[...]
The Linux 3.1 kernel isn’t making it out for a few more weeks and just before the final release, so Canonical is playing it safe and sticking to the Linux 3.0 kernel although the still-in-development release does provide some nice improvements to the DRM graphics drivers and other areas of the kernel. Users can manually upgrade to the Linux 3.1 kernel and it should be relatively safe.
If you’re watching your weight, monitoring your health and dietary habits, or simply unconvinced by flashy food labels that don’t tell the whole story, this is the project for you. According to the Web site:
Double Commander is a very interesting cross-platform file manager inspired by Total Commander (it even supports Total Commander plugins). It uses two panels side by side and comes with a huge feature list: tabbed interface, multi-rename tool, embedded terminal, internal text editor and file viewer, browse archives (ZIP, TGZ, LZMA, RPM, RAR, DEB, etc.), extended search and is fully customizable.
Recently word spread like wildfire across the net that Linus Torvalds, Father of Linux himself, had proclaimed GNOME 3 an “Unholy Mess.” The hatred for all things GNOME 3 didn’t stop there. Pundits, grand-standers, tinkerers, and media-types alike went on and on about how GNOME 3 had become nothing more than a failure. At the same time, Ubuntu Unity had been given a similar title as a nearly worthless desktop.
Let’s step back in time a year or so ago when KDE 4 came out of the starting gate. Yes it was hampered by a complete rewrite, but like it’s GNOME brethren, KDE was lambasted as too buggy to ever work correctly.
“World must be crazy” say fellow hackers when realized that one day I left Samsung’s Linux Mobile Lab to work on Smart Refrigerators.
But well, it’s still in the same company, the same city. Yet this does not mean I am stopping to dig in Linux stuff for living: we’re talking about Linux fridges.
However, there is something even less expected: these are full four-doors Qt fridges. I dare to say, except for cars or airplanes with infotainment modules, for me these cooling monsters are one of the biggest ‘Qt devices’ available on the consumer market.
Owen Taylor announced a new version of the GNOME Shell and Mutter releases this afternoon for what will be incorporated into the GNOME 3.2 desktop. While it’s late in the development cycle with the final GNOME 3.2 release coming next month and the beta release being set for Wednesday, the Mutter 3.1.90 carries two important changes along with prominent changes to the GNOME Shell.
Lost in all the news of and attention paid to Mandriva 2011, a new distribution was added to the Distrowatch database. This Ubuntu-based distribution is designed to provide users the means to “create stunning graphics, captivating videos, inspiring music, and professional websites.” Version 11.04 was released the other day, so let’s take a peek.
After several months of delays, the developers have released Mandriva 2011. The distribution includes Linux kernel version 2.6.38.7 and X.org 7.6 with X Server 1.10.3. Systemd has replaced the traditional SysVinit in version 2011.
Mandriva 2011.0 also introduces the PiTiVi video editor, replaces DigiKam with the Shotwell photo manager, incorporates KNetworkManager, and guts out KDE’s Amarok for the Clementine music player instead. KMail has also been ditched for Mozilla Thunderbird.
This spin of Sabayon on the other hand, although the better one, feels average when compared to other KDE 4 distributions like Kubuntu, Kanotix, Debian and in particular when compared to SimplyMEPIS which is just unreal. SalixOS does KDE 4 faster with only 512 MB ram. Kongoni is snappier and also allows to compile updates and any additions via its ports system. So does Slackware with sbopkg. So choose your poison, if for whatever reason you like Sabayon more than any other distribution you’re going to use it anyway, regardless the resource usage and speed. (Slightly updated 30/08/11 15:03)
With the iPad, Apple started a new revolution in the world of technology. Swarms of Apple-fans and tech enthusiasts ran to the Apple store just to grab, what was then, simply a bigger version of the iPhone. While the iPad may have been a big success worldwide, it has undoubtedly touted its competitors to come up with tablet computers of their own.
Although essentially every other software company (except Microsoft of course) has been relying on the good old Android, there have been some whispers about the porting of Ubuntu to these sleek gadgets. What’s more, a Chinese company is already working on a fully functional Ubuntu-powered tablet computer.
As professors and librarians in the United States await a judge’s ruling on a copyright lawsuit by publishers against Georgia State University over its e-reserves practices, a similarly themed battle in Canada has seen a number of high-profile research universities walk out on licensing agreements with that country’s major copyright clearinghouse.
More than a dozen Canadian universities — including heavyweights such as the University of British Columbia, the University of Calgary and York University — have said they will not renew their agreements with Access Copyright, a government-created nonprofit that sells licenses to its library of copyright-cleared content.
Fujitsu and Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo will next month release an Android tablet you could use in the bathtub, featuring a 10.1 inch touchscreen and dual-core Texas Instruments OMAP4430 processor, according to the Datacider.com website. Meanwhile, Toshiba’s poised to release a slimmer followup to its chunky Thrive, according to a Notebook Italia report.
Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) could sell anywhere between 3 million and 5 million Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android tablets in the fourth quarter, making it far and away the most successful slate provider on the open-source platform, according to Forrester Research.
Fujitsu, known for making lower-end computers and other devices, is apparently ready to throw its hat into the Android tablet game, with the Fujitsu “Arrows Tab,” a rugged Honeycomb tablet. They’ve announced the 10.1-inch device, and it’s set to launch next month on NTT DoCoMo, a Japanese carrier. The tablet could have HSPA, UMTS, and LTE connectivity, as well as GSM and GPRS capabilities, for roaming and such. The Arrows Tab will also be packing a TI IMAP 4430 1GHz dual-core processor, so it won’t be slow by any means.
One of the biggest obstacles Toshiba faces with the Thrive is that the company has no Android presence to help the company gain a foothold. They have no track record of Android phones or tablets to speak of and nothing reputable to bring to the table. At $429 the 16GB version is roughly $70 less than its Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 counterpart. Is it worth paying the extra money for Samsung’s 10-inch tablet? That depends on what’s most important to you. Do you want a functional tablet with great hardware and function? Or do you need to look cool and hip with the slimmest, sexiest tablet on the market?
OSFA recently celebrated its second anniversary and would once again like to recognize some of the individuals, projects and deployments that support OSFA’s mission.
I have a pathological use of browser tabs: I use a lot of them. A lot is probably an understatement. We could say I use them as bookmarks of things I need to track. A couple weeks ago, I was saying I had around two hundred tabs opened. I now actually have much more.
It affected startup until I discovered that setting the browser.sessionstore.max_concurrent_tabs pref to 0 was making things much better by only loading tabs when they are selected. This preference has/will become browser.sessionstore.restore_on_demand. However, since I only start my main browser once a day, while other applications start and while I begin to read email, I hadn’t noticed that this was still heavily affecting startup time: about:startup tells me reaching the sessionRestored state takes seven seconds, even on a warm startup.
One of our main goals during this developement cycle was to continue improving Empathy’s user experience by re-designing different parts of the UI. To do so our Empathy team at Collabora worked closely with designers from the awesome GNOME Design Team.
Mozilla has released the first beta of version 7.0 of its open source Thunderbird news and email client. The Beta channel release adds the ability to print a summary of selected messages and brings several improvements to the user interface. Other changes include updates to attachment handling and various Gecko platform fixes.
As big data becomes more and more top of mind, a number of new companies have popped up to support Hadoop, the leading open-source platform for data-intensive distributed applications. One of the newer entrants is Hortonworks, a company spun out of Yahoo, with a $15 million-plus cash infusion from both Yahoo and Benchmark Capital.
Citrix acquired Cloud.Com in July. As an independent entity Cloud.Com had been holding some software proprietary. Now, to win new business, Citrix is opening the entire code base.
The US Government met with European competition officials to lobby on behalf of Oracle during its purchase of Sun Microsystems, according to leaked diplomatic cables.
The cables, released this week by whistleblowing site Wikileaks, reveal that the Obama administration had monitored the European Union’s investigation into the competition issues that could arise from the merger and tried to convince them to let the deal go ahead.
The EU had investigated the merger due to concerns for the future of Java and the open source MySQL database.
The Veterans Affairs Department is set to make its open source agent operational Tuesday and make available the software code of various applications in the electronic health records of VA and the Defense Department.
Users of the applications will also have a method to report back to the open source agent changes to the software.
This article continues series of reviews of non-Linux operating systems which you can find existing. Another big family of OSes is based on BSD core. PCBSD, BSDanywhere, FreeSBIE… you can read more about them. It’s time to start our today’s adventure.
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Forum, Documentation and FAQ sections are pretty much empty on official site. I have not found any information about LiveUSB creation process for GhostBSD in the Internet either.
Finally, I decided to look at DVD-RW option. This means the test could only be carried out on Toshiba L500 laptop. Expectedly, it would be a hard task for BSD since not every Linux distribution worked fine on that laptop so far. This laptop has Realtek 8191 WiFi card which is not the most popular among free open source software developers. But let’s talk about this later.
While the Slovak Republic is slowly moving forward on the issue of open licenses, Romania appears to have taken a step backwards. The Romanian Ministry of Internal Affairs recently banned open source solutions from a public tender of almost 3 milion euro due to ‘internal and European interoperability requirements’. The tender specifically says “All versions of software that are part of the offer may not be published under a ‘free software license’ – GPL or similar”.
In what has become an annual tradition, Microsoft celebrated the start of the VMworld show in Las Vegas this week with more satirical bashing of VMware. This year Microsoft launched a Web site called VMlimited in which it likens VMware to a guy who still thinks it’s circa 1977. However, Microsoft’s viewpoint doesn’t jive with the news of new partnerships and wares streaming out of the VMworld show this year.
Disney’s best-selling Cars toys are being made in a factory in China that uses child labour and forces staff to do three times the amount of overtime allowed by law, according to an investigation.
One worker reportedly killed herself after being repeatedly shouted at by bosses. Others cited worries over poisonous chemicals. Disney has now launched its own investigation.
It is claimed some of the 6,000 employees have to work an extra 120 hours every month to meet demand from western shops for the latest toys.
It made headlines when historian Susan M. Reverby of Wellesley College discovered a decades-old program run from by the U.S. Public Health Service’s studies in Guatemala from 1946 to 1948. That’s because the researchers deliberately inoculated subjects with syphilis in order to study sexually transmitted disease, and they did so without informed consent for the procedure.
The Justice Department is refusing to release legal memos the George W. Bush administration used to justify his warrantless surveillance program, one of the most contentious civil liberties issues during the Republican president’s time in office.
In responding to a Freedom of Information Act request, the department is withholding two legal analyses by then-government lawyer John Yoo, and is revealing just eight sentences from a third Yoo memo dated Nov. 2, 2001. That memo is at least 21 pages long.
The communication logs show the admirable but futile efforts of UN Special Rapporteurs to gain answers and information on horrific incidents of torture and possible war crimes or crimes against humanity. The incidents Special Rapporteurs are seeking information about are not necessarily unknown, but what makes them significant is how the US has done little if not nothing to address and investigate the killings of journalists in the Iraq War.
CNN is reporting that recent Wikileaks cables have revealed that Apple assembled an anti-counterfeit team in 2008 to combat counterfeited iPhones and iPod touches. Apple’s early plans to attack Chinese counterfeits were to go after retailers and street vendors, work with police to raid manufacturing facilities, and to go after online retailers.
This is the story of Daniel Berg aka Daniel Schmitt aka Daniel Domscheit-Berg, one of the many collaborators with WikiLeaks in the ‘nascent period’ up to but not including the big releases of 2010.
Daniel was an employee of the US storage giant EDS in Rüsselheim Germany when he heard about WikiLeaks. Daniel’s not a programmer – and certainly not a hacker – but seemed to ‘dabble’ in political topics such as ‘anarchy’ and transparency.
But we’re getting ahead of our story. The following data was culled over the past few months when the opportunity (and the inclination) came to research Daniel’s bizarre life and relationship with WikiLeaks and the website’s founder Julian Assange. All items are referenced online save Domscheit’s own book.
On of the sneakier parts of ACTA is that the White House has insisted from the beginning that the document is not a binding treaty. Instead, it insists that ACTA is merely an “executive agreement.” Of course, the only real difference is that an executive agreement doesn’t require the Senate to ratify it. Basically, the US is calling it an executive agreement so that the administration can sign on without any oversight or scrutiny on the treaty. The Europeans, in the meantime, never got the “ix-nay on the inding-bay eaty-tray” notice from the US folks, and have been happily declaring ACTA a binding treaty as it clearly is.
However, many legal experts have noted that this raises serious constitutional questions, as the Constitution simply does not allow this kind of agreement to be signed without Senate approval. Amusingly, Senator Biden — back during the previous administration — was one of the leading voices in trying to prevent President Bush from signing an “executive agreement” with Russia, without getting Senate approval. One wonders if he’s magically changed his mind.
More and more people want the patent system to stop
Summary: An overview of articles and posts about the subject which affects GNU/Linux and Free software the most nowadays
THE MORE the corporate press complains about patents, the more involved the public will become and the better informed people will be. It is gratifying to see big publishers voicing scepticism of the current patent system and even lawyers’ site acknowledge that we may be approaching the end of software patents, even in the United States (watch patenting maximalists try to be objective). Quoting Law.com:
A closely watched appellate ruling invalidating broad software patents claims because they covered “unpatentable mental processes” isn’t as straightforward as it seems, Silicon Valley lawyers say.
The Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals’ Aug. 16 ruling in CyberSource v. Retail Decisions, 2009-1358, leaves room for debate about what kinds of business methods can be patented, thanks to one word: practicality.
Business methods that could be performed by the human mind still could be patentable because, as a practical matter, they have to be done on a computer, the court said. Figuring out what processes meet that criteria could lead to heated court battles in the months ahead, lawyers predict.
This court ruling is important and it is likely to be brought up in the future. In the mean time we have bloggers hammering on the system quite hard. Andrew’s highly-cited post, which protests against the patent system, concludes with:
The question is, what do we do when we have to keep playing the game, given the endemic problem of the emergence of strategies that subvert the intent of the game.
Lodsys has been another driver of backlash against the patent system, not just in the US but also in countries where developers make software they sell in the States. Here is Groklaw‘s latest take on the subject:
In the latest filing by Lodsys [PDF] in response to the Apple motion to intervene in the Lodsys v. Combay case, Lodsys gives every indication it is in a panic to keep Apple from intervening. Much of the document is redacted, but despite that fact we can glean the sense that Apple’s entry into the lawsuit spoils Lodsys’s entire theory of the litigation, at least with respect to the Apple (and likely Google) developers.
The EU could see the introduction of software patent wars seen in the US if it continues with plans for a ‘unitary patent’.
According to Richard Matthew Stallman, writing at the Guardian, there is a very real danger that software patents could be enforced across the whole of Europe (with the exceptions of Italy and Spain), should the unitary patent system go ahead.
The introduction of such patents would have the potential to be highly detrimental to the development of software, and the recent Hargreaves Report urged strongly against them.
However as Stallman says there are concerns that under EU plans the European Patent Office would be given the green light to issue software patents that would be valid automatically in many European states.
It is important to squash software patents in the USPTO before it spreads like an organism to other continents. █
New trouble for Željko Topić in Strasbourg, making it yet another EPO Vice-President who is on shaky grounds and paving the way to managerial collapse/avalanche at the EPO
The utter lack of participation, involvement or even intervention by German authorities serve to confirm that the government of Germany is very much complicit in the EPO's abuses, by refusing to do anything to stop them
Another example of UPC promotion from within the EPO (a committee dedicated to UPC promotion), in spite of everything we know about opposition to the UPC from small businesses (not the imaginary ones which Team UPC claims to speak 'on behalf' of)
Uploaded by SUEPO earlier today was the above video, which shows how last year's party (actually 2015) was spoiled for Battistelli by the French State Secretary for Digital Economy, Axelle Lemaire, echoing the French government's concern about union busting etc. at the EPO (only to be rudely censored by Battistelli's 'media partner')
In violation of international labour laws, Team Battistelli marches on and engages in a union-busting race against the clock, relying on immunity to keep this gravy train rolling before an inevitable crash
A new year's reminder that the EPO has only one legitimate union, the Staff Union of the EPO (SUEPO), whereas FFPE-EPO serves virtually no purpose other than to attack SUEPO, more so after signing a deal with the devil (Battistelli)
Orwellian misuse of terms by the EPO, which keeps using the term "social democracy" whilst actually pushing further and further towards a totalitarian regime led by 'King' Battistelli
The paradigm of totalitarian control, inability to admit mistakes and tendency to lie all the time is backfiring on the EPO rather than making it stronger
An outline of recent stories about patents, where patent quality is key, reflecting upon the population's interests rather than the interests of few very powerful corporations
The role played by Heiko Maas in the UPC, which would harm businesses and people all across Europe, is becoming clearer and hence his motivation/desire to keep Team Battistelli in tact, in spite of endless abuses on German soil
The latest facts and figures about software patents, compared to the spinmeisters' creed which they profit from (because they are in the litigation business)
The US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) is planning to weigh in on a case which will quite likely drive patent trolls out of the Eastern District of Texas, where all the courts that are notoriously friendly towards them reside
The scope of patents in the United States is rapidly tightening (meaning, fewer patents are deemed acceptable by the courts) and Fitbit’s patent case is the latest case to bite the dust
Pretending there is a violent, physical threat that is imminent, Paranoid in Chief Benoît Battistelli is alleged to have pursued weapons on EPO premises
A look at actions taken at a political level against the EPO in spite of the EPO's truly awkward exemption from lawfulness or even minimal accountability
Selective emphasis on very few cases and neglect of various other dimensions help create a parallel reality (or so-called 'fake news') where software patents are on the rebound
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