08.07.09
Posted in News Roundup at 9:09 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The filing adds Linux distro vendors Canonical, the sponsor of Ubuntu, and Red Hat (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), to the list of competitors for Microsoft’s Client division. Previously, Red Hat was listed only as a competitor for its Microsoft Business and Server & Tools divisions, writes Bishop.
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Ferguson goes on to say that to avoid copyright restrictions, he and the designers are only able to consider concepts and original slogans, not images or artwork. Once all the collaboration is over and design decisions are made, free t-shirts will be given to anyone who contributed a chosen design.
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So I looked at GNUcash, which I remember playing with back in my early induction into the Linux community. GNUcash is much more complex then HomeBank and would be an excellent alternative to proprietary paid financial managers.
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Desktop
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Now Peter Kirn has captured Cascone’s conversion story on createdigitalmusic.com. Interesting about the article is not only the facts of Cascone’s conversion, but the comments accompanying it that contain numerous tips and information on sound processing under Linux.
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Applications
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Though Linux comes in many different flavors, there are a common string of favorite apps that seem to unite all users.
These apps are high-quality, versatile, professional, reliable, and often available in many different packages (deb, rpm, etc). If you’re new to the Linux game, or simply want a list of programs that have been re-verified as excellent by many hundreds of users, this article is for you. To download and install the apps, just go to your built-in package manager.
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People who do use a GUI should do so knowing the risks of exploitations and security and try to keep a system updated and use the GUI only when needed.
If you aren’t actively sitting at the machine, stop the x server until you need to use it again. This will go a long way to improving overall resourcefulness and productivity.
It doesn’t need to be a fight. Use the system how it works best for you. Just make sure you know all the facts going in to be the best prepared as possible.
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Desktop Environments
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This year’s Gran Canaria Desktop Summit represented the first time the GNOME and KDE communities have co-located their annual conferences in the same location. 852 free software advocates from 46 countries gathered together last month to discuss and enhance the free desktop experience at the first ever Gran Canaria Desktop Summit.
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That probably covers the main features in the release especially the ones I’ve liked. Overall its is stable and the KDE developers themselves have said – “KDE 4.3 offers a more stable and complete product for the home and small office.” I think this was the release we were all waiting for in terms of stability and features as well.
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The way we use computers is changing, but Linux isn’t standing still. Tiny Core is a minimal Linux distribution that boots a complete live system for every day use. Its foundation and unique approach to the desktop helps it achieve certain goals like preventing system rot and ensuring your system is fresh every time it boots.
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Although Tiny Core is a relatively new distro, it has a great deal of history behind it already. It is developing at a rapid pace and implementing new features along the way. It really can change the way you think about running Linux over a more traditional method. It’s an exciting project and really worth playing with. It’s lots of fun and it does deliver on its promises. Try it out and see how fast, stable, clean and fun a Linux system can be!
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A few hours ago Slackware’s creator, Patrick Volkerding, announced that the second release candidate of the upcoming Slackware 13.0 Linux distribution was available for download. This update brings numerous new base packages, like the Linux kernel version 2.6.29.6, X.Org Server 1.6.3 and the K Desktop Environment 4.2.4. However, there are no official ISO builds for this release, but those interested in testing Slackware 13.0 RC2 can get it by using the link at the end of the article.
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Suitable For: Beginner, intermediate or advanced Linux users. Highly recommended for beginners.
Summary: A terrific alternative to the Gnome version of Linux Mint 7 for KDE users.
Rating: 4/5
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Red Hat
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Whole Foods Market was named a finalist in open-source solution provider Red Hat’s Third Annual Innovation Awards, which recognize the outstanding use, innovation and extension of Red Hat and JBoss solutions by Red Hat customers, partners and the open-source community.
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Denx announced the first Xenomai User Meeting, which will co-locate with OSADL’s Eleventh Real Time Linux Workshop (RTLWS11) in Dresden, Germany, on Sep. 28-30. The Xenomai meeting will showcase this major real-time Linux extension alternative to PREEMPT RT — and maybe help make peace between the warring camps.
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Phones
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The MyTouch 3G (pictured at right) is the first Android phone to ship out of the box with the new and much improved Android 1.5 “cupcake” release of the Linux/Java mobile platform. T-Mobile has also added its own additional apps and UI elements on top of Android, although the additions are not nearly as extensive as those offered in the Sense UI made available on HTC’s upcoming Hero phone.
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Opera Mini is available for Android now, and the Android browser itself is pretty darn good. Opera Mobile is a nice browser, and it works with the Opera servers to make mobile browsing lightning fast.
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Sub-notebooks
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At its core, Google’s new desktop, netbook, smartphone OS is built around Google’s just introduced Chrome browser and will debut by the second half of 2010.
It will initially be targeted at the low-cost netbook market, although it will eventually migrate to the PC segment, an area long dominated by Microsoft, which is planning to roll out the latest version of its Windows OS later this year.
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We already experimented with WebKit in the past, but moved to Gecko because of the better integration with most of the sites out there; Aaron is using Clutter inside “Cubano”, a media player based on the Banshee framework and mostly targeted at platforms like netbooks.
The GNOME Shell project, which is considered one of the major new features of the future GNOME 3.0 release, is using Clutter for the UI and as part of the window manager, just like the Moblin netbook user experience is. GNOME Shell alone would expose something between hundreds of thousands and millions of users to Clutter.
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The 2009 Open Source CMS Award was launched today, inviting people to visit www.PacktPub.com and submit nominations for their favorite Open Source Content Management Systems. Now in its fourth year, the Award has helped to support a variety of Content Management Systems gain recognition in a crowded and high quality marketplace.
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An amazing Open Video Conference in New York earlier this year brought together video creators, technology hackers, entrepreneurs, and others to address the crossroads of open source/open content/open society and the facts of digital media technologies, file formats, standards, and the legal/regulatory climate. At the same time, the amazing Mozilla project demonstrated their support for the <video> tag. Companies like SpectSoft are creating amazing, high-spec VTRs and DDRs (running Linux, natch), and now Blackmagic Design announces Linux SDKs for several video interface products. Finally, video is becoming a technology that sits where mainstream hackers can play!
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We were eager to know what’s happening with Firefox. Mike Beltzner, the open-source browser’s director, was glad to tell us. Here’s what he had to say about future features, competition with Chrome, and keeping all of Firefox contributors in sync.
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Note that releasing your code as BSD for a project that has or may have GPL code doesn’t protect your code from being dual-licensed in an unfavorable way. The only way to ensure full freedom for others is to only donate your code under a contributor agreement with a clause as suggested below or to a project that has agreeable guidelines for how they license their code!
To assure our users, contributors, and customers of how we at Monty Program Ab intend to re-license the code we produce or the code people donate to us, I have added the following note to our contributor agreement:
“Monty Program Ab agrees that when it dual licenses code, it will not restrict the way the third party licensee uses the licensed copy of the code nor restrict how they use their own code.”
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The move is a response to a slowdown in security spending during the recession. PC World reports that Websense plans to lay off 70 people from its worldwide workforce of 1,400.
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Literature
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Either way, given those statements, perhaps it’s no surprise at all that Murdoch is now planning to put paywalls across all his online news properties in the relatively near future. Apparently the plan will be based on the WSJ model, meaning that some stories were be available for free, but there will be severe limits. Given how many old school newspaper guys have talked about putting up a paywall, this isn’t much of a surprise (though, it is still odd given his comments from two years ago).
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In October, Google settled a lawsuit from the US Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers over its Book Search project, which that seeks to digitize the works inside the world’s libraries. Still awaiting court approval after an October hearing, it would – among other things – give the company a unique license to scan and sell and post ads against orphan works, titles whose rights holders can’t be found.
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Congratulations to the Smithsonian for thinking about the future lives of their content in such a sustainable fashion. We’re very excited to see the future developments that the Smithsonian Commons brings to free culture on an institutional scale.
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Imaginary Property Issues
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In light of these concerns, I fail to see why Amherst or any other city should be in the business of licensing video arcades. And even if they are doing so for tax purposes, they shouldn’t be using that power to censor arcade games or shutting down businesses that offer such games.
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What a stupendous waste of time, money and resources. But it shows what a ridiculous society we’ve created, where intellectual property law means that you can’t have a McDonald’s appear anywhere in the background in a movie. I’m sure that’s exactly what our founding fathers were concerned about when they put in place the constitutional clause about “promoting the progress.”
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Chester French isn’t your typical rock band. Singer D.A. Wallach and multi-instrumentalist Max Drummey met as freshmen at Harvard, where lanky, longhaired Drummey majored in social anthropology and twee, preppy Wallach graduated as the top student in the school’s African-American Studies program. In the video for their best-known song, “She Loves Everybody,” a pretty girl punches the stuffing out of the two helpless weaklings, leaving them bloody-nosed among their broken guitars and drums.
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Instead of giving interviews to reporters or dropping by radio stations, Wallach spends most of his time online, going through an average 100 to 200 e-mail messages a day. “We respond to every single e-mail we get,” he said. “I do an hour in the morning and an hour at night.
Luis Casas Luengo, Director of Extremadura’s Fundecyt foundation 20 (2004)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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08.06.09
Posted in News Roundup at 4:27 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Solution #10 – Recent efforts by 4chan to stop AT&T censorship has inspired me to start a “Spread FOSS” campaign as a meta-campaign for all free and open source software. Similar to Spread Firefox, but much more powerful and with much more exposure. 4chan was successful in bringing the issue to light because they had a majority of their community working towards the same goal of spreading awareness. Jack Wallen asks Why aren’t schools adopting open source? and the answer is simply exposure to open source. Getting thousands of students to call and write to schools asking for FOSS in the education system, getting FOSS to be a trending topic on twitter and other social networking websites, getting thousands of people to give out Linux Distribution CD’s on the streets; now that is exposure. The kind of exposure FOSS needs.
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So volunteers and computer donars, please bring this article to the attention of a charity you know of. Charity workers, please contact your local LUG people (Linux User Group) for technical help. The technological solutions these LUG (or FLOSS) people offer may not be exactly the same as what I propose here. (Google for mk-boot-usb for technical details of my proposal.) For example, Sugar on a Stick, a technology related to the MIT’s charity project OLPC, is also a bootable usb key. Its emphasis is more on the logic, programming, and social network aspects of education, but I was told that interesting geometry learning tools such as Dr. Geo may also be included. Some may offer FreeBSD or Open Solaris as equally powerful alternatives to GNU/Linux on a usb key. Yet others may propose DRBL or LTSP for different technical considerations. The latter two technologies are equally ethical and educational choices as they are also FLOSS, although arguablly they may have less powerful social impacts in the long run.
Charity is a spiritual endeavor that not only empowers the helped, but also inspires and elevates the helpers and the spectators like me. When it comes to the choice of computer software for donation, it requires a conscious and moral consideration of the chosen technology’s ethical and philosophical foundation as well as its long term social consequences. Many of us in the FLOSS community look forward to contributing to your great cause if you make the right choice.
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This issue includes…
PCLXDE: The PCLinuxOS LXDE 2009 Remaster
Master The Remaster
Repo Spotlight: addlocale and GetOpenOffice
Behind The Scenes: Up Close With Old-Polack
Through The Lens: Scanners With PCLinuxOS
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Early registration closes on Aug. 15 for the Linux Foundation’s inaugural LinuxCon event, scheduled for Sept. 21-23, 2009, in Portland, Oregon. LinuxCon intends to draw a mix of end-users, administrators, and top Linux developers, with speakers including Linus Torvalds, Mark Shuttleworth, and Greg Kroah-Hartman (pictured).
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I don’t know if Mr. O’Connor is serious or just having some fun. He does have some weird ideas about the purpose of the command line and computers in general. A lot of people make the exact same sweeping claims in all seriousness, as though they were spokespeople for a Silent and Dimwitted Computing Majority, and insist that until Linux is so easy that an unconscious person can use it it will never succeed. In my opinion it’s a matter of how willing a particular individual is to learn; some folks just plain don’t want to try. Which is their privilege, but as long as they’re using a computer for any reason it makes no sense to resist learning how to use it efficiently. But then, trying to make sense of human behavior is a futile task, so I’m not going to think about it too much.
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The two European Air Navigation Service Providers skyguide and Croatia Control Ltd. had ordered several new ARTAS systems based on the latest baseline Linux G5. In July the new redundant trackers have successfully been delivered to Geneva, Wangen and Zagreb.
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Mentor Graphics announced the availability of a combined open-source Linux and Nucleus operating system (OS) solution for the Marvell Sheeva MV78200 Dual-core Embedded Processor.
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For now, these will be my list of Linux newbie guides. I hope that newbies and not-so-new Linux users will benefit from these guides. After all, there’s something new that we could learn each day.
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Audio
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In this episode: SUSE Studio is out; Debian adopts timed releases, should we be giving coverage to companies who don’t support Linux and should geeks prefer Free internet services over free internet services?
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On this week’s show: Fab pits the iPhone against the Samsung I7500 Android phone, Podcasting gets patented, Alan Cox and Linus Torvalds get in a row, Debian gets time-based freezes and Microsoft once again confuses the hell out of everybody.
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Desktop
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Linux Against Poverty amassed for us almost 100 ready-to-go computers. Plug ‘em in and they are ready to go to work. It was in every sense of the word, a blessing.
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Cloud computing is being hailed as a disruptive technology that will improve business and IT productivity. But emerging cloud architectures still call for delivering the computing experience through dedicated PCs, which threaten to keep costs high. NComputing virtual desktops offer an economical alternative—a $70 endpoint access device that is ideal for cloud computing.
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The company recently announced its work on the new Google Chrome OS, a lightweight OS that sits atop a Linux kernel and will run on X86 and ARM chips.
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HPC
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Linux magazine HPC Editor Douglas Eadline had a chance recently to discuss the current state of HPC clusters with Beowulf pioneer Don Becker, Founder and Chief Technical Officer, Scyld Software (now Part of Penguin Computing). For those that may have come to the HPC party late, Don was a co-founder of the original Beowulf project, which is the cornerstone for commodity-based high-performance cluster computing. Don’s work in parallel and distributed computing began in 1983 at MIT’s Real Time Systems group. He is known throughout the international community of operating system developers for his contributions to networking software and as the driving force behind beowulf.org.
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Adaptive’s Moab software is widely used in high performance computing, including 12 of the 20 fastest computers on the Top 500 supercomputer list.
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“As the needs of the data center change throughout the day for different types of application services, we can actually repurpose resources to different operating system characteristics, whether that’s from Linux to Windows or between versions of Linux with different drivers,” he said.
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Kernel Space
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Interestingly, BTRFS was initially developed by Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) — which is acquiring Sun — but is now licensed under the GPL and is thoroughly in the open source community, open for contribution from anyone. It is described on its own project pages as “a new copy on write file system for Linux aimed at implementing advanced features while focusing on fault tolerance, repair and easy administration.”
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Although some X.org drivers have been updated for X server 1.7, development work is running behind schedule. New drivers from AMD, Intel and Nvidia and new Linux versions mean a number of corrections and enhancements in the graphics system. 3D support for newer Radeon GPUs is now adequate for Compiz. DRBD should make it into the main Linux kernel development tree in 2.6.32.
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Applications
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I have preschool aged kids who like to play games so I’m always looking around to try new ones. One game we’ve been playing for a while is SuperTux. SuperTux is styled after the classic Super Mario Bros games and features their classic sidescrolling action.
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Although WordNet comes with a graphical browser, it can only be described as bare-bones. The browser doesn’t offer any kind of desktop integration, and there is no support for color coding, rich text formatting, or hyperlinking. But thanks to Artha, you don’t have to put up with these limitations. This nifty little dictionary tool wraps the WordNet database into a user-friendly interface and offers a few neat features that can help you to make the most of WordNet.
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Browsers
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Linux/Windows: Whilst Mozilla is working hard to bring tabbed emails on an improved Thunderbird 3, amongst many other new features — tabbed emails are already present in pre-releases of Thunderbird 3, ThunderBrowse will add a new feature to Thunderbird 2 you didn’t miss, until now, when you read this.
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If you have anything to do with IT or computers you know about the Google Chrome browser. No matter where you stand on your opinion of Google, you can not deny the Chrome browser is fast. In fact, Chrome is setting the standard for browser speed such that the competition is now playing a serious game of catch up. The Chrome browser is so fast (at both startup and page load) that the difference goes well beyond noticeable. Next to all of its competition Google Chrome looks as if it is running in a completely different gear all together.
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K Desktop Environment
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KDE 4.3 was released this week with a number of intriguing improvements. Ars test the new version, which introduces KDE’s Social Desktop initiative, an effort to bring social networking integration to the popular desktop environment.
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I have always missed having something similar to “KDE Dot News” in Debian. I refer to KDE’s news place because it is the project I more closely follow after Debian, but there are similar news websites for other projects such as Ubuntu’s Fridge.
The Debian project has http://www.debian.org/News/ but this is just a HTML version of the announce mailing lists.
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So that’s my impression. I will always like DSL, and I admire it for its loyalty to outdated machines. But so long as Slitaz can do much the same thing, in less space, with fresher software and a cleaner, faster look, I will continue to choose it over DSL.
And that’s what it’s all about: choice.
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Red Hat
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Cloud computing — where software applications reside on the Internet rather than on individual PCs — is gaining interest among businesses, and open-source advocate Red Hat Inc wants in on this.
It believes more and more companies will be turning to cloud computing in the near future because the infrastructure makes good business sense.
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Red Hat Inc, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, is committed to develop more open source solutions with local software developers via its Open Source Collaborative Innovation (OSCI) initiative.
“In the first year, we expect 50-80 percent growth in partnerships,” its president/chief executive officer, Jim Whitehurst, told a media briefing after deliverying his speech at the company-sponsored forum, entitled “Our Mothers Asked Us To Share”, here Tuesday.
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Ubuntu
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This is just a simple list of really useful, maybe basic applications available from the Ubuntu repositories. Again this is just my list and in time it might grow to more then 10. If you like to download and install them just go to the Synaptic Package Manager and search their names.
Let’s start:
1. Compiz Manager
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Something interesting is happening with Canonical’s software portfolio. They’re offering a new system-management server, but it’s not an open source offering. If memory serves, it’ll be Canonical’s first venture into offering a closed-source product with open-source connectivity. Aberration or evolution?
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All in all, things appear usable if undramatic at this stage and there are a few months to go before the final release anyway.
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In June I was traveling with a notebook that was too damaged to run Windows, but it run Ubuntu almost flawlessly. The experience was not so bad. Back home I could choose again between Windows and Ubuntu. In past dual-boot situations I gradually reverted to fully use Windows. What happened this time?
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Below are some notes about how I installed Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) on the device and got the Sony Playstation 3 remote control working. I chose Ubuntu 9.10 because I knew the video driver for the nVidia ION card was available in the repository, and I feel confident with it.
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New Distributions
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Stresslinux 0.4.111 is released and is a preview release
The main change is the use of susestudio as build system which uses kiwi.
More detailed changes can be found in changelog
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With “YDL on a Stick,” installation has never been easier–simply plug-in the USB stick, install the bootloader, boot into YDL–and you’re running Linux on your PS3.
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Atmel also sells a low-cost, hardware/software Linux development kit for network gateways introduced in 2007. While the Harmony shares many similar features with the kit, and likely builds upon Atmel’s Linux BSP, the hardware layout and several specifications appear to be different (see photo above and block diagram below).
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Timesys says its subscription-based LinuxLink development framework now supports a new dual-core, Freescale 8641D PowerPC-based single-board computer from Mercury Computer Systems. Mercury’s Ensemble 5000 Series VXS HCD5220 offers dual PMC/XMC mezzanine sites and serial RapidIO, and is designed for sensor-networked environments such as radar installations and other military and industrial applications.
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Network
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Sick of having your GPS tell you to turn the wrong way up a one-way street or lead you to a dead end? Fear not: Linux-based technology developed at NICTA is on its way to help make personal navigation systems more accurate.
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Novatel Wireless announced a new multi-network version of its Linux-based “MiFi” mobile hotspot, supporting HSPA, UMTS, EDGE and GPRS. The MiFi 2372 appears to be similar to Novatel’s Europe-targeted MiFi 2352, but adds UMTS (CDMA) support, and is accompanied with a new OpenCGI API designed to program the device.
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VoIP provider Ooma is readying a Linux-based VoIP desktop phone for shipment this fall. Building upon the company’s earlier Ooma Hub, the Ooma Telo adds up to six DECT 6.0 cordless handsets, improved voice quality, and advanced features including mobile transfer and a “connected phonebook,” says the company.
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Phones
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Motorola was one of the first handset vendors to announce plans to ship an Android phone. Last fall, it shocked the industry by stating that it would replace its native Linux MotoMAGX platform with Android and also ditch Symbian UIQ.
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Android
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The use of Android in devices other than cell phones may soon receive a big boost courtesy of MIPS Technologies. MIPS, which deals in processor architectures and cores, is making the source code of its Android port publicly available.
Art Swift, the vice president of marketing at MIPS, explained in a statement, “Android presents a compelling value proposition in bringing internet connectivity and a broad range of applications to MIPS-based digital home devices. We are working closely with customers and partners to ensure that critical technologies are available for developers to take advantage of Android for consumer electronics.”
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Google’s mobile OS is poised for life beyond the mobile – and the netbook.
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Of course, both ARM and Atom double as embedded processors, and the MIPS world has followed them onto Android. Embedded Alley – now owned by Mentor Graphics – offers its own Android MIPS port, and you can visit MIPS Technologies’ newly open-sourced port here.
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Mips Technologies released the source code on Monday, two months after it first said it had ported Android to the 32-bit version of the Mips architecture. This architecture is used in set-top boxes, digital TV sets, home media players, Internet telephony systems and mobile Internet devices (MIDs), and is a rival to the Arm technology on which Android already runs.
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The Atom-based Aspire One will run Android instead of Windows XP
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Google is tossing out hints that its Android may be enterprise bound — perhaps as early as this year. RIM’s BlackBerry currently has the strongest creds among professionals, and Apple is loading the iPhone with more business-friendly features and functionality. If there’s no corner office waiting for the Android, is there at least an empty desk?
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Sub-notebooks
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What follows is our class’ process for developing the initial framework and vision for a new graphical user interface to run on top of an existing operating system (like Linux) that can take advantage of an ARM CPU chipset on something akin to a netbook or a smartbook. Though this case study will focus on the work of my class, there was much collaboration between the two courses’ students, influencing the final outcomes of both.
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These are only some of the advantages of Open Source. This is why I would always prefer to purchase hardware for which there is an Open Source driver, or application that are Open Source. It is not only a question of price!
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In my opinion, our biggest problem right now is marketing. There are three categories of people we really need to reach out to:
1. Those who last tried a Linux distro more than 5 or 10 years ago
2. Those who’ve been told “only hackers can use it”
3. Those who’ve never heard of it
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With its third-generation release, out this week, popular open-source management interface FreePBX has taken a bold step away from its longstanding ties to Asterisk, to embrace the up-and-coming VoIP alternative FreeSwitch.
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The old world will meet with the new in an event this week that seeks to get cultural institutions working more closely with wiki projects
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Laconica, billed as an open-source microblogging tool similar to Twitter or Jaiku, now has its own Mollom plugin to reduce comment and posting spam.
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Open source ECM technologies like Alfresco, Drupal, Liferay, Lucene, and many others, are now at or beyond their closed source equivalents. If you are a developer who’s sick of the shackles closed source CMS places on you, why not suggest exploring open source alternatives?
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If you’re looking for a virtualization solution, and you need one that makes the task of setting up virtual machines easy, VirtualBox is for you. If, however, you are looking for a tool that will allow you to serve out virtual machines you will need to purchase the full version and even then you might find it more challenging than, say, VMWare Server. But for standalone virtual machine needs, you cannot beat VirtualBox for its ease of use and price.
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Lack of adequate documentation is frequently cited as a shortcoming of open source applications and platforms, but, for the popular choices, there are surprisingly good, free online books available. We round these up on a regular basis here at OStatic, and in this post you’ll find five online books that you can jump right into. They introduce basic concepts for getting started with Linux, Firefox, Blender (3D graphics and animation), GIMP (graphics), and the OpenOffice suite of productivity applications.
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Business
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We looked at Linux and we could customise it to meet our needs. We could also get good support from vendors. The good news is that, when you do research for open source, you can easily try it out and get very good information about the product from the community behind it. All the feedback from the users is out in the community for all to see, so you never have to rely on a sales person who is just going to tell you what you want to hear. You can actually interact with other users in the community, and validate what is really there.
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Openbravo has announced the release of a new integrated business management solution, built on top of Ubuntu Server Edition, which is fully supported by Openbravo and its partner network. Openbravo is the leading developer of web-based open source Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Point of Sale (POS) solutions for businesses, while Canonical is the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, which is rapidly becoming a very popular server platform choice for businesses across the globe.
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Government
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One of the most interesting developments in the world of openness has been the growing move to open up government. In the UK, the scandal over MPs’ expenses has helped to expose the perils of lack of transparency at the national level, but far less attention is being paid to local government. That’s a pity, because it’s precisely local data that impacts most of us more directly.
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Openness
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The new US administration could implement such a system through simple FRPAA-like legislation requiring funding agencies to commit to this open-access compact in a cost-neutral manner. Perhaps reimbursement would be limited to authors at universities and research institutions that themselves commit to a similar compact. As funding agencies and universities take on this commitment, we might transition to an efficient, sustainable journal publishing system in which publishers choose freely among business models on an equal footing, to the benefit of all.
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The campaign is part of Fiat’s push to embrace the digital age head-on. By creating an open forum, it acknowledges that all ideas generated might be used by other individuals, or by its rivals. A bold step that might spell the beginning of the end for closed-shop car design.
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Like I promised few days ago, here is the demo that shows tile-based OpenStreetMap rendering on Qt/S60. If you never heard of OpenStreetMap before, it is “a collaborative project to create a free editable map of the world” (from its Wikipedia entry). You can try it at www.openstreetmap.org. It might not be as complete as other maps solutions, but surprisingly, OpenStreetMap coverage for many world big cities are detailed enough for most users.
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The code in the example is released under the GPL, so you can take it, play with it and incorporate it in your own open source application. Everybody wins — developers get a simple way to add maps to their applications, Qt shows how cool its framework is, and Nokia gets more developers writing for its phones. Try doing that without an open source licence.
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Programming
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Nationwide unemployment may be heading toward double-digits in the U.S., but among the skills that are in highest demand are those of a Linux sysadmin. That’s partly due to the effects of the recession — more companies are willing to experiment with lower-cost open source alternatives to proprietary software. Still, the good news is qualified: Many of those jobs can be done anywhere on the planet.
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The enterprise Linux vendor celebrates the tenth year of its certification program as it tries to recruit more training partners.
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I am not sure why we do not see more support for Java in many of the distributions of Linux. It is available. It is open source. And it provides a means for software developers to make programs that can run on many different platforms with few alterations. This is the opportunity that could greatly increase software support for Linux. Still I often find that Java is a bit of a pill to install in most Linux Distributions. Many have Java related stuff in the default install but they do not work properly and when you try to install a Java based program like for example limewire then you have problems.
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Just one week shy of Christmas 2008, the Python world saw the release of version 3 of Python. Big deal, eh? Well … it turns out it was and is, as Python 3 is the first major release of Python designed from the get-go to be incompatible with prior versions of the language.
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The company acquired these statistics during the natural course of its regular crawling activities, said Chris DiBona, Google’s open source programs manager. Among other things, Google’s Code Search Crawl revealed that nearly half of the projects licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) have moved to version 3 of that license, including new projects.
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The library is an add-on for existing C++ compilers, which permits computer programmers to utilize the new multithreading facilities from C++0x without the upheaval of compiler upgrades.
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One of the more notable new features is the inclusion of support for the lamda capabilities in the new C++ draft standard (C++0x). The new release now uses the LD_PRELOAD function on Linux and a dynamic instrumentation method on Windows to provide automatic memory allocator replacement throughout an application, greatly improving the memory allocators performance. Intel has also reworked the task scheduler, allowing it to scale better, and made improvements to parallel algorithms and concurrent containers.
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Due to the fast growth of open frameworks, it’s no surprise that the developer is faced with a new dilemma. It’s not “which OS should I write to?” anymore. It’s now “which Web-centric tool will help me develop the best application?” From the perspective of the developer, this is a much friendlier environment.
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Censorship/Web Abuse
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The European Commission has sneaked out its position on the Telecoms Package second reading. Decoded, it calls for the Package to seal in the right of governments and broadband providers to restrict the Internet.
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A single Canadian company sells traffic shaping gear in use on 20 percent of all broadband lines in the world—and nearly all of its clients throttle traffic by application.
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There are some users who are going to fall for DRM schemes, and lose access to their content when the scheme changes, no matter what. Just like there are some users who will leave thermal-printed concert tickets in a hot car, or let their dogs chew on their CDs. And there are some users who will avoid anything that smells even slightly of top-down media control. But the users in the middle are the people who matter. If Joe User is on the fence about buying a Kindle, what would scare him away?
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An injunction banning a book is a big deal. It’s usually called a prior restraint, and it’s usually highly suspect; the U.S. Supreme Court held publication of the Pentagon Papers could not be restrained despite the government’s claim that national security would be jeopardized.
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Press
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Last month, we wrote about a new study that basically showed that independent bloggers and the mainstream press had a rather nice symbiotic relationship, with different stories flowing back and forth across the two. Oddly, the NY Times misinterpreted the study to claim that it showed that bloggers were “behind” the mainstream press on stories, but the details showed a very different story. It’s no surprise that a mainstream publication would portray the study this way, but it makes it even more amusing when that same publication is then caught using a story from a blog as well, without doing any additional reporting.
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Recently there has been a rising crescendo of finger-pointing, shrieking, braying and teeth-gnashing about the future of the news. In the last couple of weeks there have been many comments on the AP’s proposals, Attributor’s proposals, Ian Shapira’s story and fair use.
After some of the AP commentary, I posted a tweet directed at Jeff Jarvis that prompted some members in the community to ask me to be more outspoken, asking me to be blatant about it, to post a public statement. For those who know me, I usually don’t need to be asked.
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The Associated Press has issued a statement explaining the “license” they gave me to quote Thomas Jefferson. A few brief comments:
It is an automated form, thus explaining how one blogger got it to charge him for the words of a former president.
The problem is not just that they use an automated form to issue their “licenses” (although the automated form does make it easy to mock them). No, the problem is that they also make bizarre, sweeping copyright claims about “their” content.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyright, as Wolfram seems not to understand, is a bargain between creators and their public. As an *incentive* to create, the former are given a time-limited monopoly by governments. Note that it is *not* a reward for having created: it is an incentive to create again.
Luis Casas Luengo, Director of Extremadura’s Fundecyt foundation 19 (2004)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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08.05.09
Posted in News Roundup at 5:20 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Well, I got me a new refurbished box with very good specs, which is about to become my new home office machine. That’s as soon as Slackware 13.0 hits final distribution release, which should be any day now… (Bought the box with Windows on it, you see) So, while I’m twiddling my thumbs waiting for that landmark to come to pass, I did what any Linux user probably does when temporarily owning a copy of Windows (XP Pro here), and checked how it’s doing these days.
Because, see, I just can’t get enough asstroturfers telling me how swell Windows stacks up to Linux lately. Gotta see for myself what all the hype is about. And since Microsoft is now suffering from the delusion that it competes with Linux, well…
It didn’t take long before the old Microsoft memories came back. Literally before I could get into the desktop, the first problem hit: It doesn’t recognize the mouse. To be sure, the mouse is an old Wacom tablet with the little wireless mouse on it, pressed into service because, well, my other four mice are busy. It plugs into the USB port. But anyway, I’ve plugged this same mouse into more than six different machines running Linux and it always worked instantly.
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Microsoft has listed companies such as Red Hat and Canonical, both sellers of GNU/Linux, among the reasons for the 17 percent fall in revenue for the fourth quarter, year on year.
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That shared ideology is far more significant than the specifics of particular alliances or clashes over certain parts of the market. Google’s Chrome OS, for example, is really just a minor adjustment of pieces on the chess board of the modern computing industry, neither a declaration of intent against Microsoft nor an attempt to annex GNU/Linux into Google’s worldview.
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References
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So you have heard of all the advantages and geeky babble about how Linux is better and you have finally decided to try it? Just one thing, you don’t know an awful lot about Linux to get you started. How about some free downloadable ebooks to teach yourself Linux, that you can download today? Would that help?
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To those of you who are aspiring to become a UNIX/Linux guru, you have to know loads of commands and learn how to effectively use them. But there is really no need to memorize everything since there are plenty of cheat sheets available on the web and on books. To spare you from the hassles of searching, I have here a collection of 10 essential UNIX/Linux cheat sheets that can greatly help you on your quest for mastery:
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Kernel Space
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In Torvalds’ mind it’s not conceivable that one could care about freedom out of love and not hate. It’s not conceivable that one could stand to defend his and everyone else’s rights out of compassion, without hating the person who would take them away. That is the view of an extremist.
It’s very unfortunate that people pay so much attention to Torvalds, as if he was some kind of visionary. Reality is that he’s just a very skilled hacker with delusions of grandeur and complete carelessness about ethics or morality.
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X Server
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Back in March we shared that the open-source ATI driver had gained support for the unreleased ATI RS880 IGP. Well, the RS880 ended up being turned into the 785G due to some problems on AMD’s side, but today this new, much more powerful IGP has launched. With that said, another commit made to the xf86-video-ati driver today finishes off the support. The RS880 / 785G IGPs are now properly recognized and the 2D acceleration support is complete.
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Information on the NVIDIA OptiX Application Acceleration Engine is available at NVIDIA.com. NVIDIA also lists four ray-tracing engine examples and do mention Linux for them, but the links are not currently available. These ray-tracing demos will still require Quadro FX hardware and also a NVIDIA 190.xx driver release or newer.
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Well this thread maybe useful for people who are planning to purchase a system for linux use only and which GFX card to choose mainly ATI, NVIDIA or Intel.
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Desktop Environments
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Tiny Core Linux v2.2 is released. Tiny Core Linux is a very small (10 MB) minimal Linux Desktop, which runs very well on a Netbook. It is based on Linux 2.6 kernel, Busybox, Tiny X, Fltk & Jwm. The core runs entirely in ram & boots very quickly.
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Finally, I downloaded and played the national anthem of Brazil. I also downloaded a series of science videos oriented toward primary school children.
Minor installation annoyances aside, overall I was impressed with this distro. It is based on a good, reliable source (Kubuntu) and provides a wide array of educational tools. It even includes kTurtle, a programming environment with a language described as “loosly based on Logo.” The software is good, so here’s to hoping for qualified teachers with a good curriculum to make full use of the resource.
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SimplyMepis, or Mepis for short, is a distribution targeted towards new users that has the intended goal of providing a good distribution that is easy to use. Version 7.0, which was my first experience with Mepis was pretty good. But past success means little if the newer version doesn’t deliver. So let’s see how SimplyMepis 8 does.
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Red Hat
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Red Hat has pledged to ensure Malaysia’ open source software economy continues to grow with the launch of its Open Source Collaborative Innovation (OSCI) program in the country.
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Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the award-winning finalists in its third annual Red Hat and JBoss Innovation Awards. The awards are designed to recognize the outstanding use, innovation and extension of Red Hat and JBoss solutions by Red Hat customers, partners and the open source community. From the finalists, one Red Hat Innovator of the Year and one JBoss Innovator of the Year will each be selected and announced during the Red Hat Summit and JBoss World, co-located this year in Chicago, Sept. 1-4, 2009.
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The Fedora Project, a Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration, today announced that John McLean is the recipient of the 2009 Fedora Scholarship, a program now in its second year. The Fedora Scholarship program recognizes college and university-bound students across the globe for their contributions to free software and the Fedora Project. McLean was selected from an impressive applicant pool and plans to attend Duke University this fall and double major in computer science and religion.
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Ubuntu
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I’ve stayed quiet in this discussion, though several folks have invoked my name and ascribed motivations to me that were a little upsetting. I’m not responding to that here, instead I’d like to focus on what we can achieve together, and how we can lead a very significant improvement in the health of the whole free software ecosystem.
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…So, congratulations to Clem Lefebvre and the rest of the Mint team; you have successfully lured me back to Linux Mint with this release. (I just finished installing it about a half hour ago lol) Of course Mandriva Linux is a great distro but I missed being Minty Fresh!! So it’s back to being a Mint user for me…Thank you Clem and team!!
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Mercury’s customers use the LinuxLink framework to minimize their time to market through the easy-to-use wizard that facilitates the creation of an initial Linux starting image, as well as the award-winning “Factory” build engine that enables them to develop a completely custom and highly optimized Linux platform.
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• Run Linux off a USB key, back up documents online, and start with a fresh operating system every day.
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Google is getting its Android mobile operating system ready for business users as it targets business smartphone leader Research in Motion’s BlackBerrys and Microsoft. Supporting Microsoft Exchange is a key requirement for Android, and T-Mobile’s myTouch 3G does that. A flood of Android phones is expected, along with OS releases.
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Tahoe is a secure cloud filesystem that is licensed under the GPL. Its distributed storage model, which resembles peer-to-peer networking, makes it possible to build a shared storage pool using excess drive capacity from multiple computers across the Internet.
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Open-Xchange, an open-source e-mail and collaboration software maker, has set up a test Web site that allows people to pull in their contact information from various social networking services like LinkedIn and Facebook. The goal of the project is give people a chance to take control of their contacts and put all of their personal and work information in one place. By creating what amounts to a connections clearing house, Open-Xchange wants to spur to new types of networking services.
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If Vern Yip is reading this, I still need your help. Though Sweet Home 3D tops Google’s SketchUp in a number of areas, it’s still not much help for someone with no design sense.
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Free and open source software is seeing steady adoption among small to large UK businesses, as they begin to take it to the heart of their organisations for key enterprise applications in a bid to lower IT costs.
Good enterprise-class open source support and services have also helped to drive adoption, as much as the fact that free and open source (FOSS) software products are continually maturing and improving both on the server and the desktop.
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As the Ubuntu Maryland team did last year, we are planning a day of talks and discussions about Open Source Software and its benefits. While there may be a bias towards the Linux platform in general and the Ubuntu distribution in particular we are open to talks on Open Source projects for any OS platform. In addition we are hoping to have some talks on open formats and standards.
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In this issue…
* One billion downloads of Firefox
* Why we count
* What’s the problem with Theora?
* Mozilla Add-ons U.S. Tour
* Chocolate Factory: care to help?
* Weave 0.5 released
* Help test new mozilla.org site
* Bugzilla 3.4 released
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Audio
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Bradley and Karen interview Justin Erenkrantz of the Apache Software Foundation.
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DRM/E-Book
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Sony Corp (6758.T) will begin selling this month the cheapest digital book reader for the United States, heating up the competition with Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) in the small but fast-growing market for electronic readers.
Sony plans to start selling its 5-inch-screen Reader Pocket Edition at $199 — which it called a breakthrough price — and a larger touchscreen reader for $299, through nationwide retail outlets such as Wal-Mart (WMT.N) and Best Buy (BBY.N).
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San Francisco bookstore Green Apple Books has put together a series of humorous videos that point up the advantages of paper books over Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader.
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A deb package is also suitable for Ubuntu and Debian. The source code for download off the project page is under GPLv3.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The British administrator of a former BitTorrent tracker site is out on police bail after his home was raided by police working with film industry investigators.
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While it gets some of the facts wrong (claiming that copyright exists to protect an artist’s income, rather than the truth: it exists to create an incentive to create), it at least tries to balance some of the questions, discussing things like Creative Commons and the public domain.
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AP’s service costs as much (for a newspaper the size of The Gazette) as the salaries and benefits of several staff members who could provide unique local content not available elsewhere. It’s questionable whether the content AP provides is going to maintain that value much longer. If AP focuses on the content role, no amount of copyright protection will keep that role from deteriorating in value.
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Our cautious skepticism about intellectual property laws, particularly when applied to the arts rather than technology, was confirmed this morning.
The guy who made the iconic Wall Street bull is suing the publisher and authors of a new book about the collapse of Lehman Brothers because they put a picture of the bull on the cover.
That’s right. There’s a guy out there who thinks he owns the rights to images of 7,000-pound sculpture that has been sitting in the financial district for 20 years. Whatever your opinions about the need for copyright and trademark rules to encourage innovation and reward creativity, it’s really hard to see how this makes any sense at all.
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While Internet radio stations have come to an agreement over music royalty rates, the debate over whether traditional radio stations should also pay up rages on. The Senate Judiciary Committee was the latest panel to play referee during a Tuesday hearing.
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Crippen, in a telephone interview with Threat Level, said the purpose of the jailbreaking was not for illegal piracy, but to allow patrons to use decrypted copies of their own DRM-laden gaming software. The DMCA, however, is not on his side, especially because he is accused of profiting from his hacks.
Luis Casas Luengo, Director of Extremadura’s Fundecyt foundation 18 (2004)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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Posted in News Roundup at 7:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The new application, to be developed by Unisys, is expected to be built in the Linux Open Source environment using Java development tools. The Open Source approach is designed to increase the flexibility of the application environment to reduce support costs through easier maintenance of the system.
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With rumours of a cheaper and slimmer Sony PS3 gaming console around the corner, Fixstars corporation have released a bootable version of their popular Yellow Dog Linux distribution for Sony’s platform that comes on a USB Flash drive.
The installation is straightforward plug-in the USB stick, install the bootloader, boot into YDL and you’re running Linux on your PS3. Although the Playstation 3 comes with a hard disk drive, YDL runs from the USB Drive.
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Each issue of the magazine comes with a DVD packed with new Linux software to try out, along with the magazine’s usual comprehensive coverage of the latest Linux news, reviews and tutorials. Plus, subscribers to the magazine get access to over 1300 PDFs of magazine tutorials from Linux Format back issues through its online subscriber-only area, and even get access to issues before they have been printed.
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Desktop
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I have to say that this was about as painless as OS installations ever get. Now when I want to run Ubuntu (which is most of the time) I can either grab my Wind netbook or my MacBook Pro. Either way, the choice of OS is entirely mine. Whatever floats my boat at any particular time. I have Windows XP Home or Ubuntu on the Wind netbook and Mac OS Leopard or Ubuntu on the MacBook. I’ve never enjoyed so much OS freedom. Life certainly is sweet.
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This year, a new dimension is appearing on the Linux desktop. It’s geolocation: the capability to detect and record where you and other people are, and to use the information to enhance the desktop. Potentially affecting everything from the metadata stored with files to the mechanics of social networking, geolocation is already starting to arrive in GNOME and KDE. But the first implementations are only a hint of the features that geolocation might soon provide.
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While pure open source enthusiasts may boo the fact that World of Goo is not open source, I for one am very excited. I think that this is a great example of what Linux needs. The more software that we see becoming available for Linux, the more credibility Linux will have among the skeptical. Increased credibility will lead to more adoption, which is what Linux really needs right now.
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Server
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Plenty of technology companies share in the virtualized desktop vision. For instance, IBM is working with Canonical (promoter of Ubuntu Linux) and Virtual Bridges to offer virtualized Ubuntu desktops on Linux servers. The IBM strategy openly attacks Microsoft’s fat client model, and aims to charge customers $50 per seat (per year, I believe, though I need to double check).
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Kernel Space
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Early-bird registration has been extended to Aug. 5 for the Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC). Scheduled for Sept. 23-25 in Portland, Oregon, the conference will feature keynotes and presentations from Linus Torvalds, Federal CIO Vivek Kundra, and Intel’s Keith Packard, covering Linux “plumbing” issues such as kernel subsystems and core libraries.
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The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that Telco Planning has joined the organization. Telco Planning provides consulting services to network operators that encompass technology evaluation, business plan modeling, network design, integration and installation.
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Applications
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OpenOffice.org is a terrific suite of office applications in its own right, but it’s out of this world when paired with extensions that add extra functionality. There are plenty of extensions to choose from, but let’s take a look at a few that will really make your productivity soar.
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The Bordeaux Technology Group released Bordeaux 1.8 for FreeBSD today. Bordeaux 1.8.2 adds support for Apple’s QuickTime 6.5.2 Player, IrfanView 4.25 the extreamly popular image viewer and editor. This release aslo bundles in Cabextract, Wget and Unzip to remove external dependencies. Our winetricks script has been synced to the latest official release, Steam should now install and run once again, There has also been many small bug fixes and tweaks.
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K Desktop Environment
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Don’t let my nitpicking scare you though, KDE 4.3 is a great release. At its very least, it’s not worse than KDE 4.2 so you don’t have anything to lose by upgrading.
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To maximize the space given to applications in those tiny screen resolutions now the panel is auto-hide, with the same sliding animation present in the main plasma desktop autohide panels (from KDE 4.4 done by my first Kwin effect, yay :D)
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The Debian project is planning a whole series of enhancements for Debian 5.0 “Squeeze.” A few results of the currently running Google Summer of Code are beginning to creep into it.
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Red Hat
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Sure, Microsoft has always liked to tout the existence of competition to ward off antitrust issues, but it has to watch Red Hat closely these days, just as all of the major players in servers do. Cisco is very wise to pursue a relationship with Red Hat, and is sponsoring the Red Hat Summit even as the company curtails its own event spending. I also won’t be surprised to see Red Hat’s and Cisco’s cloud computing initiatives increasingly converge over time.
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“Red Hat is strongly committed to community-based collaboration that leads to better, more secured solutions to benefit the Malaysian government and business users as well as across the region,” he said.
He said Red Hat’s collaboration with independent software vendors (ISVs) was key to its strategy to accelerate the deployment of enterprise-class, open source solutions in Malaysia, and encourage wider adoption.
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Ubuntu
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The Canonical Landscape Ubuntu systems management server is now moving in from the cloud with a new dedicated, on-site offering. Previously, the Landscape service was only available as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), cloud-based model. The new Landscape Dedicated Server expands the commercial support offerings available for Ubuntu Linux as Canonical ramps up its efforts to gain market share against rivals.
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Scheduled for release in October, Ubuntu 9.10 is perhaps the most important release to date for the community-driven Linux project.
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Linux Mint 7 KDE is a worthy addition to the Linux Mint family and is much, much better than the previous KDE release. I still prefer the main GNOME version over it, but there’s definitely an ascending path going on. Oh, and with the 4.3.0 version of KDE just released, I can’t wait until Linux Mint 8!
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Thank goodness Linux came along to keep Unix going. Otherwise we might all be running commercial operating systems today.
But technical merit is not the sole criterion. Were that the case we would all be runing Linux. We need to unite and not keep shooting ourselves in the foot. This, for example, is why I cringe every time I hear the phrase “GNU/Linux” …
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Sadly, the Kindle is a closed device, so there is little point in trying to build and boot this code. That integrity checker device seems likely to get in the way. The unhackable nature of the device does not come as a surprise; that is how things tend to be done these days. But one can still wish that things were different. A user-modifiable Kindle would not just be more resistant to Orwellian monitoring and control; it could also be extended in ways that Amazon never dreamed of. Maybe it could even get a PDF reader. What a fun device that could be.
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As of now, Google’s Linux-based operating system has its presence only on a couple of handsets, including T-Mobile G1 and myTouch 3G, and has been intended for casual customers. But, according to Rubin, the OS will be upgraded with host of enterprise-oriented features by the end of this year.
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It also turns open-source telephony inside out, setting up FreePBX as the focal point for future innovation in open-source telephony. I suspect that FreePBX’s new modular architecture and standards-based frameworks may inspire application developers to target new telephony applications to FreePBX to be able to run with any “engine”.
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Today, Click2Try has announced its Virtual Launch program, which takes some of the application launching functionality from click2try and allows any web site or blog owner to incorporate it on his or her site. If you want site visitors to try one of the open source applications that click2try includes, this is one of the fastest ways to let them do so.
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Chromium developer Tim Steele has revealed that Google is working on a new cloud synchronisation function for its Chrome web browser. Chromium is the open source base on which Google’s WebKit-based Chrome web browser is built. In his post on the Chromium development message board, Steele says that the feature for syncing user data will be linked to a users Google account and that work is being started in the Chromium project this week.
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Openness
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Aptara, a pioneer in digital publishing solutions, and Open Science Co., LLC, an Open Access medical publisher committed to the free and broad dissemination of medical knowledge, are pleased to announce the dramatic success of the first phase of development for the medical portal ePlasty.com. The site houses the Open Access Plastic Surgery journal, ePlasty (www.eplasty.com), a PUBMED/NLM indexed medical journal, along with interactive forums, a virtual exhibit hall and other resources for plastic surgery, burn and wound care professionals. Aptara designed and built the site for Open Science Co., LLC.
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Sony Pictures can give all this software away without any fear that they’ll lose competitive advantage, because although it uses this software to make its films better, it’s not a substitute for knowing how to make good films in the first place.
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The champion of “free” is author Chris Anderson who has published a book predicting that hardware is the next natural extension of the open source movement.
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In his newest book, novelist Mark Helprin sets out to single-handedly defend copyright from the barbarian freetard hordes. He advocates long-term copyright extensions and happily insults anyone who disagrees with him by comparing them to Idi Amin and Adolf Eichmann. The result is almost… uncivilized.
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On Friday, we posted a guest post from singer Amanda Palmer, all about her thoughts on connecting with fans. If you didn’t get a chance to read the whole thing, at the end she included a music video that she did. However, the story behind that music video is so good that it deserves a separate post of its own. We already know that Amanda has been a big fan of using Twitter to reach out to fans, and she did exactly that in this case — but not to film a video. Just to hold an impromptu “flash gig” on the beach with two days’ notice. Cool idea. Other bands should try that as well.
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This makes a lot of sense. Certainly record labels have a lot of experience and connections when it comes to marketing music and musicians. So leveraging those relationships makes a lot of sense. Giving up all control and rights just for that marketing expertise, on the other hand… makes less and less sense. So, no, I don’t think record labels are going away. I still think there’s plenty of room for them in the wider music ecosystem. But their role is changing, and the power shift is moving much more to artists and away from the labels. Some of the smart ones get it. But a few of the major labels certainly don’t like this, which is why they fight so hard against the technology that’s making this happe
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The Recording Industry Association of America has continued its random financial assassination of hapless American file-sharers in their campaign to “protect intellectual property rights worldwide.” Forget Pirate Bay, it’s the least prolific file-sharers who are getting bitten.
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In the past decade, have you downloaded music from a peer-to-peer service like LimeWire? Or shared files on the original Napster? Once? Twice? Lots? If so, you might want to hire a good lawyer, or consider moving to another country. Lately, major record labels—specifically, the “Big Four” (EMI, Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, and their many subsidiaries)—have been looking for folks like you.
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The Associated Press recently created quite a stir by announcing that the company is implementing a digital rights management (DRM) system to protect their content from both misuse and unauthorized use.
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Apparently the controversy was more than the estate of Edvard Eriksen anticipated after asking the city of Greenville $3,800 for having a replica of Copenhagen’s “Little Mermaid” statue in their Tower Riverside Park.
“I received a letter this week from the Artists Right Society (ARS) saying that ‘the estate of the sculptor Edvard Eriksen has decided to withdraw all of its claims thereto,’” said Greenville City Manager George Bosanic.
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Harvard University’s moves to seek U.S. trademarks for everyday phrases such as “Ask what you can do” are defensive measures, a school official says.
The university has poured a lot of money into basing its promotional and advertising campaigns on such phrases as “Ask what you can do,” which was famously uttered by President John F. Kennedy in his 1960 inaugural speech, as well as “Lessons learned” and “Managing yourself,” The Boston Globe reported Saturday.
Luis Casas Luengo, Director of Extremadura’s Fundecyt foundation 17 (2004)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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08.04.09
Posted in News Roundup at 3:55 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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A new open source netbook has separate tablet and keyboard sections and is shipping for $US399 globally.
If you are the type who shuns Windows and wants only alternative OS’ on your netbook like Linux or Android, but you don’t want to wait until the Acer dual-boot netbook hits, a company called Always Innovating has a new open source netbook for you. The machine is called the Touch Book and international orders are being accepted.
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Desktop
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Google Chrome OS is arriving just in time to take advantage of the perfect storm of cloud services, cheap hardware, and a new generation of platform-agnostic users. Unlike other Linux-based OSs, Chrome has brand recognition that even the biggest neophyte could get comfortable with.
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With the average netbook struggling to run Vista, we reckon Ubuntu Linux is a more suitable operating system. Here, we explain how to install it on your Windows machine.
Netbooks have soared in popularity over the past year, offering consumers portable PCs for word-processing and web browsing at rock-bottom prices. Such mini laptops use inexpensive processors that consume a minimal amount of power and thus offer a far longer battery life than most portables.
But there’s one problem: Windows Vista is a resource-hungry operating system (OS), and it will run painfully slow unless your system has plenty of memory and processing power. Installing Windows on a netbook also adds a significant amount to the machine’s overall cost.
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The HeliOS Project is one of those Austin organizations that puts a lump in my throat every time I write about it. Ken Starks and his volunteers take computers that would otherwise go into landfills or get donated to Goodwill. They get the machines operational and donate them to kids, families and nonprofits that are happy to have functioning desktop and laptop computers.
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Overall, even though I didn’t use that computer after that, that initial experience increased my confidence overall with computers, and piqued my curiosity into using Linux. I’ve also been impressed as to how slick and polished the installation process is now in most Linux distro’s…
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USB
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The Bootable Linux USB comes preloaded with the full installation of Ubuntu Linux 9.0.4. It’s an exceptional disaster recovery solution in the case of problems occurring with the operating system on the primary hard drive. Since important data files on the hard drive can be backed up onto the BLU drive or another USB storage device.
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This device goes beyond your average backup since you can boot an entire Linux operating system.
[...]
Bottom line: This is a new product from a South Florida company. Visually it’s not very sleek. But it goes beyond your average backup since you can boot an entire Linux operating system off this baby — and that’ll come in handy if Windows goes completely down while you’re working on a project in the middle of the night. The company provides detailed instructions on how to do this and use Linux, since it’s not something most of us do every day.
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Server
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“Modern VFX houses run a largely Linux-based infrastructure, so Nuke makes sense for them, competing products such as Fusion run a Windows code base — which us emulated on Linux — or have developed too slowly (Autodesk Toxik) to be taken seriously”, he adds.
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Kernel Space
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Our selection criteria were the following:
* micro-ATX or mini-ITX form factor
Size usually matters with a HTPC, few people would want a big tower case in their living room, not to mention the WAF (wife acceptance factor). Also most HTPC specific cases are designed for these form factors.
* Nvidia GeForce 8200/8300 or 9300/9400 series on-board GPU
Nvidia’s closed-source Linux drivers are currently the best choice for video play-back in the Linux world, as they support hardware assisted video play-back, which is at it’s best with the 8x (for AMD) or 9x (for Intel) series cards, using the VDPAU API.
* an on-board HDMI and/or DVI video out port
The best choice for connecting to your HD-TV, projector or AV receiver.
[...]
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Even though reiserfs belongs to the veterans of journaling filesystems and established ext3 and ext4 as standard Linux filesystems, a new patch serves to markedly improve it.
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Phoronix Media has released version 2.0 (codenamed “Sandtorg”) of the Phoronix Test Suite, which encompasses hundreds of updates to its flagship testing and performance profiling software. Phoronix Media has also released PTS Desktop Live 2009.3 (codenamed “Gernlinden”), which is the first Linux-based desktop operating system designed exclusively for carrying out automated tests using the Phoronix Test Suite from a live environment. Phoromatic, a web-based remote test management system, has also entered closed beta testing.
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I’ve frequently been accused of packing too much into our Linux Foundation events, making it nearly impossible to choose one session without missing other “must attend” ones. At this accusation, I proudly raise my hand and say, “Guilty as charged.” But by admitting guilt, I am not admitting repentance. While Angela and Craig have ensured enough lunch, break and networking time, LinuxCon is a testament to the same Linux Foundation strategy of packing every session with great speaking talent and interesting Linux and open source topics. One look at the LinuxCon schedule and you will see we really haven’t changed at all.
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Today another nice thing for the Linux kernel happened, we got working VME bus drivers and infrastructure submitted to the kernel tree. Now, I don’t expect it to generate as much press as the Microsoft kernel driver thing did, but it should, as I feel it’s more important in a way.
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Applications
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By the time now, we all know that all applications installed on our PC are slowly filling our system with files, then comes a time when controlling everything in our computer becomes virtually impossible. If you want your computer to be running like the first day you had it. Put FSlint the task of cleaning and organizing your Linux very easy.
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Desktop Environments
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The KDE Community today announces the immediate availability of “Caizen”, (a.k.a KDE 4.3), bringing many improvements to the user experience and development platform. KDE 4.3 continues to refine the unique features brought in previous releases while bringing new innovations. With the 4.2 release aimed at the majority of end users, KDE 4.3 offers a more stable and complete product for the home and small office.
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Every few weeks Nuno Pinheiro and the KDE Oxygen Icons team are publishing a new usability survey online to get feedback from users on the look and feel of icons. In particular, the Oxygen team is looking for feedback from individuals that have had no exposure to KDE, so if you are at home or at work, poke your friends and family and have them complete the survey, or simply take the survey yourself.
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To say that the technology industry moves quickly would be understated. Firms must innovate, adapt and grow, or fail. Two years ago when One Laptop per Child began shipping their XO-1 laptop, they defined an industry. People were excited not for OLPC’s mission, which always seemed to be a footnote, but for a diminutive inexpensive laptop. Often, the laptop was stated to include a custom distribution of Linux called Sugar that was built to help kids learn. But Sugar is more than just a Linux distro.
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While deciding about libgdata inclusion in GNOME 2.28, we (Release Team) somehow considered it didn’t make much sense to have libgdata in the desktop suite. So, one thing that came to my mind was that we need some space to aggregate development efforts aiming to integrate online social services in GNOME. Also, it seems that we need to highlight those modules in a more clear way as it seems that just a few people are aware of those GNOME-based technologies.
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We’re getting far enough along in the development cycles of several of the major Linux distributions that you can just about see the releases coming over the horizon. I’ve been trying out several of them, and they look very good already. But, first and foremost, remember that these are test releases, and are likely to still have significant bugs, omissions and various quirks in them. They are not intended for use on production systems!
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The second alpha of Mandriva Linux 2010.0 was launched last night, on July 31st, by the Mandriva team. The development cycle of Mandriva Linux 2010.0 will continue with a beta release at the end of August, two release candidates scheduled for September and October, and the official public release expected around November, 2009.
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Ubuntu
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Heres a couple of great points… First, most Linux OS distributions come with more than the basic needs. They will install a browser, email and chat clients, news readers and more. Ubuntu for instance comes with Open Office, as well as what is listed above. There are thousands of other packates you can install as well. You may not need to though, as Linux will have pre-installed the “make your life easier” software for you right out of the gate.
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The experts instead suggest that buyers look at the line of Linux distributions specially tailored for the requirements of the small laptops. They work more effectively with the little displays, for example. Among the Linux packages best suited for netbooks are Ubuntu Netbook Remix, Easy Peasy, and Linpus Linux Lite.
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Although this isn’t unique to open source software, in open source that blog post is an important community contribution—no different than a source-patch submission, entering wiki documentation or communicating in a mailing list.
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Computer experts from as far away as Turkey are gathering at the State University College of Technology at Delhi Thursday and Friday to explore the wonders of open-source software.
Open source is a development method for software that allows users to contribute and adapt the programs, presenters said, and the potential of open source is better quality, higher reliability and lower cost.
The conference will bring together higher-education technology leaders in a discussion about open-source tools, how these tools fulfill the needs of a campus and how these applications are supported internally.
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Certainly open-source software has grown more popular, and as such, supportability has increased proportionately. We expect this trend to continue. In fact, many open-source platforms are supportable nowadays, including the “LAMP stack,” which includes the Linux operating system, Apache Web server, MySQL database and PHP programming language. Some might say that the P stands for the Perl or Python programming languages, but PHP is by far the most popular and, not coincidentally, the most supportable of the three.
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Why use open source software?
The most obvious reason is that you can save a whole lot of money. Another great reason is that for almost anything you want to do on your computer, there is a great application out there. This can be as simple as Synergy, the mouse and keyboard sharing software I mentioned yesterday, to entire operating systems that can replace Windows altogether. Open source software also tends to be more flexible in what it will allow you to do.
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Jon “Maddog” Hall, president of Linux International, a worldwide nonprofit that encourages the use of free, open source software, spent 16 years working at Maynard-based Digital Equipment Corp., which after becoming a technology pioneer, was eventually acquired by Compaq in 1998.
It was his experience at DEC that put Hall squarely on the side of open source advocates like those who fought for SiCortex’s source code.
“A huge amount of the intellectual property developed over the years (at DEC) never saw the light of day,” Hall said. “If they had been open source projects, then that work and intellectual property would not have disappeared and could have been used in different things.”
Making software source code available without charge to anyone who wants it may seem to be counterintuitive in a capitalistic economy, but open source enthusiasts say that a lot of great programming code evaporates if a company goes out of business or chooses not to move ahead with a product.
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Mozilla
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It has now been a full month since the launch of Firefox 3.5 – what impact has the new browser had?
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Originally planned for Firefox 3.0 and 3.5 but finally backed out in both development cycles, tab preview is available again in Firefox 3.6 alpha 1 nightlies to provide visual tab switching: you press Ctrl + Tab to get previews of the current along with the five most recently used tabs, plus an option to show all tabs’ thumbnails.
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It’s Firefox’s reputation for superior security, rapid patching of security holes and its multitude of browser extentions that has allowed it to win converts among corporate and personal Web users
[...]
But one of the most prominent reasons for outbreaks occurs through ActiveX running on Internet Explorer. Malicious hackers use ActiveX as an opportunity to exploit users. Realizing that, in 2006, Microsoft started providing more safeguards in Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer 7 does do a better job of protecting users against ActiveX outbreaks. But according to a security report from research firm Secunia, there were more ActiveX outbreaks (366 total vulnerabilities) in 2008 than those that broke out in 2007. It was a black eye for Microsoft.
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Business
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EnterpriseDB has announced a migration assessment program for database customers who want a “way out” from Oracle price hikes.
The program features what the open-source database company called a “detailed benefit analysis” and a methodology for migrating to its Postgres Advanced Server.
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Openness
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Colleges and universities are as much about research as they are about the classroom experience, and just as open source software can provide cost savings, independence, and flexibility to educational institutions through courseware and recordkeeping, it can assist in the research process. Open source and open data standards play a role in collaboration, laboratory and literary scholarly research, publishing, and managing the overall research programs at institutions of higher learning.
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The University of California is using $500,000 in grants to build an open webcasting platform dubbed Operation Matterhorn, designed to automate the production and distribution of courseware.
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In a world-first conference, the Wikimedia Australia community will this week sit down with more than 170 senior executives from the nation’s largest cultural institutions – from the National Gallery to the Parliamentary Library – to devise strategies to better share Australia’s cultural heritage.
Called ‘GLAM-WIKI: Finding Common Ground,’ the event at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra on August 6-7 brings together Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums (GLAM) with Wikimedia Australia, the all-volunteer force that brings Australian content to the Wikipedia site.
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We’re always looking for new ways of making it as easy as possible for developers and website owners to access data held by Lichfield District Council in ways that they want – allowing you to remix, mashup and share data easily. Here’s a list of what we provide so far, this list is not exhaustive, and we’ll be adding more and more datasets as time progresses…
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B2B
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The ONE, or Open Negotiation Environment, platform is designed to overcome many of the limitations of existing business-to-business (B2B) electronic marketplaces and internet trading platforms that are run (or dominated) by large corporations.
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Programming
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FOSS coders are a strange breed. Many devote years of their lives and unquantifiable amounts of their passion to a job that may return nothing in the way of concrete rewards. It can, in fact, be thankless — FOSS coders may get ridicule and criticism instead of riches. Why do they do it? “[Humans] need a purpose in life,” says blogger Robert Pogson, “and for some, that purpose includes coding.”
[...]
FLOSS projects “will always have collisions of egos/goals/viewpoints, and we should expect people who are motivated to disagree,” Pogson added. “This does not break FLOSS or hold it back. It is a meritocracy, with survival of the fittest ideas and idealists.”
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The new effort includes a Web site aimed at keeping open source developers up to date on the projects. All five of the tools are licensed under the new BSD license, and are hosted on Google Code.
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Standards/Consortia
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The Khronos Group has announced the release of the specifications for version 3.2 of the OpenGL 2D and 3D graphics platform. The release is the third major update to the specification within a year and adds several new features, including enhanced performance, improved visual quality and accelerated geometry processing. The 3.2 update also makes it easier to port Direct3D applications and includes version 1.5 of the OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL).
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THOUSANDS of the worst families in England are to be put in “sin bins” in a bid to change their bad behaviour, Ed Balls announced yesterday.
The Children’s Secretary set out £400million plans to put 20,000 problem families under 24-hour CCTV super-vision in their own homes.
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Google already claims to serve more than 1.75 million companies and judging by the flashy campaign, it hopes to increase that number in the near future.
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Censorship/Web Abuse
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AN INTERNET filter installed by the NSW education department gave students access to pornographic material – but blocked educational sites.
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DRM
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Of course, taken to its logical conclusion, one might think that means if you can break DRM, then you haven’t violated the anti-circumvention language, because you’ve proven that the DRM is ineffective. It’s a bit of a logical pretzel. So, while I agree that it’s silly to make discussion of circumvention illegal, the legal reasoning was a bit twisted.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Crippen, 27, of Anaheim, was taken into custody Monday morning by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. The arrest follows his indictment by a federal grand jury on two counts of violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
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There is a great deal of discussion these days about the “new model,” but really it is only new to the music industry. Develop a truly great product that people are legitimately excited about. Invest the time, effort and money to market that product efficiently, and leverage small successes into larger ones. Eventually, the successes become large enough that everyone who gambled on the product gets their share of the profits. This is hardly MBA-level material.
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It’s one of many trademarks Harvard zealously protects
Luis Casas Luengo, Director of Extremadura’s Fundecyt foundation 16 (2004)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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It all occurred in a government department where an IT lady had a great idea about converting their computers to GNU/Linux. Let’s call her Gillian. Gillian was assigned to research GNU/Linux and found out that it would meet all the needs her department required and could be easily used instead of Microsoft Windows. Moreover, this switch to open source software would save them a lot of money. Gillian made a nice proposition outlined in a paper that documented all the steps she and her IT coworkers needed to take for this transition to happen. A lot of people liked her idea and thought it was feasible. Gillian even managed to convince the higher-ups who thought it was a good idea as well. However, like in all bureaucracies large or small, she still needed to get approval from the management.
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The HeliOS Project works toward a noble cause, but it is not self sufficient. It relies upon the compassion, dedication and willing sacrifice of others.
Not exactly an easy thing to lay hands upon these days…unless you are in Austin Texas.
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· Announced Distro: Sabayon Linux 4.2 CoreCD Edition
· Announced Distro: Yellow Dog Linux 6.2 Is Now Available for Download
· Announced Distro: Mandriva Linux 2010.0 Alpha 2 Has KDE 4.3 RC3 and GNOME 2.27.5
· Other news: Kernel Vulnerabilities in Ubuntu, Mandriva Flash 2009 Spring, Switch to Ubuntu
· Video Clip of the Week: Yellow Dog Linux 6 on PS3
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CLI
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Console commands can do more “work” in a single command than most graphical programs can. As a simple example. You wish to add an item to a list saved on your computer. In both windows and Linux you can simply type “echo some_item >> list.txt” and hey presto or I’m not Uncle Festo, that item is added to the end of the list. I am not going to explain the steps how to do that with a graphical editor. It’s too much work and I will leave that for you to do.
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Aside from the usual productive things that you can do on the Linux terminal, you can also use it for fun and games. Like perhaps reading those humorous man pages or watching Star Wars ASCII animation, which I’m going to show to you later on.
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Good command line tools are more important than ever and not just a relict of ancient times in comparison to RIA or GUI applications. Experienced system administrators appreciate their power in sophisticated shell scripts and could probably not manage their environments without them. The question is how can we make command line tools smarter and more powerful than today? This article discusses some ideas and potential implementations always keeping in mind “Do not reinvent the wheel” and “keep it simple”.
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Desktop Environments
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If you’ve been avoiding KDE 4 because of that, or other issues, it’s finally time to give it a try. I think you’ll find, as I have, that this new KDE is finally ready to compete with its older sibling KDE 3.5.11 and GNOME 2.26 for anyone’s Linux desktop.
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When I was first preparing to switch to Linux many years ago, I went into research mode and looked around the net a bit. At the time, part of the allure of Linux were the crazy cool desktops people had. After I switched I tried Gnome, then KDE, and was depressed at how uncool and *dozelike they were. Eventually, I discovered that all those amazing desktops were the result of Fluxbox (or the other *box forks). I switched immediately.
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GNOME
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The most beautiful part of being a linux user is the choice you have, whatever issue it is. Like any other distro, Ubuntu is infinitely customisable with any number of themes and applications. This include login window themes or gdm themes also. Major source for themes in ubuntu include www.gnome-look.org and www.devianart.com. There, you could obtain literally thousands of good quality themes.
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A common complaint about GNOME is that it has a certain fetish for icons. Menu entries, buttons – everything has an icon attached to it which often wastes space needlessly by making buttons larger than they need to be, as well as menus wider than they need to be. The good news (for me, at least) is that the next GNOME release will have all these icons removed.
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One of the most striking features of any desktop environment is its selection of icons. While wallpapers and window decorations hold a larger stage, it is the bright, colorful icons that draw ones attention and speed up the process of finding what one is looking for. The myriad of available icon themes may find themselves feeling a bit lonely in the near future, however, as the GNOME Art Team has decided that — at least some of them — will face the firing squad.
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gOS Linux is definitely one of the better-looking distributions available. Even if looks mean little to you, you’ll find its functionality of great use. Most everything works out of the box or takes mere seconds to configure. There’s no need to dabble in the command line, even though you can treat gOS as any other Linux.
Wireless, Bluetooth, web camera, codecs, all there and ready for you. On top of these, you get quick links to the whims of the modern youth, Blogger, Youtube and whatnot, and some Google products. On top of all these, you get the adamant stability and simplicity of Ubuntu and the tremendous APT/Synaptic package management.
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A while back I took at a Linux distribution geared solely toward playing games called Live Linux Gaming. Well there’s another remastered distribution for gamers called SuperGamer. SuperGamer is based on VectorLinux and requires a dual layer DVD. It weighs in at roughly 8GB so it’s a bit on the chunky side as a download. But, given the number of games it comes with (more on that below), you can understand why it’s such a large download. SuperGamer is based on the 2.6.27.24 kernel and can run on 32 or 64 bit computers.
[...]
SuperGamer is a great addition to the remastered distro collection of any intermediate or advanced Linux user. It’s well worth a download even given it’s large file size. Linux gamers in particular should probably consider this a must-have given the level of convenience in having all of its games right at their fingertips in a Live CD.
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Red Hat
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Microsoft’s latest 10-K, filed last week, adds Canonical, distributor of Ubuntu Linux, to the list of acknowledged competitors for Microsoft’s Client division, which makes Windows for PCs. Also notable is the addition of Linux distributor Red Hat to the list of Client divison rivals. Previously, Red Hat was mentioned only as a competitor for the Microsoft Business and Server & Tools divisions.
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Still, Cisco has signed on as a visionary sponsor for Red Hat Summit. And Mark Fulgham, VP of Cisco’s Data Center Emerging Technologies Central Marketing Organization, will give a keynote at the event.
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Recently, five college professors spent an intense five days with Red Hat employees and other members of the free and open source software (FOSS) community. Red Hat called the experience POSSE (Professors’ Open Source Summer Experience). The goal of the week was to show how FOSS could be used in post-secondary education, and to create a community to further the goal.
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Matthew Szulik runs a successful business that gives its products away for free.
What is more, Mr Szulik was recently named the United States Entrepreneur of the Year.
The company he works for – Red Hat – turns a profit by distributing free, open source software; computer programs and applications that anyone can download.
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Ubuntu
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Quick steps:
* Download the ISO or the torrent.
* While it’s downloading look at the overview of the new features and make sure to quickly go through the known issues.
* After the ISO is downloaded verify the MD5.
* Burn the ISO at low speed and enjoy Linux Mint 7 KDE.
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Two separate WorksWithU reader polls reveal an interesting look at competition and cooperation between Ubuntu and Google. According to one set of poll results, Google has emerged as Ubuntu’s second-biggest rival. But according to the second poll results, buzz about Google Chrome OS could ultimately help Ubuntu. Here’s a look at the anecdotal data.
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KIWI is a great tool to automate the creation of appliances, demo LiveCDs, or simply creating your own customized distribution. As a command line tool the process can be easily integrated into any build process eliminating the previously often “one-off” nature of appliance creation.
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MIPS Technologies and one of its partners are developing extensions to the Android operating system to support high-definition video displays. The effort is part of a broader initiative by MIPS to bring Google’s cellphone software to consumer electronics devices such as Blu-ray players, set-top boxes and digital TVs.
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MIPS has also initiated an Early Access Program “for a small group of key customers who will have access to specific hardware and code optimizations before they are publicly available.” And, as EETimes reports, the company specifically wants to develop extensions for Android to support HD video displays, and bring Android to Blu-ray players, set-top boxes and digital TVs.
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Sub-notebooks
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Although I have some nine different Linux distributions currently loaded for multi-boot on my 2133, Dreamlinux is not one of them, so I am not sure what version of the openchrome drivers they are using. As other distributions, what I generally recommend, especially for people who intend to use their computers for multimedia playing, is Linux Mint. It is derived from the latest Ubuntu distribution, so the latest Mint (7, aka Gloria) is derived from Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope. It has a lot of optional packages and codecs preinstalled, so it not only saves a fair amount of time, it may also include some things that you didn’t even know about – that was certainly the case with me, anyway. Out of curiosity, I just booted Mint on my 2133, and played a couple of Youtube videos. The quality seemed ok, they were not jerky or pixellating. I also played one of the videos on the ZDNet UK web site, which is of course flash-based, and it played just fine as well – if anything perhaps a bit better than the Youtube video did.
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I decided to find out just how tricky it would be to install dual Operating Systems in my netbook. My goal was to see if Linux could run along with Microsoft Windows XP as the OS du jour in my MSI Wind U123 netbook.
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This article is aimed mainly at the supporters of culture without boundaries, the people who have been convinced by Lawrence Lessig (the author of “The Free Culture”) and Richard M. Stallman’s ideas of fighting the bad copyright and non-free software licenses.
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But there’s a problem. Surprising as it may seem, many people have never heard of Firefox, whereas they may well have come across references to Internet Explorer – or even used it before on school or work PCs. This means that the huge, potential opportunity for Firefox that this offer by Microsoft represents could be wasted. Indeed, I suspect that Microsoft is well aware of this fact, which is why it felt it could make what seems like a fairly generous proposal without risking too much in practice.
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As news that a series of powerful earthquakes were shaking the coast of Mexico in Baja, Calfornia, no doubt researchers all across the globe were keeping a watchful eye on the data as it rolled in. Many geological research facilities around the world use or are in the process of developing open source software and applications designed to interpret and share information with other researchers. Let’s take a look at some examples.
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Peter Semmelhack, founder and CEO of Bug Labs and self-proclaimed “inveterate tinkerer” is developing an open source device to alert diabetics when their blood sugar falls dangerously low, particularly while sleeping. Though still in its early stages, Semmelhack has already run a couple of preliminary experiments that indicate his personal project shows a lot of promise for helping diabetics manage their blood sugar and insulin levels.
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Open source has infiltrated so many levels of IT over the past decade. It has been a slow process; however, little by little, it has become a normality. And even though many companies are adopting open source software, they are hesitant to bring open source developers into the fold. Why is this?
Many larger companies do not place any value on open source applications, therefore they do not place any value in those who code the applications. Some companies are afraid that hiring an open source developer would be a liability – possibly reverse engineering their proprietary software and then releasing forked versions into the community. Although these may sound like justifiable fears, they overlook some very important benefits that come with hiring open source developers.
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Open innovation is taking over in many areas, and open source plays an important role especially in software sequential innovation, where each successive invention builds in an essential way on its predecessors. Foremost, for the most of us before anything else software (open source included) is a tool towards a goal.
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A new Google project, Simple, aims to be as BASIC as possible. Simple is very much a work in progress, but currently consists of a compiler and runtime for the Simple language, which is a dialect of BASIC specifically for developing Android Applications. Simple programmers can define static or dynamic forms and manipulate them with BASIC like commands. The hope is that a simple programming language, based on BASIC, will open up programming Android devices to a wider audience.
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Standards/Consortia
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In light of this, Ogg Theora seems like a good alternative as it doesn’t seem to be encumbered by patents. Google and Apple, though, are not so sure. They believe Theora hasn’t been cooking long enough to draw the attention of any submarine patent holders. Theora advocates turn this argument around and suggest that H.264 could also have undiscovered patent encumbrances. I appreciate the logic of what they’re saying, but the fact that H.264 is already so wildly popular for so long seems to guarantee that any patent trolls would have surfaced by now.
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The logic here seems to be that there would be an “imbalance” in open standards if it were insisted that patents were excluded – because balance obviously means having standards with and without patents. While it’s true that creates a “balance”, it’s a purely linguistic one; the fact is that patent-encumbered standards requiring licensing fees cannot, by definition, be open. That’s because they do not create level playing fields: there is always one or more players who occupy a privileged position. So the balance is entirely specious.
[...]
Against that background of a standardisation process being bent to breaking point, complaints about the *balance* of open standards ring rather hollow.
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The Free Software Foundation’s DefectiveByDesign.org campaign, in cooperation with prominent authors, journalists, and librarians, has launched a petition against the Amazon Kindle’s use of digital restrictions management (DRM).
“The freedom to read without supervision or interference is central to a free society,” said FSF executive director Peter Brown. “When ebook products like the Kindle use DRM to restrict what users can do with their books, that is a clear threat to the free exchange of ideas.”
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Intellectual Monopolies
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They tell me I have to use the sentence “exactly as written” and heaven help me if I don’t include the complete footer with their copyright boilerplate.
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It appears that some (certainly not all) in the mainstream press still seems to have problems understanding the value of getting people to talk about what they reported on. They seem to come at this viewpoint from the old line of thinking that a reporter reported on the story and that was it. The story was done. But that’s not the way the news works. A news story is simply a part of the conversation. It may be a starting point in a bigger effort — which is why it’s important for so many people today to be able to spread and share the news with others. Yet, if you come at things from a viewpoint of the newspaper article being a final and definitive word, then suddenly such sharing and spreading is viewed as “theft” or being “ripped off” and the person promoting and discussing and sharing your work is suddenly a parasite.
Luis Casas Luengo, Director of Extremadura’s Fundecyt foundation 15 (2004)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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Send this to a friend
08.03.09
Posted in News Roundup at 1:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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New Stuff
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Desktop
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Just about three weeks ago the AMD developers working on the open-source ATI drivers had reached the milestone in their open-source 3D support for the R600/700 GPUs of having glxgears running on these two latest generations of ATI graphics processors. glxgears running itself isn’t much, but it’s an important step. Last night, AMD’s Alex Deucher is now reporting a new milestone and one that is certainly interesting for a large number of users, that is Compiz is running!
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Care to guess what happened after I clicked “Shut Down”? My Linux system actually let me shut down. Like, right then. None of this “let me install a few updates before you really get to shut down your system”, like in Windows. I wasn’t held hostage by an update process that insisted on owning my machine for another hour. The system just shut down, normally.
Linux “System Update” was done when it said it was done. That is how modern systems are supposed to work!
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Kernel Space
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A month of the Hurd: hurd Debian package, union mount translator, bug fixes, and a job opening.
Samuel Thibault uploaded a new version of the hurd Debian package which improves system stability by fixing a long-standing bug in the exec server that had randomly made it hang, inhibiting the creation of new processes.
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Ok, I’ve got some pending stuff, but I’m pushing out -rc5 now because it does fix a lot of regressions, and some of the pending stuff I’m not entirely sure about.
Apart from various regression fixes, the diffstat shows a couple of new drivers (at_hdmac, uc2322, gspca/sn9c20x, ds2782 battery driver), and some big KMS radeon changes (the Radeon KMS source code may physically be under drivers/gpu, but it’s only enabled if CONFIG_STAGING is set, and is considered unstable).
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So I’ve figured out my drive and partition usage, but the things that are causing the most headaches, and occupying the majority of my research time, are:
1. Which filesystems
2. Which mount options
3. Which schedulers
4. Partition alignment schemes
See, I will have two SSDs in there with Gentoo installed on ‘em, but I’ll also have a separate magnetic HDD for media storage, so that means a different for each drive.
For 1, ext4 is looking increasingly attractive for the SSDs. I may continue to use ReiserFS for the media drive, as it’s worked very well for a few years now. But, given that the Portage tree is just lots and lots of tiny files, perhaps I could continue using ReiserFS on it? Though I would need to deactivate the journal. The Mobi drive should not have any journaling on it — too many writes.
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Applications
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Simply put, GIMP is the best FREE software for photo editing that you can find on the internet. You can create, modify and enhance any digital image with GIMP with ease and confidence. The best way to enjoy GIMP is to download it and begin to use it right away. In no time at all you will become a photo editing expert without having to pay an arm and a leg.
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Lets face it, the days of shelves bowing under the weight of DVD cases & CD’s is coming to an end, but even if for you its not, in the days of cheap online stores and what seems to be all year round “everything must go” type sales, most peoples collections are going to be rather large. Whilst GCstar won’t put all your CD’s into their correct boxes, nor will it put them in an alphabetical order on your shelves, what it will do is allow you to document your entire collection on a database. So why is this preferable to any other database package? I hear you ask. Well, if you fancy setting up your own fields with “genre”, “year” et al, then be my guest. Its already been done though with GCstar.
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We are in the final steps toward releasing KMyMoney 1.0. It has been over 2 years since the last stable release and over that time the development team has been busy building a lot of features, while maintaining and even improving stability and performance.
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No, the lack of “standards” for GNU/Linux is not the problem. The natural human resistance to change, corporate inertia and illegal (or at least unethical) business practices by certain large companies [1][2] are the problems. We cannot overcome resistance to change in people. Where we need to concentrate on change is with our children. Especially children locked in public education systems that are locked into proprietary operating systems [3][4]. Teach our children to use GNU/Linux and we change the future of the computing landscape.
Too many “versions” of GNU/Linux? No. Too little education about GNU/Linux? Definitely.
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My very first Linux distribution was called Pygmy Linux, a mini-distro based off Slackware. It had no graphical desktop, no compiler, no office suite, no package management and it didn’t recognize my modem. Obviously it didn’t qualify as a replacement for my main desktop system at the time. Nor was it supposed to. But it did do what I wanted it to and that was to teach me the UNIX command line and the structure of a UNIX file system. It did those things very well and I learned a lot. It has been ten years since I plunged into the Linux depths. To celebrate ten years with Linux, I decided to give a mini-distro based on Slackware a test drive. Pygmy is long gone, but others live on. This week I installed Slax on my system and put it through its paces.
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As with Linux Mint, what you notice about Pardus is that there are no games installed. Not one. Also there are no media center applications like Moovida, the media center application formerly known as Elisa Media Center, or XBMC. Not only are these not installed, I could not find them (Moovida and XBMC) in the default repo. With games however, there are a decent collection in the default repo that you can install using the package manager.
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Okay as anyone who loves Mepis knows there is a huge amount of wants and desires and lets not forget the rumors that abound from the Forums to websites. They all seem to have most of the same things mentioned. KDE4 is the biggest thing, while it is available from other sources it has not as of yet made it into the Mepis Repositories.
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Red Hat
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The leader of the CentOS GNU/Linux project, Lance Davis, who had gone missing for a while and caused other developers on the team some angst, has reappeared and held a meeting with them, according to a notice on the project website.
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Ubuntu
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Community support does a fairly good job replacing the mysterious elements with science — and it often, honest to Pete, ends up being an all-out community effort. It all gets sorted out, 99% of the time — but it takes some time. Presumably those people purchasing the Professional support service are smaller businesses, and cliche as it is, time often is money.
That doesn’t mean that paid support will necessarily work through a problem faster or as elegantly as community support will, but it does mean that your issue is, for the techs, a priority — not something only tackled on lunch and coffee breaks.
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This month:
* Command and Conquer
* How To: Program in Python – Part 1, Scan To PDF/DJVU, Associate A File Type
* and Inkscape – Part 4.
* My Story – My Ubuntu Home Server.
* Review – Amarok 1.4.
* MOTU Interview – Nathan Handler.
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Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #153 for the week July 26th – August 1st, 2009. In this issue we cover: Canonical to Offer Ubuntu Desktop Support & Services, Free Books for Approved LoCo teams, DC LoCo Bug Jam, Atlanta Linux Fest & Mini Ubucon, Ubuntu Pennsylvania & FreeGeekPenn, Sharing translations between different releases, Open Mind & Launchpad, More power to the release manager, Writing code for Launchpad, Exporting translations to a Bazaar branch, New layout for kubuntu-de.org, Ubuntu Podcast Quickie #10, Ubuntu Teams Meeting Summary for July, and much, much more!
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Gillis discusses why LiMo is different than other mobile Linux platforms and offers insights on Intel’s Wind River acquisition, Android, Chrome, Symbian, and more.
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The LiMo Foundation will soon announce more handsets, said executive director Morgan Gillis, in an interview with LinuxDevices. Gillis, who sounded off on Intel’s Wind River acquisition, Android, Chrome OS, Symbian, and more, said the mid-August announcement will be followed by bigger announcements in October as LiMo R2 reaches market.
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Europe leads the world in open source software adoption and development. Open source solutions have greater market share in Europe than the rest of the world, both on the server and the desktop, and more open source developers live in Europe than on any other continent including North America. Only 18% of the developers on SourceForge live in the United States, while 33% live in the European Union (EU). European firms that contribute to open source projects account for about 565,000 jobs and have combined annual revenues of over €260 billion ($350 billion).
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Business
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“Actuate’s solid financial foundation enables us to adapt through any business climate,” said Pete Cittadini, President and CEO of Actuate. “We continue to make forward strides with our open source strategy. For the first time, we are able to identify opportunities totaling multiple millions within our pipeline, where the prospect began by downloading Eclipse BIRT and now expresses interest in Actuate’s commercial offerings. This is further substantiation that our open source investments continue to position us well for growth associated with a new, more profitable enterprise software business model.”
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Revenues for 2Q09 were $22.2 million compared to $16.0 million in 2Q08, an increase of 38%. Revenues for the six months ended June 30, 2009 were $40.8 million compared to $29.7 million for the same period last year, an increase of 37%.
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BitRock Inc, the leading provider of cross platform deployment tools and services, today announced the release of all of the BitNami Stacks as SUSE-based virtual appliances. BitNami users can now download ready-to-run BitNami Appliances for open source applications such as SugarCRM, Drupal, WordPress, Alfresco and many others. The appliances are available free of charge from the BitNami project website, BitNami.org.
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Among the big companies that are using this system you are going to find big clients like Sony Entertainment, Mazda Motors Europe, and many others.
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When I was in University, not long after discovering a thing called “Linux” and all the wonderful free software that came with it, I fell in love with Open Source. The ethics of openness and meritocracy really appealed to me. It just seemed to me to be the “right” way of doing things.
However it was a source of some good humoured tension between myself and my colleagues, circa Red Hat 6.0. Reaction against the idea of open source basically ranged from “anything given away for free can’t be any good”, to “very idealistic but it has no future since there is no way to make a living off of ‘free’”.
Luis Casas Luengo, Director of Extremadura’s Fundecyt foundation 14 (2004)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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Posted in News Roundup at 2:12 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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PC cases come in many form factors, but they’re all basically boxes that lack personality. This doesn’t have to be the case (pun intended), as my Carpet Cleaner PC very well proves. Yes, this is a working Ubuntu PC built out of an old Bissell Carpet Machine.
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PC cases come in many form factors, but they’re all basically boxes that lack personality. This doesn’t have to be the case (pun intended), as my Carpet Cleaner PC very well proves. Yes, this is a working Ubuntu PC built out of an old Bissell Carpet Machine.
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Microsoft had to report a 30% slump in sales for the last quarter. Their report to the U.S. SEC includes a rundown of their risk and competition factors. Among their concerns are Linux and open source untertakings, but also their own partners HP and Intel.
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The basic idea is to promote and discuss FLOSS, with a bit more emphasis on the Free aspect. There’s been a downright anti-Free / anti-ideals trending in the FLOSS world for quite sometime, and some of us think the Freedom aspect of FLOSS could use a little positive promotion. I especially welcome feedback on topics you’d like to hear about, and suggestions on how to improve the site quality! I’ve also enjoyed writing a lot, and The Source represents a welcome chance for me to expand my focus and improve my writing. (Not that it kneads any improviment, but One trys to be modestly.)
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I want to make my own Tux plushie, based on the pattern I blogged about before. However, I am just a newbie when it comes to sewing using a sewing machine so curves are really not easy for me right now. Anyhow, I’ve been looking at some T-shirt surgery guides and I think that some of them are fairly easy to follow. There are two things I’d like to do with some of my shirts.
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Desktop
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Since my last entry on this topic two weeks ago, I’ve had the chance to bring my work Lenovo Thinkpad T400 running Ubuntu Linux 9.04 on a few business trips. I’ve also done a few tweaks, added a few apps, subtracted a few apps, and generally lived with this environment as my primary working environment.
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But Chrome OS — starting with cheap, mobility-focused netbooks — promises to be fast, simple, and — important — free to gadget makers, which are already facing paper-thin margins on netbooks, and pressure to cut costs. If Google can make a great user interface and link easily to cloud services like the Web, Google search, GMail, and Google chat, then the Windows juggernaut could be at risk.
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Education
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Linux shirts, caps, etc. Just the presence of those items will make people more aware of its existence. And if you make a really awesome design, people will talk to you about it and ask what it’s all about. A conversation starter that could let someone know about Linux and maybe even get him/her interested to try it out.
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If you’re running a training center, whether it concerns distance education or not, you need tools to help you manage your classes and facilitate discussions, especially for those who are into distance education learning programs. Issues that need to be addressed include: course management as well as ensuring that the training room is managed well so that learners can focus on the lessons and not be distracted by other applications.
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Server
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Many different flavors of linux are available on this new system including CentOS x86 or 64-bit, Debian 5.0 x86 or 64-bit, Fedora 11 x86 or 64-bit, Fedora-Core 7 x86, and Ubuntu 9.04 x86 or 64-bit. Orders will be processed and your VPS will be available within 2 hours.
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Metastorm, a provider of business process management, business process analysis and enterprise architecture software for aligning strategy with execution, has introduced Metastorm Integration Manager for Linux System Z.
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Kernel Space
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This week there were several interesting stories at Phoronix, if you happened to miss any of them. We started off by sharing that proper multi-seat support for Linux / X.Org is on the way with the new VGA arbitration code coming about. With this new implementation, multiple X Servers can be run side-by-side without needing to use Xephyr or any ugly hacks.
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I went into one of my colleague’s office and kicked the hell out of one of the much loved Google beanbags, all the while screaming obscenities into the air for a good five minutes. He looked on with bemused amusement. I finally calmed down enough to explain the problem. One packet being returned at the wrong time. One single mis-timed packet caused a ripple effect in the Windows client file system software that was seen all the way up in the complex user interface of only that particular version of Excel, when interacting with the “Offline Files” feature, only on Windows Vista.
The remaining task was to add a regression test into our test suite, so that this specific bug is tested for before we release any new versions of Samba. The code isn’t done until it’s properly tested. But at least the user is now happy.
Interoperability with Windows is hard. But somebody has to do it. And if you’re going to do something, you might as well try and do it well (and try and have some fun at the same time) 
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File Systems
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Btrfs is heading for 1.0, a little more than 2 years since the first announcement. This is much faster than many file systems veterans – including myself – expected, especially given that during most of that time, btrfs had only one full-time developer. Btrfs is not ready for production use – that is, storing and serving data you would be upset about losing – but it is ready for widespread testing – e.g., on your backed-up-nightly laptop, or your experimental netbook that you reinstall every few weeks anyway.
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As you may probably know, Linux supports various filesystems such as ext2, ext3, ext4, xfs, reiserfs, jfs among others. Few users really consider this part of a system, selecting default options of their distribution’s installer. In this article, I will give some reasons for a better consideration of the file-system and of its layout. I will suggest a top-bottom process for the design of a “smart” layout that remains as stable as possible over time for a given computer usage.
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Applications
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Typically, a programmer writes language statements in a language such as C or C++ using an editor. The programmer then runs the appropriate language compiler, which analyzes the language statements and turns them into machine code that the processor can execute.
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Changing the application backgroud won’t change the world. Indeed it is a useless feature, and a very minor enhancement.
But most people struggle with their computer. The software is too often a handicap they have to cope with to get things done.
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Audio
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Today we’ll log in for the first time. Talk about Ubunutu’s service offerings and talk about the uname and man command.
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ScummVM, a collection of recreated popular game engines made to run on new platforms.
Guest: Eugene Sandulenko for ScummVM
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Desktop Environments
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Two and a half weeks ago, I got a netbook and promptly installed Ubuntu, followed by Fluxbox (as already explained). And after two weeks of almost continued use, I like it even more than when I decided to use it. Some of the points I really enjoy (in no particular order).
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Marble is a spectacular piece of software. It is beautiful, thorough, detailed, well laid out, fast, robust, and responsive. And you can enjoy it without any needs for a powerful graphics card. It runs well on modest hardware, which only makes it even more wondrous.
For people who like geography, Marble is a great bonus. It also seems like an excellent tool for teaching people (and kids) the wonders of our Planet in a fun and exciting way. I wish I had something like this when I was growing up!
Marble is simply great. You have to try it!
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Today I have the pleasure of introducing to all of you, Robin H. Johnson (robbat2) Gentoo Developer, Gentoo Trustee board member, head of the infrastructure, without it working smoothly there would not be Gentoo as we know it. Robin is also involved with helping out MySQL, LDAP, base-system, and lots more.
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Mandriva Linux 2010 Alpha 2 is now available on public mirrors. This Alpha is available only through Free version, 32 and 64 bit DVDs.
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Dell
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Specification
* Intel Core 2 Duo Processor T9300(2.5 GHz, 6M cache, 800 MHz FSB)
* 320 GB SATA Hard Disk
* 4GB (2×2048 MB) 667 MHz Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM
* Dell Wireless 1395 802.11g 54Mbps Wireless Mini Card
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Ubuntu
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There are two methods of getting Amiga on Ubuntu.
Method two, is good old emulation using E-UAE. to emulate the Amiga. E-UAE is fantastic, and if you have an Amiga Rom and startup disks you can get a pretty good working version of the OS going. However, this defeats the whole purpose of trying to port Amiga games over to Ubuntu, and what one really wants is some form of Amiga emulation layer, or a binary library like WINE, so that Amiga apps can run on Ubuntu.
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Today Amazon credited my card with $65.45. After ordering an Eee PC 1005 HA from amazon.com, I asked them for a refund for the cost of Windows XP via the ‘Contact us’ form. At first they told me to cancel any items on my order that I wanted a refund for, but after I explained that XP was pre-installed on the machine they got it. They asked what the cost of the OS was, and I answered that I had no idea but that Amazon UK refunded £40.00.
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A bare-bones box with Ubuntu sells for $369 sporting the Intel 1.6GHz Atom N270 CPU, 512MB of RAM, and a 16GB solid-state drive. The fully loaded model we received (in tasteful playground-ball red, of course) runs Windows XP on 1GB of RAM (upgradable to 2GB) and a 80GB hard drive; it sells for $559 (as of 7/31/09). I know that education is expensive, but are you willing to drop that many ducats on your child’s netbook?
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The Open Source brand has been successfully defined as providing freedom from vendor lock-in, establishing a community of users and developers, and enabling any user to be successful, regardless of the size of their wallet. The establishment of this regulated market makes the implicit statement about fairness: that playing in the world of cost-free products necessarily means agreeing to some restrictions that protect users and developers over the long-term.
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Open source projects tend to be very agile. Bugs are often reported and fixed within days. The developers of the software generally make themselves available on mailing lists and discussion groups to help users of the software. If you are using proprietary software you are subject to the availability of the provider. Companies can go bankrupt and developers can flake out on you. If you’re using open source you already own the code and you can probably find another developer familiar with your technology without much difficulty.
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Web Browsers
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So, as the name implies, we the Firefox fans in Jordan (specifically Jordan University for Science and Technology) have arranged a nice and humble gift for the FOSS society as a whole, and the Firefox community in specific:
A cool trip to one of the world’s new seven wonders, The Ancient City of Petra!!
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Arora seems to render pages much quicker and it certainly loads quicker. There is a sizable decrease in memory footprint – averaging at around 150 Mb. I’ve browsed for a few hours with several tabs open and not seen it go over 200Mb.
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Government
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EDOS (Environment for the Development and Distribution of Open Source software) obtained interesting results, either from an academic point of view or from an industrial perspective.
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Of the 232 candidates for the European Parliament that pledged their support for free and open source software, 34 have been elected, from Belgium, France, Greece, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.
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Licensing
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We will also be changing the license for this new version of opentaps from the Honest Public License (HPL) to the Free Software Foundation’s Affero GPL v3.
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Openness
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A new site with the self-explanatory name of “Open source cognitive science” has an interesting opening post about Tools for Psychology and Neuroscience, pointing out that…
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Programming
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For today’s computer science students, learning C is like taking an elective class in Latin. But C is anything but history and not at all a dead language. And C remains the dominant language in the fast growing field of embedded software development. Figure 1 summarizes 13 years of relevant annual survey data collected by the publishers of Embedded Systems Design.
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The cross-platform Qt GUI framework now runs on Wind River’s VxWorks real-time operating system, although it currently still requires a separate X11 server to be installed. The Qt developers point out that this version of Qt will probably never run without being customised for each respective version of VxWorks.
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Standards/Consortia
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Based on what we actually know, Theora looks good. It complies with the W3C patent policy and goals, and there haven’t been any patent claims that would indicate otherwise.
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Censorship/Web Abuse
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You can trust today’s DIA (maybe), but really do you trust them in 5 years time? 10 years? 20 years? Once the filter is in it’s a trivial thing for a future government (or maybe just an unelected public servant) to change it to a completely different sort of filter. Suddenly all info on a policial movement is gone (think the anti-communism era that wasn’t so long ago) – or all info on cannibas – or all perhaps anything that ridicules MPs… All you gotta do is say it’s to “stop child porn” and you can do anything.
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And then, somebody built a better mousetrap. Google isn’t a threat to the publishing industry because it “steals” its content for Google News. It’s a threat because it destroyed our advertising models.
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Legal threat from lawyers representing the failed Icelandic bank Kaupthing to WikiLeaks (Sunshine Press), seeking to suppress a 209 page internal Kaupthing document assessing the credit risks of its largest clients.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Summary: this would be a new four-part test to add to the already existing four-part “fair use” test.
1. The presence and quality of the link.
2. Does the new format provide the opportunity for democratic engagement that is unavailable at the original provider?
3. Courts should consider this balance: between the added value of information (provided by the so-called appropriator) and amount of appropriation of the “original” work.
4. What is the overall purpose and character of the appropriating organization?
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The idea that a publication retains value that creates an obligation upon the recipient to repay is an epiphenomenon of copyright. This is the peculiar idea that the maker or recipient of a copy of a published work extracts value from it which must be repaid to its copyright holder (or million dollar fines are liable).
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On Thursday, July 30, 2009, the White House office of the United States Trade Representative denied release of 4 new proposals for text that were circulated in July to “all countries” in the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) negotiations. The request was limited to documents that were prepared in the past 90 days for purpose of discussion at the July 2009 ACTA negotiating meeting held in Morocco.
Luis Casas Luengo, Director of Extremadura’s Fundecyt foundation 13 (2004)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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