• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Need Ideas for Christmas or Other Presents?

Want a finished product not requiring installation? Why not buy a PC with GNU/Linux installed for presents. Recipients will remember your generosity for years of trouble-free use and top performance.

Desktop

• Linux Out Performs Windows in OpenGL

  Late last year I did a posting detailing how Windows 7 crushed Ubuntu 9.10 in the area of 3D performance. Nine months later I am happy to say:

  Linux out performs Windows 7 in OpenGL benchmarks!

• Dell.com.cn

  Dell, in China, has no qualms about putting Ubuntu before consumers. On their site they do “recommend that other OS” according to Google Translate but the Mini-10 comes in two models, one with Ubuntu and one with that other OS. That other OS is RM100 higher price. They even have N series with FreeDOS or “Linux Ubuntu 9.10“. Isn’t the outside of the USA a different world?

Ballnux

• Amazon fires a shot at Apple’s iPad in new Kindle commercial

  In it, a man and a woman are both lounging by the pool trying to read. But the man is having trouble reading on his iPad (which starts at $499) in the sunlight. He leans over to ask the woman how she is able to keep reading “in this light.”

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • The Next X.Org Developers Summit?

    The X.Org Developers’ Summit in Toulouse, France just ended and it’s time in the morning to head to Oktoberfest to meet with many Phoronix readers at this annual outing. XDS 2010 turned out to be a wonderful event and more organized than some X.Org events in the past. Thanks to the wonderful organization by Matthieu Herrb, the venue itself was nice, the social event last night was terrific, the Internet and power at the event was plenty, etc. Stay tuned for Phoronix notes and some audio/video recordings to be published in the coming days, beyond what has already been reported. At XDS 2010 it was also brought up where to host XDS 2011.

    It was brought up whether to host the 2011 X.Org Developers’ Summit in Brazil, simply on the basis of the X.Org events usually being in the United States or Europe, even though that’s where a vast majority of the X.Org developers are located. No real reasons in favor of an XDS Brazil event were provided and there isn’t even any X.Org developers presently living in Brazil that could organize such an event. There were plenty of concerns though regarding the cost of transportation, the time needed to fly to Brazil for both Americans and Europeans, and just the overall location being inconvenient for everyone.

  • Most Drivers Won’t Be Merged Into X Server 1.10

    The last talk of the 2010 X.Org Developers’ Summit was regarding X.Org Server 1.10. The good news is that nearly every X.Org graphics driver will not be merged back into the xorg-server repository.

Applications

• Wine

  • Wine Announcement [1.3.3]

    The Wine development release 1.3.3 is now available.

    What’s new in this release (see below for details):
    – Improved support for right-to-left text.
    – Support for CMYK JPEG images.
    – Beginnings of a Game Explorer implementation.
    – Improved 64-bit support in MSI.
    – Stub inetcpl control panel applet.
    – A number of fixes to crypto support.
    – Translation updates.
    – Various bug fixes.

Distributions

• PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Mageia – a Mandriva fork

    Most employees working on the distribution were laid off when Edge-IT was liquidated. We do not trust the plans of Mandriva SA anymore and we don’t think the company (or any company) is a safe host for such a project.

  • Mandriva’s Forked Into A New Project Called Mageia

    The Mandriva Linux distribution has been forked by a number of Mandriva contributors with the fate of this distribution formerly known as Mandrake being unknown due to financial troubles and layoffs facing Mandriva’s parent company. This new forked version of Mandriva is being called Mageia.

  • Mageia – A New Linux Distribution

• Red Hat Family

  • UBS: IBM, Oracle could bid to buy Red Hat

    UBS strategist Thomas Doerflinger says in the note that the forces driving M&A activity include the economic slowdown and low interest rates. Also, the potential buyers have strong balance sheets and ample cash.

    Red Hat’s market cap is close to $7.3 billion. The company employs about 2,800 worldwide.

• Debian Family

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Shuttleworth: Defending Ubuntu

      I’m not talking about valid criticism or difference in philosophy either, I’m talking about people who personally attack rms and/or simply lie about the FSF (ala recent attempts to suggest the FSF supports software patents to attack non-GPL software [1][2]).

      I’m not sure how the Self-Loathing Free Software User gained traction in Ubuntu (or in any community for that matter), but it seems at odds with the messaging coming from Mr. Shuttleworth.

Devices/Embedded

• Device update: Analysts bullish on ereaders

  These forecasts not only predict a growing number of devices being used by consumers, but also a growing amount of online content to feed those devices. Taken together, these projections create an optimistic short-term picture for the ereader market.

  Turning to this week’s news: we’ve got announcements from Elonex, Ectaco, and Velocity Micro, as well as an update on the Samsung Galaxy Tab.

Trade Practices Implications of Infringing Copies of Open Source Software

Earlier in the year Linux Australia approved a grant for the production of a research note on the Trade Practices Implications of Infringing Copies of Open Source Software. The note has been completed and reviewed by the Linux Australia committee and is now ready for open release.

The main finding of the research is that a vendor selling an infringing copy of open source software is likely to be in breach of at least one section of Part V the Trade Practices Act 1974 (Cth) relating to misleading or deceptive statements or conduct, and likely more than one. There are many cases in which such breaches have been found in relation to infringing copies of software. Even where a vendor only offers to sell (as opposed to actually selling) an infringing copy they are still likely to be in breach of the Act.

Apache is Hanging in There…

Netcraft reports that Apache has 66% share of the servers on the million busiest sites, 57% of all sites (up 1% which Apache stole from M$ last month), Since this demonstrates FLOSS works, it’s hard to see whence all the doom and gloom for GNU/Linux on the desktop comes.

Databases

• Why NoSQL Matters

  “NoSQL” is a label which encompasses a wave of innovation now happening in the database space. The NoSQL movement has sparked a whirlwind of discussion, debate, and excitement in the technical community. Why is NoSQL generating so much buzz? What does it mean for you, the application developer? And what place does NoSQL have for apps running on the Heroku platform?

CMS

• Coolest [Drupal] modules (and theme) of the week

Education

• 50 Reasons to Love GNU/Linux for Schools

  We have all read articles with 5 or 10 reasons to love/hate some facet of IT. I thought I would go for 50. It is not hard. What is hard is putting them in order of importance/preference. The first few are easy. The last few are a coin-flip, but there are many reasons to love GNU/Linux in education.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• What is Software Freedom Day About?

  Other things that encourage both my use and support of free software are the heavy handed application of Digital Rights Management (DRM) and Technical Protection Measures (TPM). These are methods employed in hardware and software to force your tech stuff to be subservient to the manufacturer. In many if not most cases DRM/TPM result in degrading the hardware or software, sometimes making it difficult to use, sometimes just crippling it so that things that should work don’t, and sometimes breaking it so that it doesn’t work at all. It used to be inadvertent “bugs” were the biggest problem in running software. Today it’s deliberate DRM. I suppose you could put DRM on free software but people would know what it was and correct it out. As far as I’m concerned, DRM is as much malware as spyware or viruses. If it is going to be allowed at all, it needs to be clearly labelled. The fact that it is not and consumers only know about it after they’ve purchased it is a huge government #fail

  The biggest thing free software has done to change my outlook is that it has changed my way of thinking. Because the principals behind free software can be applied in many more things. For me, it’s made me rethink the idea of copyright, and then rethink it again. It has in fact encouraged me to join what Cory Doctorow calls the copyfight. As a writer, I’m embracing the concept of self publishing, and I will be releasing my debut novel under a Creative Commons License.

Openness/Sharing

• Open Access/Content

  • Introducing LAPSI and EVPSI

    Information generated and collected by public sector bodies represents a veritable gold mine: optimal access to and reuse of this public sector information (PSI) has a positive impact on market services improvements, but also on the democratic involvement of citizens in governmental decisions.

  • Mars Inc. Cacao Genome Database claims Open Access, public domain: falls short

    This initially looked very promising: Mars, along with a number of collaborators (USDA, IBM, Clemson University Genomics Institute; Public Intellectual Property Resource for Agriculture at the University of California-Davis; National Center for Genome Resources; Center for Genomics and Bioinformatics at Indiana University; HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology; and Washington State University), have sequenced the cacao genome and released it “Open Access” and “public domain” for the benefit of all, at a site called the Cacao Genome Project…

    [...]

    Clearly, this data set has not been released as Open Access and certainly not released into the public domain.

    Instead of Open Access or public domain, they have a restrictive license, which allows gated access for a restricted set of uses.

Email Netiquette – Part 1

As with top-posting, not trimming your replies is lazy, and again, it’s rude. Some people don’t have the hard drive space you might, or the bandwidth to pull down such a noisy message. Cutting out the cruft, leaving the relevant pieces in, is considerate, polite and logically sound. Do you, and everyone else a favor, and trim your replies.

Jackson family lawsuit blames AEG for Michael’s death

Michael Jackson’s family has sued AEG Live claiming the event production company is responsible for Jackson’s death.

Here’s the complaint, filed today in Los Angeles Superior Court by Katherine Jackson on behalf of the family. The lawsuit claims AEG, president and CEO Tim Leiweke, Anschutz Entertainment and others are responsible for Jackson’s death because his contract with AEG for the planned “This Is It” tour created a legal duty to keep him healthy.

The Trouble with the View from Above

It is both striking and important to recognize how relatively little the pre-modern state actually knew about the society over which it presided. State officials had only the most tenuous idea of the population under their jurisdiction, its movements, its real property, wealth, crop yields, and so forth. Their degree of ignorance was directly proportional to the fragmentation of their sources of information. Local currencies and local measures of capacity (e.g., the bushel) and length (the ell, the rod, the toise) were likely to vary from place to place and with the nature of the transacting parties. The opacity of local society was, of course, actively maintained by local elites as one effective means of resistance to intrusions from above.

Having little synoptic, aggregate intelligence about the manpower and resources available to it, officials were apt either to overreach in their exactions, touching off flight or revolt, or to fail to mobilize the resources that were, in fact, available. To follow the process of state-making, then, is to follow the conquest of illegibility. The account of this conquest — an achievement won against stiff resistance — could take many forms, for example: the creation of the cadastral survey and uniform property registers, the invention and imposition of the meter, national censuses and currencies, and the development of uniform legal codes.

Health/Nutrition

• Big Corn wants to change “High Fructose Corn Syrup” to “Corn Sugars”

  The US Corn Refiners Association has petitioned the FDA for permission to change the name “High Fructose Corn Syrup” to the much more innocuous-sounding “Corn Sugars.” This comes as 58% of Americans say they are concerned about HFCS’s impact on their health. HFCS is a heavily subsidized industrial byproduct of the corn industry, and is ubiquitous in American processed food — everything from Rice Krispies to “healthy” granola bars.

• Obesity costs US at least $215 billion every year: study

  Obesity costs the US economy at least 215 billion dollars a year in direct and indirect impacts including medical expenses and lost productivity, a new study showed Tuesday.

Security/Aggression

• Why the Paul Chambers case matters

  This week will see the appeal by Paul Chambers of his conviction under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003.

  He was convicted – and so given a criminal record – for what was, and what was intended to be, a joke contained in a tweet.

  [...]

  They send several anti-terrorist officers around to Paul’s workplace.

  (Unsurprisingly, Paul loses his job very soon after.)

  The police arrest Paul and keep him in custody for a number of hours.

  However, it appears that even the police do not think this is a serious matter.

  But again “process” means it needs to be taken further. And so the case is referred to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).

  The CPS realise quickly that there is no evidence for Paul to be prosecuted under the bomb hoax legislation.

• Body armor contractor convicted for $190M stock scam scheme

  NY jury convicts body-armor company founder of running $190 million stock scheme

  The founder of America’s leading supplier of body armor to the U.S. military was convicted Tuesday of charges that he ran a $190 million stock scheme.

  David H. Brooks, founder and former chief executive of DHB Industries Inc., was convicted of 17 counts, including securities fraud and conspiracy. Prosecutors said he used the company treasury for personal luxuries, with more than $6 million in unauthorized expenditures.

• Darpa Wants You To Build An Anti-Secrecy App

  Usually the Pentagon expends time and technological effort to protect information. But now the far-out researchers at Darpa are looking for a few good futurists to help the Obama administration declassify reams of national security documents.

• DRG SSH Username and Password Authentication Tag Clouds

• WikiLeaks readying the ‘biggest leak of military intelligence ever’

  Whistleblower website WikiLeaks is teaming up with news outlets to release a “massive cache” of classified US military field reports on the conflict in Iraq, Newsweek magazine reported recently.

• WikiLeaks founder Assange ‘free to leave’ Sweden

  Assange, 39, has said the allegations against him are part of a “smear campaign” aimed at discrediting his website, which is locked in a row with the Pentagon over the release of secret US documents about the war in Afghanistan.

• Walt Disney, Monsanto discovered among Blackwater’s hidden clients

  Also on list: Royal Caribbean, Deutsche Bank, Chevron

  Almost three years ago exactly — Sept. 17, 2007 — a cadre of guards from the security firm then known as Blackwater shot and killed 17 Iraqis at a public plaza in Baghdad.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• A Week of Biking Joyously: An American Delegation Learns from the Dutch

  But the idea of learning from the success of the Dutch is not far-fetched. The Netherlands resembles the United States as a prosperous, technologically advanced nation where a huge share of the population owns automobiles. They simply don’t drive them each and every time they leave home, thanks to common sense transportation policies where biking and transit are promoted as an attractive alternative to the car. Indeed, millions of Dutch commuters combine bike and train trips, which offers the point-to-point convenience of the automobile and the speed of transit.

• Measuring and Marketing in Japan’s Eco-Model Cities

  It’s an effort that has the support of top national leadership: in fact Chiyoda, home of the nation’s Imperial Palace and the Prime Minister’s Office, is one of the Eco-Cities. It has a population of 45,000 at night but swells with 800,000 government and business day tripper commuters. By 2050, the city portends a reduction in its volume of auto commuters: Chiyoda aims to reduce its greenhouse gases 50% from 1990 levels by that date.

• The World Energy Congress kicks off with a splash

  This is how all energy industry events should begin. The World Energy Congress kicks off today in Montreal and as delegates arrived at the conference venue, hundreds of demonstrators were there to tell them that the industry needs to go beyond oil, and that dirty and risky fuels weren’t welcome here.

• Unauthorised GE potato unleashed in Sweden

  In the North, in Haparanda, Greenpeace activists marked and sealed off the potato fields that were recently discovered to be contaminated with the illegal, unauthorised genetically engineered potato, named Amadea. Simultaneously, activists protested outside the Swedish Board of Agriculture office building in Jönköping, calling for the authority to order a full destruction of the contaminated fields in order to prevent further spread.

• And the 2010 World Energy Congress Declaration is…

  I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised. After all, this is the energy industry talking to itself. But the reality is – as I said to the Congress yesterday – that the industry and governments that regulate it are accountable to us, the citizenry. And comforting words don’t do much good for those people still cleaning up in the Gulf of Mexico after the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster, those people who have had their waterways and their air polluted by dirty energy or those who are suffering at the hands of greenhouse pollution-driven climate change.

• Gulf oil well on verge of being plugged for good

  After five months, the oil well that had spewed millions of gallons into the Gulf of Mexico is on the verge of being plugged once and for all.

• BP to completely seal Gulf well by late Saturday

• Armed men kidnap seven foreign workers in Niger

  SEVEN FOREIGNERS working for French companies were kidnapped in a uranium mining region of Niger yesterday.

• In legal filings, BP says thousands of oil spill victims do not have right to sue

  BP and its partners in the blown-out Gulf well said on Monday that thousands of fishermen, seafood processors, restaurants, hotel owners and others may not yet have the right to sue over the spill, according to court papers.

  BP and its partners such as Transocean Ltd and Halliburton Co said the majority of alleged victims who have brought about 400 lawsuits must first take their claims to a $20 billion fund established by BP.

Finance

• World poverty seen falling sharply but patchily

  In China, whose economy this year officially surpassed Japan’s as the world’s second largest, the number living below the international poverty line fell from 60.2 percent in 1990 to 15.9 percent in 2005. By 2015, it is forecast to be 5 percent.

• Motivating Miss Daisy

  The new small business legislation intended to support startups is based entirely on debt — getting banks to lend money to small companies. But the only kind of debt that most tech startups know is credit card debt. Little tech companies grow by selling equity, not borrowing money. Short-term debt goes on plastic at 18 or 23 percent because no bank has — or will — lend to real tech startups in any significant amount.

  They’ll finance new Burger King franchises, but lend money for electric cars or new kinds of data storage or — shudder — software? Forget about it.

  Presidents Obama and Bush didn’t know this, Fed chairman Bernanke doesn’t know it, nor does Treasury secretary Geithner. None of these men have a minute’s experience with tech startups, yet our economy is almost entirely dependent on those startups for real recovery.

• Basel rewrites capital rules for banks

• Basel III is out… who cares?

  In conclusion I suspect that is the way they want it. After all, as far as I can tell, Basel is a set of self-imposed rules by the banking system and their regulators and they are primarily concerned with their own survival, not the well being of the economy from a monetary standpoint. It should be no surprise that they avoid the larger question of systemic stability by monetary self-regulation. Beware of the invisible hand, it may be robbing your back pocket!

• FBI arrests Ohio County Commissioner on bribery charges

  A Commissioner of Cuyahoga County in Ohio was arrested by FBI agents early Wednesday morning as part of a larger federal probe into corruption in the county.

  Seven other Cuyahoga County officials, labor leaders, and business people have also been arrested.

  Commissioner Jimmy Dimora, age 55, is accused of using his public office to obtain free home improvements, prostitutes, and trips.

• US homes lost to foreclosure up 25 pct on year

  In all, banks repossessed 95,364 properties last month, up 3 percent from July and an increase of 25 percent from August 2009, RealtyTrac said.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Medical ghostwriters who build a brand

  The latest documents come from a court case brought against Wyeth by around 14,000 patients who developed breast cancer while taking Prempro, the hormone replacement therapy (HRT).

  The open access journal PLoS Medicine, acting with the New York Times, argued successfully in court that 1,500 documents which detailed the ghostwriting should be placed in the public domain, because they represent information on a potential threat to public health.

  Now, PLoS has published the first academic analysis of these documents, which is free to access online.

• The Chicago Council Releases its 2010 Public Opinion Survey Findings at the Brookings Institution on September 16

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• UID is an Identity Crisis in the Making

  AN EXERCISE is currently underway to enter every resident in India on a database. In a few years, the unique identification (UID) is intended to become a ubiquitous number, to be used in many operations: enrolling in a school, maintaining a bank account, ticketing for travel, seeking treatment in a hospital and having one’s death recorded in a mortuary register.

  The sales pitch for the UID is, like most advertisements, intended to mislead. Enrolment is said to be voluntary. But, and as is now acknowledged, other agencies may refuse to provide a service if an individual is not enrolled, making it compulsory. The Working Paper of the UID Authority of India (UIDAI), which has been the basis of many discussions, starts with a claim that the UID will bring down barriers that prevent the poor from accessing services; but quickly adds: “UID will only guarantee identity, not rights, benefits and entitlements.”

• Magid on Tech: Online privacy a key topic at UN-sponsored conference

  Participants from throughout the world are gathered in Vilnius, Lithuania, this week for the fifth-annual Internet Governance Forum.

  The IGF is an annual United Nations-sponsored event where representatives from governments, nonprofits, academic institutions, and businesses worldwide discuss a broad range of policy issues including online safety, privacy, rights of children, equality issues and other topics pertaining to the way the Internet is affecting every country.

  The goal of IGF is “to foster the sustainability, robustness, security, stability and development of the Internet.”

• Koran burner Derek Fenton booted from his job at NJ Transit

  The protester who burned pages from the Koran outside a planned mosque near Ground Zero has been fired from NJTransit, sources and authorities said Tuesday.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• Time Warner Cable Sends a Message to Video Suppliers: Cross Us and You’re Out

  Why do we suspect that cable operators see online video as a threat and may try to use “managed services” exceptions to Net Neutrality rules to crush it? How about deals like this.

  Time Warner Cable has decided not to do any deals with the premium movie channel Epix, home to movies from studios like Viacom, Lions Gate, and MGM. Why? Because Epix decided to cut a deal with Netflix for streaming access to its movies.

• The distinctions and controversies of net neutrality

  I started the wiki because I think we need it. Just over the past few weeks we’ve been treated to news coverage of a joint proposal from Google and Verizon, which I found muddled in ways that show why we need a finer understanding of the many topics involved. The FCC has released a request for comments that shows they’re trying to hone in on the distinctions. And a recent article where I made an initial stab at dissecting the arguments was well received and summarized in Forbes online.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Woman Trademarks Her Name, Says No One Can Use It Without Her Permission

  She even goes so far as to post a list of websites “illegally” using her name, as well as a copy of the cease and desist letter (pdf) her lawyers will send you. Now, it may very well be that some of the sites in question are, in fact, violating her trademark (and at least one of the pages I’ve found does appear pretty questionable from a trademark standpoint) but the blanket claim that “it is illegal to use the name on any website without prior written permission” is simply false. That’s not how trademark law works. Dr Ann De Wees Allen does, in fact, have a trademark on her name, used in commerce related to dietary supplements, but just because you have a trademark, it does not mean you have complete control of the mark.

• Copyrights

  • Prison for camming – a UK first

    Emmanuel Nimley, 22, yesterday received a 6-month sentence for filming movies with his iPhone at The Vue cinema in Harrow and uploading them to silverscreen.com. His motive: self-glory. The Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) say this is the first-ever UK prison sentence for ‘camming’.

  • 4chan DDoS Takes Down MPAA and Anti-Piracy Websites

    Following a call to arms yesterday, the masses inhabiting the anonymous 4chan boards have carried out a huge assault on a pair of anti-piracy enemies. The website of Aiplex Software, the anti-piracy outfit which has been DDoSing torrent sites recently, is currently down having been DDoS’d. They are joined in the Internet wasteland by the MPAA’s website, also currently under huge and sustained attack.

  • Why Are The Record Labels Demanding Money To Let People Stream Legally Purchased Music?

    Lately, I’ve been playing around with various music locker services, just to get a better understanding of how they work and to be able to access my (legally purchased) music collection on various machines and devices. So far, they’re all a bit limited, but it shouldn’t be long until they get better. However, the industry has always hated music locker services, and insisted that they somehow violate their copyright, even when the lockers simply allow individuals to place shift their own legal music. There’s an ongoing lawsuit over Michael Robertson’s MP3Tunes for which a decision is expected shortly. At the same time, Apple has been trying to quietly enter the market without disturbing the record labels.

  • How Much Did The Pointless OiNK Raid Cost UK Taxpayers?

    So how much did this entertainment-industry driven mess cost UK taxpayers? Well, police refused to release that information for a while, claiming that it “could undermine any ongoing and future investigations and cause potential damage to the criminal justice process.” Uh, right. About the only way it would do that is when people realized how much money was being wasted on bogus investigations. Eventually, however, it came out that the investigation itself cost about £29,000 — including £7,800 on overtime (OiNK after dark?) and £4,300 on “travel and subsistence.” Of course that doesn’t even get into what the actual trial cost taxpayers, which I’m sure is many times greater than that.

  • Pay what you want to see Freakonomics: The Movie

    In the most unique screening experiment we’ve heard of in a while (sorry, Jonah Hill), Magnolia Pictures and the Green Film Company will offer a pay-what-you-want preview of Freakonomics: The Movie on Sept. 22 for audiences in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington D.C., Chicago, Boston, Dallas, Philadelphia, Denver, and Seattle. The adaptation of Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt’s best-selling book applies economics-based thinking to everyday human behavior, using a “dream team” of documentary filmmakers like Seth Gordon (The King Of Kong), Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me), and Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room) to examine everything from Sumo wrestling to baby names to students who are paid to study harder, and by participating in this screening—which requires filling out a short questionnaire—you’ll actually become part of a Freakonomics study yourself, in keeping with the book’s examination of how people interact with a pay-what-you-want bagel service.

  • Fox News Sues Senate Candidate For Using Clip In Commercial

    But, really, the bigger issue, is that in suing and sending takedowns over this video, all Fox has done is draw significantly more attention to the story itself and the negative impression of Blunt. If I had to guess, I’d say that Carnahan has never been so happy to be sued. It’s tons of free advertising on an attack ad on her opponent.
    And, of course, if the video is found to be fair use — as I would bet it would be — we’ll have yet another example of how the DMCA’s takedown process is a clear violation of free speech. Even if the video is eventually allowed back online due to a counter-notice, copyright law was being used to silence political speech in the middle of a campaign.

  • ACTA

    • European ICT sector’s concerns about ACTA: ECIS position paper

      The European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS) is an international non-profit association that endeavours to promote a favourable environment for interoperable ICT solutions. Its members include both large and small companies in the ICT sector such as IBM, Nokia, Oracle, Opera, and Red Hat.

    • Internet Governance Forum a beacon of openness

      A representative from Internet Society (ISOC) proposed to extend the open and global multi-stakeholder approach of the IGF, its unique and sucessful governance model, to other processes such as the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement negotiations. The ACTA addresses Internet Governance issues along Camembert and is negotiated by a small coalition of supportive trade administrations.

    • ECIS ACTA position paper [PDF]

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Server

• Finally a decision on Solaris

  Now that Oracle has largely ended support for OpenSolaris, many Solaris users and customers that continued to be on the fence about the OS will finally be making their decision to either stay with Solaris or move over to Linux. Unix migration to Linux has always been a mainstay for enterprise Linux adoption, and while the low-hanging fruit is becoming more sparse, there is still plenty of Unix migration to Linux to come. We have seen cases in Linux communities where the most significant Unix in their world is OpenSolaris, and while we hear similar things regarding Solaris and its continued market presence, there is no question OpenSolaris — a fully open source OS with available binaries — was a much better fit for the growing ranks of Linux-savvy developers and administrators.

• Red Hat License Fee for Rackspace Cloud Servers Changing from Hourly to Monthly

  The purpose of this post is to make you aware that beginning in September, Cloud Servers customers will be billed for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) instances on a monthly rather than hourly basis. Due to changes in our subscription arrangements with Red Hat, we can no longer offer Cloud customers hourly billing for RHEL licenses. Rackspace will begin charging our customers a monthly licensing fee, starting in September. This license fee will not be prorated.

• More on Multi-core

  Moving over to the GP-GPU world, the NVidia GPU Conference is next week, I was going to attend, but I had a scheduling conflict come up. Look for some good stuff to come out of this event. Since I won’t be on the west coast next week, I will probably attend the one day HPC Financial Markets event in New York City. This show used to be called “High Performance on Wall Street,” which has a small, but free exhibit.

• Talk About HPC Bang For Your Buck, How About Ka-Boom For The Server Room

  Reviewing HPC hardware is not easy. You usually need to travel to a data center and look at a rack of servers while someone tells you where they landed on the Top500 list. One could review a server, but basically they are all pretty much the same inside. They are running Linux and use either AMD or Intel processors. In addition, testing a cluster takes time because running meaningful programs that exercise the whole system must be done carefully. And finally, clusters are not sitting on the “shelf” as they vary by customer due to possible packaging, interconnect, processor, and storage choices.

IBM

• The Limits of Strategy

  When I look back upon my long career, one of the major factors shaping my views of business, strategy and innovation is the creative destruction that I saw buffeting the IT industry over most of that time. In particular, having lived through IBM’s own near-death experience, respect – if not fear – for the hurricane-power forces of disruptive change is edged deep down in my psyche.

Ballnux

• Samsung Media Hub to Feature Next-Day TV Shows, Movies, and Device Sharing

  Today in New York, Samsung announced the launch of the Samsung Media Hub. The service, which features Next-Day TV Shows, Movies, and sharing (for up to 5 media hub enabled devices), will be available for Samsung Galaxy Tab and Galaxy S devices.

• Galaxy Tab coming to all US carriers; no pricing yet, no 4G

  The Galaxy Tab is the first in a number of Android tablets that have been announced or rumored for release either in late 2010 or early 2011. At 7″, Galaxy Tab may well be the new stocking stuffer for Android fans, but for now, customers will have to wait to find out when they can buy it and for how much.

• Introducing The Amazon Linux AMI

Kernel Space

• Bcache Testing: Metadata

  Our two prior articles have detailed the performance results from a new patch, bcache, that uses SSDs to cache hard drives. We’ve looked at the throughput and IOPS performance of bcache and — while it is still very new and under heavy development — have found that in some cases it can help performance. This article examines the metadata performance of bcache hoping to also find areas where it can further boost performance.

• Graphics Stack

  • Wayland Demonstration At XDS 2010

    Nothing too exciting was learned during this time about Wayland, but there was a brief demonstration of this lightweight display server that leverages kernel mode-setting, Mesa EGL, and other technologies.

Applications

• gThumb 2.11.90 – I’m working faster than ever

  What this means is that if I resize an image, shrinking it from whatever large size to 600 pixels wide, gThumb remembers this, and the next time I resize a picture, 600px is the default value, and all I need to do is click a box and I’m done. Since I’m often (or usually) resizing everything to the same size, this is a feature that’s saving me tremendous amounts of time.

• Pretty Damn Good Audio Player: Guayadeque

  Guayadeque is built using the wxWidgets toolkit, a popular C++ library designed for writing graphical applications, and is included in the Ubuntu Maverick repositories. Let me list some of the major features Guayadeque offers:

  - 10-band equalizer, including presets
  - sortable playlists with column attributes which can be added or removed
  - music library, which show artists, albums with covers and labels
  - static and dynamic playlists
  - support for online radios
  - Last.fm integration and song submission

• Justniffer – tcp packet sniffer

• Open source tool for Video Editing

• Peazip- A powerful opensource file and archive manager for linux

  PeaZip 3.3 is released, this release brings various fixes and an improved user interface focused in better integration with web search (optionally on multiple search engines at once) and in launching favorite applications, scripts or websites/web services from PeaZip.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How-To: Set Up KMail With GMail and IMAP

  • iRedMail 0.6.1: Open Source Mail Server With Postfix, Dovecot, Amavisd, ClamAV, SpamAssassin, RoundCube On Ubuntu 10.04

  • 12 Useful GIMP Video Tutorials For Absolute Beginners

• Wine

  • Bordeaux 2010 year end roadmap

    We also refreshed Bordeaux for BSD and Linux five times this year, and added support for Mozilla FireFox, Apple Safari, Google SketchUp, VLC Multimedia player and updated to the latest IrfanView release. Bundled Wine 1.2.0, added support for Pulse Audio, updated and cleaned up our custom winetricks script and we also fixed a number of bugs and tweaked the install scripts for cleaner installs.

  • winetricks 20100917 has been released

Distributions

• Debian Family

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Growing the Open Source/Free Software Commons

      Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical and Ubuntu, has penned an interesting post about their involvement and contribution to the open source/free software community. He is responding to some criticism that Canonical is not giving enough back. Mark makes an excellent point that there are many ways to give back and Canonical and Ubuntu have focus on making Linux more accessible to a wider audience. To me this makes perfect sense and Canonical should be applauded for their contributions to the community.

    • A Canonical Controversy

      Up next, let’s pull from the Planet Gnome FAQ, “It generally helps to write a few words about you and your contributions to GNOME, or why you think your blog should appear on Planet GNOME”. Looking at the bug that was filed we find no explanation as to why it should be added other than “I contribute via Canonical”. This phrase is going to be flogged by those people that were/are irked with Canonicals level of contributions upstream.

      Lastly, since Mark is the CEO of a company, does this mean Gnome supports his company more than say…CEO of Red Hat or Novell since those CEO’s are not added on Planet Gnome? Does this constitute a conflict of interest? Does it signal favoritism? If one person believes it to be this way, everyone loses…because there will be a debate about it and it WILL divide people and not unite them.

      To be honest, I can’t believe Mark even asked to be on Planet Gnome as the CEO of Canonical. He should know right out of the gate that it would look bad if he was added in…if it were me, I’d remove myself immediately.

    • Ubuntu Open Week, request for instructors

      Here at Ubuntu we love to give training sessions over IRC. Since Developer and App Developer Week cover the more advanced end of the spectrum we have something for normal users — Ubuntu Open Week: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuOpenWeek

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Nokia/MeeGo

    • Can Android be the answer to Nokia’s Problems?

      With a resigned CEO and the head of the smartphone division, all is not well with Nokia. What I am actually wondering is, how impossible is it to manufacture Android based devices? Yes Symbian is great, but it looks more like a dying breed to me. Is it at all possible that the two platforms could be marketed side by side to the myriad of markets that Nokia is found in?

    • GENIVI – Open Source In-Vehicle Infotainment Platform Based on MeeGo With Partners Like BMW, GM, Renault

      While Android is all poised to become the most popular mobile phone OS by 2014, what about the other open source, *truly* Linux, mobile OS platform, MeeGo? Well, MeeGo might just become the most popular open source In-Vehicle Infotainment platform!

  • Android

    • Leaked Documents Confirm T-Mobile End of Year Android Plans

      Today finds another leak that basically confirms all the Android devices we saw listed. TmoNews has obtained a pair of internal T-Mobile accessory listing that makes reference to multiple phones, some by their project names. If you weren’t already doing it, start looking forward to Motorola Begonia, Motorola Jordan, LG Optimus T, and myTouch HD.

• Sub-notebooks

  • That’s what I call Linux mobility: Smart Book from Always Innovating

    If you need to do some serious typing (or run out of the battery of both the tablet and phone-core), you can dock the tablet into a stand with a keyboard which makes the device a proper netbook/laptop and gives you an extra 12000 (!!!) mAh battery capacity. When this happens, you may switch the computing core to a full Ubuntu Linux from the Android you used on the MID. This is done with a dedicated hardware button (called the AI button).

Open Source Code Quality Tools: Sonar

Sonar is a Stable and well-mantained code, with an high mark in Maturity (3.5 years old) and Stability. Sonar is becoming increasingly popular among developers, unfortunately there are not available books yet.

Announcing The New ASF Executive Officers

- Doug Cutting, Chairman
- Jim Jagielski, President
- Greg Stein, Vice Chairman
- Noirin Shirley, Executive Vice President
- Geir Magnusson, Jr., Treasurer
- Craig Russell, Secretary
- Sam Ruby, Assistant Secretary

Events

• OSI Days 2010: Asia’s Largest Conference On Open Source Begins Tomorrow

  New Delhi, Delhi, India, Saturday, September 18, 2010 — (Business Wire India)

Web Browsers

• Chrome versus Firefox

SaaS

• Yahoo spins cloud web around competitors

  Speaking to ZDNet Asia in an interview Monday, Raghu Ramakrishnan, chief scientist of audience and cloud computing research at Yahoo, noted that the Internet company has not been involved in “many cloud conversations” today as these revolve around “low-level cloud services”, but it is still very much in the game.

  Elaborating, he said that many of today’s cloud services such as those provided by Amazon Web Services and Salesforce.com, are basically infrastructure products with “baked-in” apps that can be used straight out from the box.

• OpenStack Governance

  One of our key deliverables in keeping with this commitment was to publish a Governance process shortly after the establishment of the community, and to ensure that the process outlined contained active involvement and representation from the community.

Databases

• Couchio Becomes CouchOne and Launches CouchOne Mobile

Business

• eZ Systems set to boost innovation while enhancing business value to professional users

• WSO2 Marks Five-Year Anniversary With Five Major Milestones in Customer Adoption and Business Growth

• The Open Learning Centre Introduces vtiger CRM On Demand from just £10 per Month

• Global open source alliance to deliver an enterprise monitoring stack

  Opsview, the open source network and application monitoring vendor, today announced it has teamed up with Canonical, the Ubuntu service provider, to help drive the enterprise adoption of Opsview Enterprise with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Server Edition. Opsview has grown rapidly within the managed service provider and financial services space; key strategic verticals for Canonical.

• 
  Teradata and Cloudera Welcome Companies to the New Parallel Universe
  

• MuleSoft Announces Next Generation Open Source ESB

• Semi-Open Source

  • Announcing ActuateOne: One Design, One Server and One User Experience

  • Ixxus And Opsera Enterprise Services Division Agree To Merge, Growing UK Open Source Powerhouse

    Having become the dominant supplier of enterprise services for both the Alfresco open source content management system and the Lucene/Solr open source enterprise search platform, this acquisition will broaden Ixxus’ technology and open source portfolio, giving them a new strong foothold in the financial services industry.

Funding

• Sonatype Raises $11.6 Million to Transform Software Development

  Sonatype was founded by Jason Van Zyl, the original author of the Apache Maven build and project management software, and the creator of Maven Central, the primary cloud-based repository for software distribution in the open source world.

• Sonatype Names Wayne Jackson as CEO

• Joyent Secures $15 Million in Series C Funding

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Celebrating Software Freedom Day in Ghana

  We are proud to announce that the Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT (AITI-KACE) in collaboration with the FLOSSInclude Project will again be hosting a special event on Saturday, September 18th under the theme “Knowing the alternative software solutions”. The venue for this year’s celebrations is the AITI-KACE premises and the time is 9:30 – 15:00. This is the biggest international celebration and outreach event for Software Freedom globally involving hundreds of teams from all around the world.

Government

• Open Source Software Licensing

  Directgov Innovate strongly advocates the use of open source software and we want your views on the best ways to licence government and public projects.

  Which licence do you think would best suit our projects? While copyright would remain with the Crown, we could choose either a very permissive licence, perhaps MIT or BSD. These would allow the code to be used again in closed or open software. Alternatively we could require that the code is kept open, by using a licence like the GNU GPL. You can find a list of approved licences at the The Open Source Initiative website.

  The first project we are looking to release is Spark, a platform designed to share and showcase innovation from all areas of public and civil society. With limited exceptions the technology underpinning Spark is open source, including PHP, MySQL and the Symfony Framework. We host Spark on a Linux webserver.

• Government “committed” to using more open source

Openness/Sharing

• Industry giants show some give on openness

  While it got less attention, Google also opened up a bit more by allowing all OSI-approved open source licenses, including the AGPL on its Google Code, a move that was also met with cheers from some. This comes as a welcome change from Google, which had previously resisted the AGPL.

• The Case For Open-Source Design: Can Design By Committee Work?

  The following is an investigation into the difficulties of extending the open-source collaboration model from coding to its next logical step: interface design. While we’ll dive deep into the practical difference between these two professional fields, the article might also serve as a note of caution to think before rushing to declare the rise of “open-source architecture,” “open-source university,” “open-source democracy” and so on.

Programming

• Google Relaunches Instantiations Developer Tools – Now Available for Free

• Python: Unit Testing with Doctest

Standards/Consortia

• HTML5 Dribbble Infographic

Neutrino version 6.5 released

The QNX Momentics tool suite offers a comprehensive Eclipse-based IDE with innovative profiling tools to help developers gain maximum insight into system behaviour. Version 6.5 of the suite introduces support for the Eclipse platform 3.5.2, Eclipse CDT 6.0 and GNU compiler (GCC) 4.4.2. The compiler offers optimised dynamic linking, including lazy linking and GNU hashing.

Science

• Capture Your Body – Or Someone Else’s!

  You’ve probably heard of hand-held 3D scanners before, but CreaForm produces units specifically designed for “body capture”. No, they’re not ensnaring people in nets, but rather they take a 3D digital picture in the form of a 3D model. (Actually any of these formats: .OBJ, .FBX, .DXF, .STL, .VRML, .LWO, .MAYA, .HRC, .3DS). The awkwardly named “MegaCapturor 3D Body Digitizer” has an amazing sub-millimetre resolution even at a distance of over a metre.

• Implanted Fuel Cell Powered by Rat’s Body Fluids

  A new fuel cell is putting a twist on alternative energy from biofuels: The implanted device draws power from chemicals in living animals.

  Dubbed a glucose biofuel cell, the implant gets its juice from glucose—aka blood sugar—and oxygen, both of which are naturally present in the fluids between a body’s cells.

  In a recent study, researchers created a test version of their glucose biofuel cell and implanted it in a white lab rat named Ricky. The rat sported the device successfully for 11 days and suffered no ill effects.

• For clean hands, don’t rub, scrub with a paper towel

  DOCTORS and nurses take note – rubbing your hands together in a hand dryer leaves them coated with more bacteria than just after you washed them. Even normal skin bacteria may be bad news for sick people.

  “When you rub your hands, you bring a lot of bacteria to the surface from the pores of your skin,” says Anna Snelling of the University of Bradford, UK. She asked 14 volunteers to dry their hands for 15 seconds using three different types of air dryer, sometimes rubbing their hands together and sometimes not.

Security/Aggression

• What happened to Directory Services?

  The point here, though, is that in 2010 we are still looking for a method to connect to systems without having to register with all of them. And with all our current solutions, we still have not quite got that problem solved. And if someone mentions web of trust I might scream. Because, after all, that is the root of the problem, or at least one of them.

Finance

• A History Of People On Wall Street Swearing Their A$$es Off — Even Buffett

  1) someone at Goldman got his or her panties in a twist when their “shitty deal,” email went viral, and is now insisting that Partners, VPs, Managing Directors – everyone at Goldman – waste their time, stop their train of thought, and fart it up with nicer words that feel unnatural and nobody really uses, and 2) that is ridiculous (much like the upcoming slideshow) and 3) the senate would have been just as furious if instead of “shitty deal,” “this is not a good deal” had been written, we’ve created a slideshow of swearing by “role models” like Gary Cohn and Jamie Dimon on Wall Street.

• California Employment Hooks Downward Once Again

  Last month I suggested that the little hook downward in California employment, reported for July, was a troubling sign. Today, fresh data was released from the State of California, and the downward move has continued. Whereas employment levels had just managed to hang on above the 16 million person level in July–in August they slipped back below, to 15.968 million. | see: California Employment in Millions 2000-2010.

• Obama taps Elizabeth Warren to launch Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

  President Obama picked a woman Wall Street loathes to crack down on unscrupulous behavior in the financial industry.

  Harvard Law School Prof. Elizabeth Warren will launch the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, answering directly to Obama and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the President announced Friday.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Amazon Customer Puts “Toxic Sludge” on Top Ten Must-Read List

  One said Toxic Sludge is Good for You was “one of the top five most important books in my lifetime.” CMD’s founder, John Stauber conceived of the book, and this watchdog group, while fighting PR spin and intimidation efforts from Monsanto. Increasing corporate influence and ever-stealthier lobbying and propaganda techniques make this book more relevant than ever.

• Watchdog Groups Request Criminal Fraud and Money Laundering Investigations against The U.S. Chamber

  Two national watchdog groups have filed separate complaints against the U.S. Chamber of Commerce requesting criminal investigations for tax fraud, money laundering, and campaign finance violations. The first, filed with the Washington, DC FBI Field Office by StopTheChamber.com, was predicated on a letter sent to the organization´s attorney, Kevin Zeese, from an insider at the Chamber who alleged in significant detail that the Chamber and its CEO Tom Donohue are engaged in a massive scam to support Mr. Donohue´s “lavish lifestyle.” Mr. Zeese wrote:

  “On August 4, 2010, we received a letter from a purported Chamber of Commerce insider in response to our latest reward offer. In short, the insider compares Tom Donohue to Jack Abramoff, Michael Scanlon and Bernie Madoff, in the manner in which he is scamming clients to serve his own interests rather than the interests of the business community. He alleges fraud, campaign finance violations and financial impropriety that could be uncovered with a criminal investigation. Equally troubling is that he alleges that Mr. Donohue does not fear the FEC or Congress and has a plan in place to attack the Department of Justice if the DOJ investigates him.”

• Xenophobic Postage Stamp Email Resurfaces

  A year-old, anti-Muslim email has resurfaced and is curculating once again, riding the latest wave of U.S. anti-Muslim bigotry. The email urges people to boycott a U.S. postage stamp that recognizes the Islamic holiday of EID. The stamp, which rumor-mongers refer to as a “Muslim Christmas Stamp,” was first issued about ten years ago, and is one of six seasonal postage stamps the United States Postal Service sells that commemorate Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, EID, snowmen and music makers.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• On the Web, Children Face Intensive Tracking

  A Wall Street Journal investigation into online privacy has found that popular children’s websites install more tracking technologies on personal computers than do the top websites aimed at adults.

• ONLINE ONLY: Richard Stallman – No censorship is good censorship

  David Ramli: Why did you choose to name your free software system GNU?

  Richard Stallman: Because it’s funny. And since we announced the movement in 1983, which was 27 years ago, to call it the new system would be extremely misleading.

  DR: The Government’s planned mandatory ISP filter is practically dead now. Should people keep talking about it?

  RS: Australia already has Internet censorship and it has censorship of links. Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) made a link to a foreign political website and it got threatened with a fine of $11,000 per day if it did not remove that link. This is censorship and it has to be abolished.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• Intel Threatens to Sue Anyone Who Uses HDCP Crack

  Intel threatened legal action Friday against anybody who uses its proprietary crypto key — leaked on the internet — to produce hardware that defeats the so-called HDCP technology that limits home recording of digital television and Blu-ray.

  “There are laws to protect both the intellectual property involved as well as the content that is created and owned by the content providers,” said Tom Waldrop, a spokesman for the company, which developed HDCP. “Should a circumvention device be created using this information, we and others would avail ourselves, as appropriate, of those remedies.”

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• 4 Ways to Give Desktop Linux a Test-Drive

  That desktop Linux offers myriad compelling advantages for business users is no longer the subject of much debate. All that remains for many Windows users is to give it a try.

• Have Courage, Linux Noobs

  Using Linux is “almost natural, but you still need to poke around to be really fluent — just as in any OS with a lot of features,” Pogson added.

  “I have exposed Grade 1 kids to GNU /Linux GNOME desktops, and after they learned to click a mouse they were off to the races,” he recounted. “They were the only humans able to max out that terminal server.”

Server

• Should Red Hat Be Worried About Amazon Linux AMI?

  Red Hat is facing another competition from Amazon on form of Linux AMI. Amazon has announced the availability of the Amazon Linux AMI.

  The Amazon Linux AMI is a supported and maintained Linux image provided by Amazon Web Services for use on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). “It is designed to provide a stable, secure, and high performance execution environment for applications running on Amazon EC2,” claims Evangelist Jeff Barr in his blog post.

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • Why Broadcom’s Release May be More Significant than Just Code

    On September 9 the news of Broadcom’s release of the code for some of its wireless Ethernet chip sets sent shockwaves throughout the Linux community. Broadcom owners, as well as distribution developers have a reason to celebrate.

    In the past, Broadcom owners had to resort to NDISwrapper or rely upon the limited reversed engineered drivers. Neither was optimal. The release of the code by Broadcom should eventually mean a much better Wi-Fi experience for owners of systems with Broadcom chip sets. But for those that like to read between the lines there may also be a deeper significance to this move.

Applications

• Miro Review – Great Internet HD Video Player

  As a final conclusion, Miro is just great firstly because of the awesome HD movie feeds it provides. However, as a movie player it does not offer the more advanced options dedicated movie players provide, like video and audio effects, support for DVDs, etc. But this is not the case, since Miro’s goal is not to do these things, but to offer a great way of watching online videos.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Weekend Project: Create a Live USB Key Linux Distribution

  • How to Install KDE SC 4.5.0 on Ubuntu 10.04

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • The future of KDE instant messaging is happening now

    Kopete was initially very innovative, at least in its goals: to communicate with people, while leaving the IM network as a channel. We brought the concepts of “metacontacts” (bad naming), but basically you say people in your contact list, no matter if they were available on MSN, ICQ, or both.

    Today I have a telephone with internet 24/7 in my pocket and I can IM on the bus. I don’t choose IM networks as a soccer team, but rely on them because I have friends on various of them. Just like I use twitter for “geeky stuff” while Facebook is a more “relaxed” environment.

  • Edit Your Films In Ubuntu, Use New Kdenlive

    Ubuntu is one of the most popular, powerful and useful operating systems of the world. While Mac is locked to Apple machines and Windows is expensive and vulnerable to viruses and attacks, Ubuntu is the only operating systems which has all the merits — its highly secure, free of cost and can run on Apple machines as well.

Distributions

• Fat or thin, it’s your choice.

  The point here is that, no matter what Linux distribution you start from, you can make it do anything, be anything or look like anything. If wished you can take an Ubuntu installation and have it look, feel and perform like a Fedora distribution. Or you can take a Fedora installation and have it as slim and trim as Puppy Linux.

• Looking at Fedora 14 and Ubuntu 10.10

  Both releases seem to be shaping up well, if very differently — as befitting the focus of the distributions and projects. Ubuntu 10.10 is a polished consumer OS that is well-suited for users who are new to Linux, or just prefer a desktop system that’s easy to use. Fedora’s developer-centric approach makes for an OS that is easy enough to use, but better suited for developers or experienced users who want to tinker with technologies before they make an official appearance in RHEL and other distributions. Ubuntu, on the other hand, is the end result of development rather than the beginning. Many of the changes in 10.10, e.g. the Ubuntu One improvements and the application indicators, are unlikely to show up in other distributions (excepting, perhaps, Linux Mint).

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat looks out of area for HQ-size space

    Red Hat Inc., one of the Triangle’s high-profile companies, is scouting for sites in other states where officials may also be wooing the open-source software developer to move its headquarters from Raleigh.

  • Smartrend’S Candlestick Scanner Detects Bearish Engulfing Pattern For Red Hat (RHT)

    SmarTrend issued an Uptrend alert on shares of Red Hat on August 23, 2010 at $33.03 per share (13.4% return since that call). This bearish candle pattern may point to a reversal of the previously called Uptrend.

  • Fedora

    • Momonga Linux 7 review

      Momonga is a Linux distribution based on Fedora. It is a community-developed distribution with roots in Japan (the name is derived from a species of flying squirrel found in Europe and parts of Asia). Like Fedora, it is a multi-purpose distribution, a Free distribution, with a script that makes it easy to build and install non-free applications

• Debian Family

  • Squeeze in a jam?

    I put this down to being a complete noob, and reinstalled Lenny. Later I learnt that the upgrade has to be staged- certain packages have to be updated before doing a full upgrade, otherwise the upgrade falls down.
    Recently I saw a post on the Debian forum which suggested that an upgrade was now a relatively simple process- involving just a kernel upgrade before a full upgrade, so I thought I’d give it a go.

  • Ubuntu 10.10 – Wallpaper, and a few notes

    In the process of doing some other things, I have just noticed that those who thought the “Barf Bag” wallpaper that showed up in Ubuntu 10.10 Beta was just a “placeholder” were probably correct.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Canonical Announces Provisional Ubuntu Developer Summit Tracks

      Canonical has unveiled the a list of provisional tracks for the Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) scheduled for October 25-29, 2010 in Orlando, Florida.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Nokia/MeeGo

    • MeeGo Developer Day – Day 2 at IDF

      Sunil Saxena spent some time reviewing the MeeGo Architecture, along with our current thoughts on how we plan to define MeeGo compliance. The MeeGo compliance spec is still being developed, so now is a good time to review it and provide feedback.

      Bill Pearson was the next presenter talking about AppUp and the Intel AppUp Developer Program, which helps developers focus on what matters: platform sexiness, making money, getting recognition, and low friction deployment, while Intel helps with boring things like validation. Developers can create applications or components that they can sell to other developers. In addition to revenue from selling applications, the Million Dollar Development Fund provides additional incentives. Robust analytics are also available on the developer dashboards, to learn more about how your application is selling.

      Rajiv Ranganath gave us an overview of Qt, which has over 350,000 commercial and open source developers.

    • Day 1: Intel AppUp Elements 2010

    • Day 2: Intel AppUp Elements 2010

  • Android

    • Android lockdown: Thanks Linus

      The current lockdown of Linux based devices (including Android phones, TiVo, and many many consumer devices) is due, simply, to the Linux developers’ unwillingness to update their code to the GPLv3 license. We* contribute to Linux, Linux is taken for use in Android (and remains Open and Free), and then the phone manufacturers take our work and lock it up and sell it to us with reduced functionality. Big thanks, manufacturers.

    • Android Continues to Gobble Up Smartphone Share

• Tablets

  • High-end Avaya Android-powered Table PC Unveiled

    Avaya, an enterprise communications systems company, just announced a high-end table PC that is primarily designed for business conferencing. Called the Avaya Flare, the device has an Intel Atom processor and runs Android operating system. It is said to make use of Avaya unified communications software utilizing a new interface called Flare User Experience and features Aura Conferencing and the Linux-based Avaya Aura Messaging software.

  • ViewSonic and Samsung tablets are U.S.-bound

    Viewsonic demonstrated a 10.1-inch, Android 2.2 “G-Tablet” that’s bound for U.S. sales, powered by an Nvidia Tegra 2. Meanwhile, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon Wireless say they’ll offer the Android 2.2-based Samsung Galaxy Tab tablet this fall.

  • Asus U35JC review

    OS Tested: Ubuntu 10.04.1

How do you find and choose free software?

So you’ve got your GNU/Linux based box. You’ve installed the base system and you’re good to go. Welcome to the world of freedom. But then what? How do you determine what packages to install. How do you decide which of the alternatives to go with?

A Quick Look at OpenIndiana

OpenSolaris is dead, but OpenIndiana lives on. Just a few weeks after Oracle made it clear that OpenSolaris was dead as a doornail, the Illumos and OpenIndiana folks have a distribution ready for the OpenSolaris community that’s been left in a lurch by Oracle.

The code dropped on Tuesday, so I haven’t had a lot of time to muck with OpenIndiana yet. I spent a few hours with the live CD and installed it into VMware.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Firefox 4 update moves link previews to awesome bar

    Clearly, the status bar’s days are numbered. Even Internet Explorer 9 has removed the bottom-dwelling bar in favor of inline tooltips.

    Now, in the latest updates to Firefox 4, Mozilla’s browser has moved status bar link previews to the right-hand side of the Awesome Bar. Hover a link, and the destination URL appears in soft, gray text. Sure, it looks OK when you’re currently viewing a page with a nice, short URL — but what about on something like an Amazon product page? Take the jump to see!

  • Firefox 4 Preview – Foxy, sharp and fast!

    I think Firefox 4 is a very smart product. It looks better than 3.6 overall, tabs on top or without them, it feels faster, it has lots of useful features, and it’s got the Web 2.0 bling bling. Linux beta lags a step behind, but that’s understandable. Performance is good in all aspects, with major improvements in responsiveness. Memory consumption is fairly modest. Firefox 4 is a pleasant addition to the browser arsenal.

    Firefox 4 is a plenty of good, old stuff and a sprinkling of new to make you feel young and excited again. Mozilla, good job. Even the revolutionary stuff is done with style and moderation to make a hot-headed conservative like me smile. You should look forward to the next release. Firefox 4 is going to be a superb browser.

  • Mozilla releases Thunderbird updates

    One day after it released updates for its Firefox web browser, the Mozilla Project has issued versions 3.1.4 and 3.0.8 of Thunderbird, the latest stable and legacy branch updates of its popular open source email client. According to the developers, the latest maintenance updates improve the applications overall stability and address several user experience concerns found in the previous stable branch release.

  • Mozilla releases new “Kraken” browser benchmark

    Mozilla software engineer Rob Sayre has announced the release of “Kraken”, a new browser benchmark. The developer says that unlike other browser benchmarks, such as SunSpider, V8 and Dromaeo, Kraken focuses on realistic workloads and on forward-looking applications.

CMS

• Diaspora warning: don’t actually *use* it

• Diaspora Has Security Holes? Duh

• ‘Facebook killer’ Diaspora source code released, alpha due in October

  Unlike Facebook, Diaspora is a decentralised social network. Your information, such as pictures and status updates, is stored on your “seed” — a personal Web server — and can be shared with your friends. In addition to the option of running your own seed, the project’s developers hope to provide a hosted service, in a similar manner to the WordPress.com blogging platform: WordPress can be installed on your own server or you can use a third-party service provider (or WordPress.com itself).

Business

• Mule Heads to the Clouds With New Open Source ESB Release

  Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) (DEFINE:ESB) is a technology that performs a critical role in SOA (DEFINE:SOA) architectures, enabling data and message integration.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Celebrate Software Freedom Day with the LibrePlanet community

  Saturday, September 18th is Software Freedom Day, a worldwide celebration of user freedom. It’s a great opportunity not only to introduce new people to free software, but to connect with other free software activists in your area or online.

  But what about the day after? How can we sustain these links? How can we make sure that people in your area who hear about free software can find a local community to connect with?

• want to work on Bazaar?

  Now we’re looking for a very good software engineer to join the Bazaar team at Canonical, working both on the core tool itself and on how it’s used by Ubuntu developers.

• A month of the Hurd: Media Appearances, procfs, Arch Hurd.

  Finally, amongst other bug fixing and other development work by the usual suspects, we had a short review of what the current Hurd contributors still need to use a GNU/Hurd system for most of their day-to-day tasks. This may help to prioritize the development efforts.

Licensing

• Google and Microsoft Open Source Project Hosting Policies

Openness/Sharing

• Developing films the open source way

  In a world where movies are produced on budgets of hundreds of millions of dollars, at a time when studios expect a huge return on their investment, in an industry where the opening weekend can make or break a film–one man refuses to live by society’s (or the movie industry’s) rules. One man is willing to put it all on the line and do something different. Something daring. Something… free.

  [...]

  The key idea to take away here is freedom: freedom of the consumer to see what they’re paying for before they spend their money. This empowers the viewer, letting them control where they spend their money. Rather than spending their money up front before watching a film, they can see the work for free. As a result, more people are likely to watch the film, or listen to the music.

Standards/Consortia

• ODFToEPub can now embed fonts

Power to the PC: How to Select a Computer Power Supply

Security/Aggression

• Carlisle man destroyed CCTV camera spying on his home

  A man who objected to a CCTV camera keeping watch on his bedroom window from the house opposite appeared before a judge – for stealing the camera and throwing it in a river.

• What to do with an incompetent Department? Give them more power! At least, that’s what HMRC thinks…

Finance

• Kaufman Says `Something Rotten’ in Commodity Markets: Video

  Sept. 16 (Bloomberg) — Frederick Kaufman, a professor at College of Staten Island, Alexia Howard, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., Dennis DeLaughter, the owner of Progressive Farm Marketing Inc., and Alex Wittenberg, a partner at Oliver Wyman, talk about agricultural futures and commodity markets. They speak with Pimm Fox on Bloomberg Television’s “Taking Stock.” (This is an excerpt. Source: Bloomberg)

• Setting the Agenda

  That’s what journalists are supposed to do: Set the agenda. Rarely, however, do we get the headlines. But last night, on Bloomberg TV, the Food Bubble came through . . .

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• The Internet Freedom Fallacy and the Arab Digital activism

  This article focuses on grassroots digital activism in the Arab world and the risks of what seems to be an inevitable collusion with U.S foreign policy and interests. It sums up the most important elements of the conversation I have been having for the last 2 years with many actors involved in defending online free speech and the use of technology for social and political change. While the main focus is Arab digital activism, I have made sure to include similar concerns raised by activists and online free speech advocates from other parts of the world, such as China, Thailand, and Iran.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• Red tape snarls rural Internet firm

  Ottawa tells Peace Region ISP that it’s not Canadian enough for new slice of spectrum

• Tens of thousands could be priced out of broadband after Government announcement on file sharing code

  Up to £500m will be taken out of the UK economy according to the Government’s announcement today about the cost sharing for the letter writing regime following the Digital Economy Act. The BIS cost order confirms the 75/25 split of costs between rightholders and ISPs.

  ISPs will of course pass on these costs to their customers. According to the Government’s own estimates that means that up to 96,000 individuals will not be able to afford an internet connection anymore.

Intellectual Monopolies

• BSA’s Latest Study on Piracy and Economic Benefits “Shockingly Misleading”

  When IT Business’s Brian Jackson asked me for a comment, I noted that such estimates were notoriously speculative (see Glyn Moody on this) and that the BSA would do far better to tell us how much Canada has gained from its recent significant reductions in piracy. Last year, the BSA said the Canadian rate dropped by three percent to 29%, the biggest drop among developed countries and – the BSA noted – an all-time low. In fact, since 2006 the BSA says that there has been a five percent drop in Canada. Has that created thousands of new jobs and generated billions in new revenues and taxes?

• IP as a joke

• Lars Johnson Has Goats on His Roof and a Stable of Lawyers to Prove It

  Having Trademarked the Ungulate Look, Restaurateur Butts Heads With Imitators

• Copyrights

  • Millions at Stake in Education Copyright Battle

    Negotiating with individual authors or publishers for the rights to a single work may be cumbersome, but so too are the proposed reporting requirements. Moreover, individual negotiations hold the advantage of potential costs savings for students and ensuring that the actual authors receive full compensation for the use of their works. In other words, win-win-win for authors, teachers, and students.

  • An Explanation Of My Views On Copyright Part Four – The Sky Is Falling

    Going back to the section on Digital Locks, let’s assume that Bill C-32 passes into law with no changes. So Randy Bachman releases a new compact disc, and the Record Label uses TPM/DRM on it. The way the law is currently written, Randy Bachman could not legally break the TPM/DRM, even if he owns the copyright. Even worse, he wouldn’t be legally able to break the TPM/DRM if he owned the Record Label, and the compact disc pressing plant. You might argue that he shouldn’t need to, as he’d still have the masters, but accidents have happened before, and masters have been lost. Even if Randy controlled every step of the chain, legally he can’t break the TPM/DRM he decided to use. Does this make sense?