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09.13.11

Links 13/9/2011: 2011 Gentoo Screenshot Contest, All XOs Run GNU/Linux

Posted in News Roundup at 6:18 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • TLWIR 16: Hydrogen, Recording Music and Red Hat’s Day
  • How to Hire the Linux Talent You Need

    More than 30 Linux-specific IT and developer jobs were posted to the Linux Foundation’s Jobs Board in a single week recently, while more than 11,000 Linux-related jobs can now be found on tech jobs site Dice.com. Demand for Linux experience, moreover, is growing at a rate of 31 percent year over year on Dice, compared with just 20 percent year on year for job postings overall.

  • Desktop

    • Linux, a second class system?

      I have seen a influx lately of people who use Ubuntu or have talked about their plans to use it. Whenever I hear this I will ask them why they want to use Ubuntu so I can know what people’s motives actually are for using Ubuntu. Often the response i hear is not a response I particularity like. It is usually to the effect of “well my windows system is getting a little old so I think I’ll breathe new life into my old laptop with Linux. Linux to them is the thing that makes their old windows laptop last a few more years. though this is true what I find happening is people will after these couple years are up, buy a new laptop and do the same cycle all over again; use Windows until their system gets a little sluggish or breaks then install Linux on to it. My friends, I do not see this as always good for Linux and the community behind it. The user who install Linux on their system to breathe new life into it is going to get new life but not realize that Linux is great for more then just that.

    • Linux Is Dead…and My Students See Dead Linux!

      Right…Linux is dead. So dead that nowadays I seem to encounter more people who know about it. True, they are not counted by millions, but this shows that the hegemony of Windows is not as solid as it used to be.

  • Server

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • GNOME Desktop

      • Second beta of GNOME 3.2

        The GNOME project has published version 3.1.91, the second beta version of GNOME 3.2. In just under two weeks, GNOME release candidate 3.1.92 is to follow. According to the roadmap, GNOME 3.2 is to be published on 28 September, but the developers are currently a few days behind.

  • Distributions

    • Russian Linux: Simply Works!

      What is Simply Linux? This is distribution which is based on the core of Alt Linux. I wrote about Alt Linux couple of times, so you may wish to have a look at those posts. Alt Linux is commercial product which is marketed in Russia for use in schools and government organisation.

    • Tails: One more distro for the privacy-conscious

      A couple of weeks ago I posted some information about the Department of Defense releasing its Lightweight Portable Security (LPS) Linux distribution aimed at giving remote workers a more secure way to access government networks– but also available to the public for anyone’s use who wants a little extra security.

    • New Releases

      • Softpedia Linux Weekly, Issue 164

        Summary:
        · Announced Distro: ArchBang 2011.09
        · Announced Distro: VortexBox 1.10
        · Announced Distro: Bodhi Linux 1.2.0
        · In Other News: Linux kernel sources moved to GitHub and KDE Software Compilation 4.7.1
        · Review of the Week: Tab Mix Plus 0.3.8.6
        · Video Clip of the Week: KDE SC 4.7
        · Distributions Updated Last Week: Zorin OS 3.1, AriOS 3.0.1, BrowserLinux 501, and more…
        · Development Releases: Unity Linux 2011 Alpha 2, Elastix 2.2.0 RC2 and ZeroShell 1.0 Beta 15

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Does Linux Community Need Corruption?

        So, ex-Minister invested his money into Mandriva. At the same time he started new Russian company ROSA Laboratories. And same fund NGI also acquired another Russian company PingWin.
        If you look at sites of ROSA Labs (English version using Google Translate) and PingWin (English), it is easy to notice, they are located at the same address in Moscow: number 14 at Presnensky Val. Do you need any more proofs of their affiliation?
        Now let’s come back to Mandriva. Recent release of this Operating System, called Mandriva 2011 Hydrogen, was very revolutionary, if not say more. Mandriva dumped all the Desktop Environments, except for KDE. Distribution itself grew in size more than twice. And even KDE itself was reworked significantly with help of… surprise-surprise: ROSA Labs. As a result, we got monster operating system with oversized distribution, slow performance and very arguable interface. Reading all the reviews of Mandriva 2011, I have found no one where reviewer would be absolutely happy with new release.

    • Gentoo Family

    • Red Hat Family

      • CentOS 6 is finally deployed in my production setup!

        Believe it or not, I have finally included CentOS in my home production setup. After many years of unbroken hegemony of openSUSE and Ubuntu, the balance has been shattered. It is not so much a testimony of failure of either of the two, more sort of a great success that CentOS has reaped.

      • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 gets thumbs up from SAP, Amazon

        Red Hat has reached two significant milestones in its effort to establish its latest enterprise Linux as the ideal platform for cloud computing and running mission critical applications.

        On Tuesday, the leading Linux provider will announce that its 10-month-old Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 has been certified by SAP.

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Lightweight Bodhi 1.2 distro offers Enlightenment for the Linux masses

          Ubuntu derivative Bodhi Linux was released in a version 1.2 that moves up to Linux 3.0. Bodhi Linux 1.2 advances to a fresh new version of the lightweight Enlightenment 17 window manager and version 0.4 of the lightweight Midori web browser, and features improved documentation and a variety of new desktop themes, says the project.

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Is the opposition still unified against Ubuntu Unity?

            On May 10, 2010, Mark Shuttleworth stood in front of developers, programmers and fans of Ubuntu Linux at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in La Hulpe, Belgium and announced that Natty Narwhal, Ubuntu 11.04, was going to ship with the Unity Interface rather than Gnome. It was a surprise, and a startling one at that. The Gnome Shell was a staple of Ubuntu; if you wanted something other than Gnome, well, there was KuBuntu (with KDE), Lubuntu (using LXDE), or other distributions. Gnome came with Ubuntu; it was how things were. To veer off that path sounded like a betrayal to some, and the beginning of the end for others.

          • Is Ubuntu Driving Users Away?
          • Ubuntu Security Engineer Kees Cook To Join Google

            Kees Cook, an Ubuntu Security Engineer, has resigned from Canonical after a 5 years long stint. Kees will join Google’s ChomeOS team.

          • Canonical Seeks Independent Developers for Ubuntu Linux

            Are you an app developer with an “itch to scratch,” or an independent programmer eager for more exposure to the open source channel? If so, the Canonical team is building a site just for you, to help you integrate your work into Ubuntu. Here’s a look at what the company has done so far.

            The developer portal of the Ubuntu website, developer.ubuntu.com, has been around for a while now, but Canonical employees David Planella and John Oxton made its expansion and design the focus of a recent session during Ubuntu App Developer Week. The proceedings of their discussion reveal some important insights into Canonical’s plan for engaging new developers and expanding Ubuntu’s application profile.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Inside Linux Mint

              Linux Mint’s meteoric rise to the top of the distro charts can be attributed to its perfect mix of usability and functionality. But if you think it’s just another Ubuntu-skinned distro, you’re very wrong.

              Unlike most popular Linux distros, Mint is the brainchild of just one man – Clement Lefebvre – yet it has managed to invigorate the community. It’s no surprise, then, that it looks to its legions of users for advice.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Teaching technology in the future – Raspberry Pi

      So how can we take advantage of that trend towards discovery and learning, and combine it with small cheap electronics, to really make a difference? Well, you may have heard of the Raspberry Pi Foundation – it has had a fair amount of coverage in the UK anyway, with the promise of a new low-cost computing platform which could theoretically replicate the success of the BBC-sponsored, Acorn-built, BBC Microcomputers from the 1980s (and backed by one of the most successful computer games authors of that era). Those BBC Micro systems were rolled out across schools all over the UK, and pretty much anyone in the 30-40 age bracket will have learned to write some kind of BBC BASIC or LOGO code at some point in their education, and have looked at fractals and played a variety of classic 8-bit games. My first home computer was an Acorn Electron, an affordable beige “keyboard box” that could be plugged straight into a home TV in 1984, with games and programs loaded off a (then) common cassette player.

    • SkyNET Copter Wrecks Wi-Fi Networks In Its Free Time

      As of now, it’s just a prototype. It’s built on the company’s AR Drone quadrocopter core, and it’s modified with a Linux computer, 3G card, GPS module and two Wi-Fi cards.

    • This Cheap Air Drone Can Break Into Your Computer and Own It

      The SkyNET drone is a modified $300 Parrot quadcopter with a Linux computer, 3G card, a GPS unit and two Wi-Fi cards. This is how it works:

    • Phones

      • HTC mulling purchase of operating system: report

        After the global PC heavyweight Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) announced on Aug. 18 a plan to spin off its PC business and stop sales of its TouchPad tablet that uses the WebOS operating system, a slew of manufacturers like HTC and Samsung reportedly have been trying to acquire the WebOS platform to expand their mobile market reach.

      • Android

        • Fast processor, 4G push Droid Bionic to the top, says review

          The Android 2.3.4-powered Droid Bionic by Motorola is the company’s fastest smartphone yet, and it runs on Verizon’s LTE network, the fastest 4G service in the U.S. Although one pays dearly for the Bionic’s blazing speed, both in price and in poor battery life, the Bionic will more than compensate for those seeking top performance, says this review.

        • Intel to offer Android 2.x on Atom E6xx in January
        • Echostar Set Top Box runs on Android 2.3

          The Echostar IP Set Top Box HDX-200 seen at the IBC 2011 Amsterdam is an Android 2.3 operated device & runs Linux kernel 2.6.34.

        • 7 beautiful CyanogenMod 7 themes

          If you own a rooted Android phone most probably you will have heard about CyanogenMod. CyanogenMod is a free, community built distribution of Android 2.3.x which greatly extends the capabilities of your phone. In other words it’s a custom ROM for your mobile phone. Among its many features is its ability to use custom themes on your phone simply by installing APKs and using the T-Mobile theme engine. Here I will show you 7 beautiful themes for CM7.

        • Top Free Android Finance Apps

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • 0% of XOs run Windows

        A stray comment today about Windows not working on ARM machines, by someone who thought all OLPC laptops had moved away from Linux, reminded me to reaffirm something:
        Every XO we have ever made shipped from the factory with Linux. The 2M+ XOs running Linux is one of the largest deployments of Linux in the classroom anywhere in the world, and the largest in primary schools.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Why we still love open source

    It’s easy to make the argument that open source ain’t what it used to be. In the essay accompanying this year’s Bossie (Best of Open Source Software) Awards, InfoWorld contributing editor Peter Wayner nails it: Aggressive patent and copyright enforcement are inflicting damage on real openness and community-driven software development. And in desperate pursuit of revenue, both independent ISVs and big software players can make it hard to distinguish between demo versions and open source distributions.

  • The Covenant – A New Approach to Open Source Cooperation

    How can a company profit from their product while being fair to their Open Source development partners? After decades of corporate participation in Open Source, this question is still debated. HPCC Systems is taking a new approach.

  • Web Browsers

  • Databases

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • CMS

    • Drupal: is an open-source star on the edge?

      For some, Drupal is a powerful content management system; for others, it’s a development framework.

      With more than 2m downloads and high-profile users like MTV UK, Estee Lauder, Fox News, and The Economist, however, there’s no disputing the fact that Drupal is a great example of a successful open source project.

  • Public Services/Government

    • UK Government: Open Standards Must be RF, not FRAND

      So there we have it: the UK government officially recognises that open standards must be RF, as specified in the Procurement Policy Note, not FRAND, because the latter “ may present some difficulties for the open source software development model in terms of patents and royalties,” which is absolutely spot on.

  • Open Access/Content

    • A barrier-free world with open-access publishing

      The International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (ICFOSS), based on the Technopark campus here, is poised to take its first step into open-access publishing. The centre is set to release the Journal of Free Software and Free Knowledge on Monday, representing the next stage in the free software movement.

      Talking to The Hindu, Satish Babu, director, ICFOSS, said open-access publication provided an answer to the problems posed by copyright restrictions in the conventional method of publishing.

  • Programming

    • Introducing CoffeeScript

      It’s great that JavaScript has improved in many ways. At the same time, the language contains many legacy issues—not in terms of capabilities, but in terms of the syntax and grammar. You can do great things with JavaScript, but it’s easy to write code that has unexpected side effects, whose variables don’t have the scope you expect, or whose functions operate just differently enough from your intention to cause problems.

Leftovers

  • M$: Hotmail is Trash

    I have been saying that for about a decade. Now M$ agrees and will revamp Hotmail.

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • Through the Toxic Mirror: Vietnamese and Americans Continue to Suffer Effects of Agent Orange

      Fred Wilcox is a writing professor at Ithaca College and a long-time peace activist. In 1983, his book Waiting for an Army to Die: The Tragedy of Agent Orange broke the story of the suffering of American veterans of the Vietnam War due to poisoning by Agent Orange used as a defoliant. On September 13, Seven Stories Press will release his latest book, Scorched Earth: Legacies of Chemical Warfare in Vietnam, which chronicles the effects of chemical warfare on the Vietnamese people. On the same day, Seven Stories will also release a new edition of Waiting for an Army to Die.

    • A Decade After the 9/11 Attacks, Americans Live in an Era of Endless War

      To grasp its sweep, it helps to visit Fort Campbell, Ky., where the Army will soon open a $31 million complex for wounded troops and those whose bodies are breaking down after a decade of deployments.

  • Cablegate

    • 2011-09-11 Bulgarian Ambassador in Washington – Trusted Informant of USA

      A secret diplomatic cable [08SOFIA185], released by Wikileaks and dated March 27, 2008, reveals that Bulgarian Ambassador in Washington, DC, now serving a second term there, Elena Poptodorova and then Deputy Defense Minister, Sonya Yankulova, have informed American Ambassador in Sofia John Beyrle about plans to increase the Bulgarian contingent in Kandahar by fifty rangers, months before the official decision of the Bulgarian cabinet.

      The cable is also shading light on the steady pressure exerted by US officials on the Government of Bulgaria to expand its Afghan contribution with new contingent.

    • Narco elite vs oligarchy: Guatemala votes

      As candidates square-off in Guatemala’s presidential election, a broader political battle is transpiring away from the campaign signs and populist rhetoric: the old oligarchy is fighting to maintain its privileged position against an increasingly powerful “narco elite”.

      The old elite, or oligarchs, usually come from a feudal-style landowning class linked to coffee exports, cattle ranching and some heavy industry, such as cement production. The new narcos deal in cocaine, marijuana and assassinations.

    • More Lies from M$

      Sad that they relied on taxpayers money to sell products. Sad that one of the richest corporations in the world did not have the confidence to compete on price/performance.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • CNN Sustains Tea Party Myth

      CNN Online has published a story titled an “angry electorate helps sustain tea party,” ignoring the clear evidence the “movement” is only sustained by thinly-veiled religious zeal and wealthy funders like the Koch brothers.

  • Privacy

    • Google+, Real Names, and Groklaw’s Pamela Jones

      In the meantime, though PJ, who’s a very private person, was subjected to death threats, invasion of her privacy by junkyard journalists, and even claims that she wasn’t a real person at all. There really is a PJ. I’ve met her, and as it happens her “real name” is Pamela Jones.

      Just because she has a real name though and she’s a well-known online legal expert and journalist, doesn’t mean that she wants Google, or anyone else, drawing a direct line from “PJ” the paralegal and analyst/reporter and the Pamela Jones who lives at X address in Y City. So what does she think of Google’s instance of making those connections from online to real-world identities?

      In our conversation, Jones said, “I was going to join up with Google+ until I read about the ‘real name’ policy. I use my real name, actually, but if I have to send a license or some other proof to establish it, it’s no different, to me, than a government ID card.”

  • Civil Rights

    • How problematic is the Public Data Corporation?

      Jonathan Raper from open data company Placr argued that the PDC is a massive step backwards for the direction we thought data policy was moving under this government (US style marginal cost + tax funding model). This is going to stop on its tracks opening up other key core data areas, such as Companies House. It is not just the impact of the datasets involved in the current deal for the PDC but the general policy u-turn.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Copyright term extension is a cultural disaster

        This morning we heard that term extension in sound recordings has gone through the EU Council. Term extension is a cultural disaster. It means that it will be harder to publish older works, and many will remain out of print. Research showed that around 90% of the cash windfall from copyright levies will fall into the hands of record labels.

        Despite the rhetoric, small artists will gain very little from this, while our cultural heritage takes a massive blow by denying us full access to these recordings for another generation.

      • The Orphan Wars

        Just when I thought that the Google Books case might be tailing off towards an anticlimactic, unresolved ending — bam! The Authors Guild today filed suit against the HathiTrust, the library partnership holding many of the scans received from Google. You have to say this for authors: they sure know how to time a plot twist for maximum dramatic impact. I’ll give a quick summary of the important facts about the lawsuit, and then a few thoughts about what it means.

      • Accused Of Copyright Infringement For Reprinting Images Produced In 630 A.D.

        Over the years, we’ve heard tons of stories of professional printers refusing to print certain images because they’re concerned about being accused of copyright infringement. This tends to create a huge nuisance for people who have a legitimate right to have things printed, but it gets absolutely, positively ridiculous when it involves material that is quite obviously in the public domain.

Canonical/Ubuntu

  • Is the opposition still unified against Ubuntu Unity?

    On May 10, 2010, Mark Shuttleworth stood in front of developers, programmers and fans of Ubuntu Linux at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in La Hulpe, Belgium and announced that Natty Narwhal, Ubuntu 11.04, was going to ship with the Unity Interface rather than Gnome. It was a surprise, and a startling one at that. The Gnome Shell was a staple of Ubuntu; if you wanted something other than Gnome, well, there was KuBuntu (with KDE), Lubuntu (using LXDE), or other distributions. Gnome came with Ubuntu; it was how things were. To veer off that path sounded like a betrayal to some, and the beginning of the end for others.

  • Is Ubuntu Driving Users Away?
  • Ubuntu Security Engineer Kees Cook To Join Google

    Kees Cook, an Ubuntu Security Engineer, has resigned from Canonical after a 5 years long stint. Kees will join Google’s ChomeOS team.

  • Canonical Seeks Independent Developers for Ubuntu Linux

    Are you an app developer with an “itch to scratch,” or an independent programmer eager for more exposure to the open source channel? If so, the Canonical team is building a site just for you, to help you integrate your work into Ubuntu. Here’s a look at what the company has done so far.

    The developer portal of the Ubuntu website, developer.ubuntu.com, has been around for a while now, but Canonical employees David Planella and John Oxton made its expansion and design the focus of a recent session during Ubuntu App Developer Week. The proceedings of their discussion reveal some important insights into Canonical’s plan for engaging new developers and expanding Ubuntu’s application profile.

  • Flavours and Variants

    • Inside Linux Mint

      Linux Mint’s meteoric rise to the top of the distro charts can be attributed to its perfect mix of usability and functionality. But if you think it’s just another Ubuntu-skinned distro, you’re very wrong.

      Unlike most popular Linux distros, Mint is the brainchild of just one man – Clement Lefebvre – yet it has managed to invigorate the community. It’s no surprise, then, that it looks to its legions of users for advice.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Teaching technology in the future – Raspberry Pi

      So how can we take advantage of that trend towards discovery and learning, and combine it with small cheap electronics, to really make a difference? Well, you may have heard of the Raspberry Pi Foundation – it has had a fair amount of coverage in the UK anyway, with the promise of a new low-cost computing platform which could theoretically replicate the success of the BBC-sponsored, Acorn-built, BBC Microcomputers from the 1980s (and backed by one of the most successful computer games authors of that era). Those BBC Micro systems were rolled out across schools all over the UK, and pretty much anyone in the 30-40 age bracket will have learned to write some kind of BBC BASIC or LOGO code at some point in their education, and have looked at fractals and played a variety of classic 8-bit games. My first home computer was an Acorn Electron, an affordable beige “keyboard box” that could be plugged straight into a home TV in 1984, with games and programs loaded off a (then) common cassette player.

    • SkyNET Copter Wrecks Wi-Fi Networks In Its Free Time

      As of now, it’s just a prototype. It’s built on the company’s AR Drone quadrocopter core, and it’s modified with a Linux computer, 3G card, GPS module and two Wi-Fi cards.

    • This Cheap Air Drone Can Break Into Your Computer and Own It

      The SkyNET drone is a modified $300 Parrot quadcopter with a Linux computer, 3G card, a GPS unit and two Wi-Fi cards. This is how it works:

    • Phones

      • HTC mulling purchase of operating system: report

        After the global PC heavyweight Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) announced on Aug. 18 a plan to spin off its PC business and stop sales of its TouchPad tablet that uses the WebOS operating system, a slew of manufacturers like HTC and Samsung reportedly have been trying to acquire the WebOS platform to expand their mobile market reach.

      • Android

        • Fast processor, 4G push Droid Bionic to the top, says review

          The Android 2.3.4-powered Droid Bionic by Motorola is the company’s fastest smartphone yet, and it runs on Verizon’s LTE network, the fastest 4G service in the U.S. Although one pays dearly for the Bionic’s blazing speed, both in price and in poor battery life, the Bionic will more than compensate for those seeking top performance, says this review.

        • Intel to offer Android 2.x on Atom E6xx in January
        • Echostar Set Top Box runs on Android 2.3

          The Echostar IP Set Top Box HDX-200 seen at the IBC 2011 Amsterdam is an Android 2.3 operated device & runs Linux kernel 2.6.34.

        • 7 beautiful CyanogenMod 7 themes

          If you own a rooted Android phone most probably you will have heard about CyanogenMod. CyanogenMod is a free, community built distribution of Android 2.3.x which greatly extends the capabilities of your phone. In other words it’s a custom ROM for your mobile phone. Among its many features is its ability to use custom themes on your phone simply by installing APKs and using the T-Mobile theme engine. Here I will show you 7 beautiful themes for CM7.

        • Top Free Android Finance Apps

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • 0% of XOs run Windows

        A stray comment today about Windows not working on ARM machines, by someone who thought all OLPC laptops had moved away from Linux, reminded me to reaffirm something:
        Every XO we have ever made shipped from the factory with Linux. The 2M+ XOs running Linux is one of the largest deployments of Linux in the classroom anywhere in the world, and the largest in primary schools.

    • Free Software/Open Source

    • Why we still love open source

      It’s easy to make the argument that open source ain’t what it used to be. In the essay accompanying this year’s Bossie (Best of Open Source Software) Awards, InfoWorld contributing editor Peter Wayner nails it: Aggressive patent and copyright enforcement are inflicting damage on real openness and community-driven software development. And in desperate pursuit of revenue, both independent ISVs and big software players can make it hard to distinguish between demo versions and open source distributions.

    • The Covenant – A New Approach to Open Source Cooperation

      How can a company profit from their product while being fair to their Open Source development partners? After decades of corporate participation in Open Source, this question is still debated. HPCC Systems is taking a new approach.

    • Web Browsers

    • Databases

    • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • CMS

      • Drupal: is an open-source star on the edge?

        For some, Drupal is a powerful content management system; for others, it’s a development framework.

        With more than 2m downloads and high-profile users like MTV UK, Estee Lauder, Fox News, and The Economist, however, there’s no disputing the fact that Drupal is a great example of a successful open source project.

    • Public Services/Government

      • UK Government: Open Standards Must be RF, not FRAND

        So there we have it: the UK government officially recognises that open standards must be RF, as specified in the Procurement Policy Note, not FRAND, because the latter “ may present some difficulties for the open source software development model in terms of patents and royalties,” which is absolutely spot on.

    • Open Access/Content

      • A barrier-free world with open-access publishing

        The International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (ICFOSS), based on the Technopark campus here, is poised to take its first step into open-access publishing. The centre is set to release the Journal of Free Software and Free Knowledge on Monday, representing the next stage in the free software movement.

        Talking to The Hindu, Satish Babu, director, ICFOSS, said open-access publication provided an answer to the problems posed by copyright restrictions in the conventional method of publishing.

    • Programming

      • Introducing CoffeeScript

        It’s great that JavaScript has improved in many ways. At the same time, the language contains many legacy issues—not in terms of capabilities, but in terms of the syntax and grammar. You can do great things with JavaScript, but it’s easy to write code that has unexpected side effects, whose variables don’t have the scope you expect, or whose functions operate just differently enough from your intention to cause problems.

    Leftovers

    • M$: Hotmail is Trash

      I have been saying that for about a decade. Now M$ agrees and will revamp Hotmail.

    • Defence/Police/Aggression

      • Through the Toxic Mirror: Vietnamese and Americans Continue to Suffer Effects of Agent Orange

        Fred Wilcox is a writing professor at Ithaca College and a long-time peace activist. In 1983, his book Waiting for an Army to Die: The Tragedy of Agent Orange broke the story of the suffering of American veterans of the Vietnam War due to poisoning by Agent Orange used as a defoliant. On September 13, Seven Stories Press will release his latest book, Scorched Earth: Legacies of Chemical Warfare in Vietnam, which chronicles the effects of chemical warfare on the Vietnamese people. On the same day, Seven Stories will also release a new edition of Waiting for an Army to Die.

      • A Decade After the 9/11 Attacks, Americans Live in an Era of Endless War

        To grasp its sweep, it helps to visit Fort Campbell, Ky., where the Army will soon open a $31 million complex for wounded troops and those whose bodies are breaking down after a decade of deployments.

    • Cablegate

      • 2011-09-11 Bulgarian Ambassador in Washington – Trusted Informant of USA

        A secret diplomatic cable [08SOFIA185], released by Wikileaks and dated March 27, 2008, reveals that Bulgarian Ambassador in Washington, DC, now serving a second term there, Elena Poptodorova and then Deputy Defense Minister, Sonya Yankulova, have informed American Ambassador in Sofia John Beyrle about plans to increase the Bulgarian contingent in Kandahar by fifty rangers, months before the official decision of the Bulgarian cabinet.

        The cable is also shading light on the steady pressure exerted by US officials on the Government of Bulgaria to expand its Afghan contribution with new contingent.

      • Narco elite vs oligarchy: Guatemala votes

        As candidates square-off in Guatemala’s presidential election, a broader political battle is transpiring away from the campaign signs and populist rhetoric: the old oligarchy is fighting to maintain its privileged position against an increasingly powerful “narco elite”.

        The old elite, or oligarchs, usually come from a feudal-style landowning class linked to coffee exports, cattle ranching and some heavy industry, such as cement production. The new narcos deal in cocaine, marijuana and assassinations.

      • More Lies from M$

        Sad that they relied on taxpayers money to sell products. Sad that one of the richest corporations in the world did not have the confidence to compete on price/performance.

    • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Finance

    • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

      • CNN Sustains Tea Party Myth

        CNN Online has published a story titled an “angry electorate helps sustain tea party,” ignoring the clear evidence the “movement” is only sustained by thinly-veiled religious zeal and wealthy funders like the Koch brothers.

    • Privacy

      • Google+, Real Names, and Groklaw’s Pamela Jones

        In the meantime, though PJ, who’s a very private person, was subjected to death threats, invasion of her privacy by junkyard journalists, and even claims that she wasn’t a real person at all. There really is a PJ. I’ve met her, and as it happens her “real name” is Pamela Jones.

        Just because she has a real name though and she’s a well-known online legal expert and journalist, doesn’t mean that she wants Google, or anyone else, drawing a direct line from “PJ” the paralegal and analyst/reporter and the Pamela Jones who lives at X address in Y City. So what does she think of Google’s instance of making those connections from online to real-world identities?

        In our conversation, Jones said, “I was going to join up with Google+ until I read about the ‘real name’ policy. I use my real name, actually, but if I have to send a license or some other proof to establish it, it’s no different, to me, than a government ID card.”

    • Civil Rights

      • How problematic is the Public Data Corporation?

        Jonathan Raper from open data company Placr argued that the PDC is a massive step backwards for the direction we thought data policy was moving under this government (US style marginal cost + tax funding model). This is going to stop on its tracks opening up other key core data areas, such as Companies House. It is not just the impact of the datasets involved in the current deal for the PDC but the general policy u-turn.

    • Intellectual Monopolies

      • Copyrights

        • Copyright term extension is a cultural disaster

          This morning we heard that term extension in sound recordings has gone through the EU Council. Term extension is a cultural disaster. It means that it will be harder to publish older works, and many will remain out of print. Research showed that around 90% of the cash windfall from copyright levies will fall into the hands of record labels.

          Despite the rhetoric, small artists will gain very little from this, while our cultural heritage takes a massive blow by denying us full access to these recordings for another generation.

        • The Orphan Wars

          Just when I thought that the Google Books case might be tailing off towards an anticlimactic, unresolved ending — bam! The Authors Guild today filed suit against the HathiTrust, the library partnership holding many of the scans received from Google. You have to say this for authors: they sure know how to time a plot twist for maximum dramatic impact. I’ll give a quick summary of the important facts about the lawsuit, and then a few thoughts about what it means.

        • Accused Of Copyright Infringement For Reprinting Images Produced In 630 A.D.

          Over the years, we’ve heard tons of stories of professional printers refusing to print certain images because they’re concerned about being accused of copyright infringement. This tends to create a huge nuisance for people who have a legitimate right to have things printed, but it gets absolutely, positively ridiculous when it involves material that is quite obviously in the public domain.

    09.11.11

    Links 11/9/2011: Xonotic 0.5, Plasma Active

    Posted in News Roundup at 9:48 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

    GNOME bluefish

    Contents

    GNU/Linux

    • Applications

      • Instructionals/Technical

      • Games

        • Xonotic 0.5 Release

          Today we can bring you some great news, a brand new release of Xonotic! It has been quite a while since the 0.1 preview version, but we have made immense progress over the last few months. In this blog post we’ll be showing off the latest improvements and tell you about the changes we made from the feedback we had after the initial release.

    • Desktop Environments

      • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

        • Plasma Active: Crunching towards One

          Plasma Active aims at creating a desirable user experience for a spectrum of devices, based on a fully Free software stack, developed in the open. The first release is planned for October. In the following article, you can read about the latest status and recent improvements made.

        • Back from the Desktop Summit 2011 in Berlin

          Perhaps I am the last one writing about the wonderful Desktop Summit in Berlin some days ago. Nevertheless I want to summarize my personal highlights.

          The Desktop Summit was awesome. I had the pleasure to meet people (old and new friends from all over the world), discuss complicated stuff face-to-face and of cause: have a lot of fun together.

          In a combined cross desktop marketing BoF we discussed some ideas how we (GNOME and KDE) could join forces to get bigger media coverage (e.g. TV, radio or big newspapers). One intresting first step is by paying attention on our messages. It occured that the message was: “… is THE Linux Desktop Environment” or “A is better than B”.

        • Google Summer of Code & Season of KDE

          How awesome are the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and Season of KDE (SoK) programs? According to Daniel Moctezuma, “All the work done by students in GSoC/SoK will have an impact in Free Software and the world.” Daniel is one of the 2011 GSoC students. Lydia Pintscher is the main administrator of these programs for KDE. She made the following report.

          [...]

          It makes me proud that KDE as a community is able and willing to teach newcomers to Free Software on such a large scale, while delivering high-quality results in terms of code produced and students mentored.

      • GNOME Desktop

        • Intel SNA With Unity, Unity 2D & GNOME Shell

          After the benchmarks a few days back of Intel Sandy Bridge Acceleration On Non-SNB Hardware, Chris Wilson of Intel who has been responsible for much of the “Sandy Bridge New Acceleration” work requested more tests, but this time to see the effect that the compositing window manager has on this new acceleration architecture. As a result, here is some quick tests of Intel’s Sandy Bridge graphics under the Unity, Unity 2D, and GNOME Shell desktops.

    • Distributions

      • Lucid Puppy 5.2.8 review – More goodness

        Praising an operating system over and over is a sure sign of fanboyism, which is punishable by flogging in some countries, or at the very least, leads to ostracization in the higher social circles. But it is truly difficult to find fault with the Puppy Linux, release after release. And while I tested Lucid Puppy not that long ago, I had an urge for more great stuff, so I redid my testing with the latest release, version 5.2.8.

      • New Releases

    • Devices/Embedded

      • Phones

        • Android

          • Android Update brings PAN/NAP to Motorola defy

            After my summer vacation, I finally did the official update on my defy, which brought the thing to Android 2.2.2.

          • It’s an Android future, with or without Google

            Making its public debut with the release of the HTC Dream/G1, Google’s Android mobile operating system has provided the search giant with a massively successful mobile ecosystem that, whilst doesn’t directly generate revenues through licensing, it provides smartphone manufacturers with a free, powerful and customisable software platform – generating millions of dollars in sales – and also helps possibly the world’s biggest advertising company dominate another advertising vertical.

      • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

        • Tablet Sales Jump Forecast

          Moskowitz did acknowledge the possibility that the Amazon tablet could be a major player, though cited concerns about the Android OS as a weak spot.

    Free Software/Open Source

    • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

      • LibreOffice API documentation available

        The new documentation covers the complete LibreOffice 3.4 API, has reference documentation for the Java UNO Runtime and C++ UNO runtime systems, and an overview of the UNO development tools.

    Leftovers

    • Windows 7 driver signing conundrum

      Personally I think the whole driver model for Windows is a huge mess, especially when problems come up like this,

    • Security

    • Defence/Police/Aggression

      • TSA Agent Threatens Woman With Defamation, Demands $500k For Calling Intrusive Search ‘Rape’

        After investigating whether or not she could file sexual assault charges, and being told that this was probably a non-starter, she instead wrote about the experience, and named the TSA agent who she dealt with: Thedala Magee. Alkon felt that if people can’t stop these kinds of searches, they should at least be able to name the TSA agents who are doing them.

      • Libya: 19 Suffocated in Gaddafi Detention

        The discovery on September 8, 2011, of 18 bodies buried in western Libya corroborates reports of the death by suffocation of detainees held by Gaddafi forces in June in the town of al-Khoms, Human Rights Watch said today. Another victim died a few days later, so was not buried with the other 18.

      • Mall of America visitors unknowingly end up in counterterrorism reports

        As he shopped for a children’s watch inside the sprawling Mall of America, two security guards approached and began questioning him. Although he was not accused of wrongdoing, the guards filed a confidential report about Kleinerman that was forwarded to local police.

        The reason: Guards thought he might pose a threat because they believed he had been looking at them in a suspicious way.

    • Cablegate

      • Reef safeguard cut back

        THE federal government has secretly wound back a critical environmental protection for the Great Barrier Reef against shipping accidents in order to avoid a diplomatic stoush with the US and Singapore.

      • Leaks reveal it’s past time to speak for West Papua

        The leaked documents also reveal the penetration of Indonesian surveillance on Papuans: everyone from teachers to taxi drivers is on the Kopassus payroll. I have first-hand experience of it. In 2002 I worked with advocate John Rumbiak (now in exile in the US) at Elsham, a Papuan human rights organisation. As an Australian exchange student at an Indonesian university, I had entry where journalists were denied – but it did not spare me from surveillance or intimidation.

      • Tales from Mexico’s drug wars, WikiLeaks style

        Mexico’s offensive against the drug cartels that plague the nation has been fraught with controversy. Over the past four and a half years, tens of thousands have been killed, including many civilians, and the violence continues unabated.

        The drug war is made up of hundreds of incidents and decisions, both public and behind-the-scenes, that the media dutifully reports, unless, as in the case of some Mexican media, there is self-censorship out of fear.

      • Justice Department Reports Drug Seizures Do Little to Stop Cartels

        The government’s long-running war on drugs is having little impact, according to documents just released. The National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC) of the Justice Department reports demand for drugs is rising and the demand is being supplied by major transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) or cartels, which adapt to government “counterdrug efforts” modifying interrelationships, altering drug production levels and adjusting trafficking routes and methods.

    • Finance

      • Wall Street Banks: Too Big To Blame For Subprime?

        Goldman Sachs has historically been one of the more bullish investment houses on Wall Street, but the firm has recently taken a dark macro view. The Wall Street Journal reported on Sept. 1 that Goldman issued a 54-page report sent to their institutional clients on August 16th arguing that as much as $1 trillion in capital may be needed to shore up European banks; that small businesses in the U.S., a past driver of job production, are still languishing; and that China’s growth may not be sustainable.

      • Is Goldman Sachs Doomed?

        No Franchise lasts forever. In the 1990′s, the Chicago Bulls were considered the best basketball team ever. Today, the same sentiments do not exist. When the junk bond market was red hot in the 1980′s, Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette was the premier investment bank on Wall Street. Before DLJ, the big dog was Drexel Burnham Lambert.

        [...]

        If history truly repeats itself, Goldman Sachs may one day be considered as a second-rate bank, or may even become defunct.

      • $4 Gas: Brought to You by Wall Street

        It was the summer of 2008, and the entire country was outraged over $4 gas. It seemed like everyone had bought into the idea that the solution to high gas prices was more drilling for oil: Sarah Palin and other prominent Republicans had taken up the “Drill, baby, drill” refrain. Democrats in Congress, so afraid of consumer backlash, let the 27-year-old moratorium on new drilling in the outer continental shelf quietly expire. But what most people didn’t realize at the time was the role that big financial players like Goldman Sachs—not simple supply and demand—played in pushing gas prices sky-high.

    • Civil Rights

      • Is it Legal to Photograph or Videotape Police?

        The ACLU, photographers’ groups, and others have been complaining about such incidents for years — and we have been consistently winning in court. Recently, an appeals court ruled, on behalf of an ACLU client, that Americans have a First Amendment right to videotape the police making an arrest in a public park.

      • Clothing brands agree to look into mass faintings in Cambodia

        Cambodia is home to some 300 factories where clothing for export is manufactured. They supply major global brands such as Gap, H&M, Wal-Mart and Puma.

    Links 11/9/2011: Linux Tablets for Just $159, Sakai Open Academic Environment (OAE) Reaches 1.0.0

    Posted in News Roundup at 8:07 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

    GNOME bluefish

    Contents

    GNU/Linux

    • Desktop

      • ENT: The many faces of Linux – Online with Bob Vaillancourt

        A few weeks ago I mentioned that I had been playing around with a new distribution of Linux called Bodhi. One of the things I liked was its ability to run on minimal hardware. Its resource requirements were quite low, even to the point of enabling it to run on rather antiquated 386 machines.

    • Kernel Space

    • Applications

    • Desktop Environments

    • Distributions

      • ALT Linux 6 KDesktop review

        Package Management: Debian’s Advanced Packaging Tool, APT, is the package management framework on ALT Linux, with Synaptic Package Manager as the installed graphical interface to apt-get, the most commonly-used command line utility in APT. The version of Synaptic that ships with this version of ALT Linux is Synaptic 0.57.3, which was released in late 2005. Compare that to Synaptic 0.70, the version that comes pre-installed on Linux Mint and Ubuntu. So the graphical interface you have to use on ALT Linux 6 KDesktop is very old. It works, but if you have used Synaptic on other distributions, you feel like you have just stepped back into the last decade.

      • The OpenJDK as the default Java on Linux

        Recently I’ve received a bunch of private correspondence from people confused/worried over the change in the default Java packaging for Linux. For many Linux distributions, the official Sun/Oracle version of Java has been packaged up as the default Java for the platform. However, due to a recent licensing change, this will no longer be the case! So, is this a positive or a negative thing for the Java and open source ecosystem? Read on for my take on it :-)

      • New Releases

        • PelicanHPC GNU Linux

          09 Sept. 2011. version 2.6 is available. make_pelican uses a new and simpler method to add non-Debian software. This latest image was made using the new method, and the image contains the updated tutorial which explains the new system.

      • Debian Family

        • Derivatives

    • Devices/Embedded

      • Phones

        • Android

          • Motorola’s Facebook phone leaked, without Google Android?

            A report posted by Unwired View on Thursday revealed an unannounced new smartphone from Motorola Mobility, running without the glorious power of Google Android operating system. The site claims the phone was posted in Bluetooth’s official website where certified devices land and get the “approval” for using the technology.

          • Undeniable Reasons That Show iPhone 5 Will Fall Head First Down Against Samsung Galaxy S2

            Samsung’s Galaxy S2, which is expected to reach the U.S. this month, has been released in more than 120 countries. The UK and South Korea were the first ones to receive the device.

          • Sharp Launching Aquos 3D Android Handset in Japan

            3D Android phones haven’t really taken off just yet. Even with HTC’s big marketing behind the Evo 3D, and the LG Optimus 3D, we haven’t seen much adoption right out of the gate. It appears that Sharp is staying in the game, though, as they’ve just announced a 3D Android handset that’s headed for Japan’s SoftBank.

          • Is Android forking – and does it matter?

            Android seems to be having a difficult time at the moment, but, far from being a sign of increasing problems, Glyn Moody argues that the forking of the mobile operating system by the likes of Amazon and Baidu could work in Google’s favour.

      • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

        • Like Father like Son (or Like Phone like Tablet)

          For those that read a previous article of mine, it shows to me why Microsoft wants to “talk up” the desktop – It knows that it won’t be able to compete in the Tablet world and if they follow their Phone legacy, then there will be the excuse of “its still in its infancy” whilst the product matures to a point to compete with others.

          It may be 12 months away (Windows 8 ) but I think we can add another 8 months onto that for “baking”. 2 Years for a ready competitor to Apple and Android Tablets? Yes Microsoft, you better keep talking up the Desktop, maybe you’ll convince a few of your customers.

          Unfortunately Microsoft can no longer dictate to the consumer, for the mainstream majority, I’d suggest Tablets are the future, Tablets I hasten to add that unlike the majority of Desktops, won’t force Microsoft products onto people.

        • Barnes & Noble Steps Up Push for Android Developer

          Barnes & Noble, growing increasingly serious about their Android efforts, has begun touting the benefits of their NOOK App Developer program. I recently spent some time speaking with Claudia Romanini, Director of Developer Relations and learned that NOOK Apps has been an all-around success. App downloads are already in the millions and developers are making money. According to Romanini, there are now more than 500 apps to choose from with many more on the way. The number of developers signed up for the program has eclipsed 10,000 more than doubling in the last few months. About that all-important money, I was advised that some developers have seen earnings of more than $100,000 in their first 30 days.

        • Quick Deals: Herotab M6 Gingerbread Tablet for just $159

    Free Software/Open Source

    • Events

    • Web Browsers

    • SaaS

      • HP’s OpenStack Cloud Goes Into Private Beta
      • Hadoop data-management provider Platfora raises $5.7M months after launch

        Hadoop is an open-source data-management software framework. It’s useful for companies that store enormous amounts of data and have to regularly index it. That can include financial services companies that have to track previous prices and old transactions or companies like Yahoo that need to regularly access search information. Platfora aims to add a more manageable user interface to access all that and make the data easier to digest for everyday users and business professionals.

      • LexisNexis open sources code for Hadoop alternative

        HPCC Systems, the division of LexisNexis Risk Solutions dedicated to big data, has released the open source code of its data-processing-and-delivery software it’s positioning as a better version of Hadoop. The High Performance Computing Cluster code is available on Github, and it marks the commencement of HPCC Systems’ quest to build a community of developers underneath Hadoop’s expansive shadow.

    • Databases

      • Open-source databases in the post-Oracle world.

        Open-source products, like MySQL and PostgreSQL, brought relational database functionality to the masses at a fraction of the price of a commercial Oracle, IBM or even Microsoft database. MySQL led the pack of free, or almost free, contenders — customers typically paid for support, not the database itself. Sun Microsystems bought MySQL in January 2008 and open-source fans saw Sun, which fostered many open-source projects, as a worthy caretaker.

    • Education

    • Healthcare

    • Business

      • Web terms SME operators need to understand #6: Proprietary systems

        If it weren’t for open source (as covered last week), there would be no need for the term “proprietary”.

        Because from a business perspective, “proprietary” is essentially “situation normal”.

        Normal because it’s the notion of a free or community service that to business is in fact pretty unusual.

    • Project Releases

    • Public Services/Government

      • Government of India Promotes FLOSS

        In the interests of open e-government, India has widely adopted GNU/Linux in governmental organizations from the legislators to the schools. A recent draft of policy formally gives preference to FLOSS. This has been a long process over the last decade. India has lots of divides and has no need of a digital divide so standardizing on FLOSS works for them.

      • Cabinet wants open source openness, with chocolate biscuits?

        Press reports have been circulating since the start of this month analysing the government’s attitude towards open source technology procurement. As we now know, the traditional approach within Whitehall has been to opt for some of the most costly proprietary technologies.

        Has this situation occurred due to perceptions of the ‘safety factor’ associated with big brand vendor products?

        Is this a case of ‘nobody ever got fired by buying Microsoft’ asks the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones.

        Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude has said that he wants to shift mindsets and see more open source software deployment considered across a so-called “level playing field” now.

    • Openness/Sharing

      • Millennials’ Open Source Attitude

      • Open Hardware

        • Geek 101: What Is Arduino?

          If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ve probably seen us refer to the Arduino microcontroller on a number of occasions. This little circuit board is at the heart of many DIY projects, from robotics to art projects and just about everything in between.

          But what on Earth is Arduino, anyway? What makes it so versatile? And what can you do with it?

    • Programming

      • Google’s 7th Summer of Code comes to an end

        Google has announced that its seventh annual Google Summer of Code (GSoC) event has come to an end. More than 1,100 university students from 68 countries participated in this year’s event by writing code for 175 open source organisations, 50 of which are new to GSoC. A total of 417 mentoring organisations, including the Blender Foundation, the Debian Project, the GNU Project, the KDE Project, LibreOffice and Mozilla, were accepted in 2011.

    Leftovers

    • Defence/Police/Aggression

      • Orwell, 9/11, Emmanuel Goldstein and WikiLeaks

        A strikingly good piece of investigative journalism from Associated Press finds that accusations about the damage done by WikiLeaks’ latest release are — yet again — wildly overstated and without any factual basis. These most recent warnings have centered on WikiLeaks’ exposure of diplomatic sources whom the released cables indicated should be “strictly protected.” While unable to examine all of the names in the cables, AP focused on the ones “the State Department seemed to categorize as most risky.” It found that many of them are “comfortable with their names in the open and no one fearing death.”

      • When mistaken identity leads to torture

        Khaled El-Masri was held for weeks by secret agents who missed a letter in his name

    • Cablegate

      • WikiLeaks Has No Blood on Its Hands

        Cassandra Vinograd and Bradley Klapper of the Associated Press conducted a partial review of US State Embassy cables released by WikiLeaks focusing on the sources the State Department “categorized as most risky.” The findings in the report cast further doubt on the official party line the government promotes when commenting on anything WikiLeaks and concludes, US examples of threatened sources have been “strictly theoretical.” The review found “several of them” are “comfortable with their names in the open and no one fearing death.”

      • 2011-09-05 Caracas Cables Pt I: Hugo’s Former Wife and “Half Brother,” Contentious Environmental Politics

        At the U.S. Embassy in Caracas, diplomatic staff routinely spoke to the rightist Chávez opposition during the Bush years. But in 2004, an odd encounter occurred between the Americans and Chávez’s former wife, Herma Marksman, who held a rather disparaging view of the Venezuelan president. Marksman, a history professor who was married to Chávez between 1984 and 1993, told U.S. diplomats that the firebrand populist was ambitious from an early age and “even thought of running the country as a 20 year-old.”

      • Kashmir politics – in disarray and dirtier than Dal Lake

        Kashmiris knew about their leaders all along. They knew they played a many-layered game. So when whistleblower website WikiLeaks recently released cables which the then US ambassador to India David Mulford had sent to the US State Department in February 2006, the contents didn’t surprise many.

      • A Wild WikiLeaks Week By Sonala Olumhense

        It is a cruel coincidence that in a week in which awful revelations have been tumbling out from WikiLeaks, much of it about the filthy nature of Nigeria’s political elite, the Goodluck Jonathan government insisted on inserting a 100 Days celebration.

        I would have counseled a policy of silence, but perhaps, in their wisdom, they imagined such a celebration would deflect attention from the lamentable revelations.

      • The Idea That DoS Attacks Against WikiLeaks are War Crimes

        A recent interview WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange did with Sueddeutsche Zeitung in Germany features Assange’s take on what happened with the Cablegate release, how the organization has managed to withstand cyber attacks, the organization’s suspicions about OpenLeaks founder and former WikiLeaks spokesperson Daniel Domscheit-Berg and how the organization thinks it has impacted the world.

        One section that sticks out is Assange’s discussion of the denial of service (DoS) attacks the site has managed to withstand.

      • Wikileaks: Ugandan First Lady “Ultimately Behind” Anti-Homosexuality Bill

        Tomorrow’s edition of Sunday Monitor, Uganda’s largest independent newspaper, cites leaked diplomatic cables to report that Ugandan First Lady, Janet Museveni, was behind the Anti-Homosexuality Bill.

    • Copyrights

      • Hollywood Leaks strikes fear into film industry bosses

        Behind the feelgood story lines and happy endings of even the most bland Hollywood movies lurks a formidable PR machine that exerts a grip on every aspect of a film’s life. From keeping scripts secret, to vetting press interviews with stars, setting embargoes and filming on closed sets, big Hollywood studios jealously guard their projects. After all, hundreds of millions of dollars are often at stake. One slip-up can kill a movie – and a dead movie usually takes a few careers with it.

    09.10.11

    Links 10/9/2011: Apple Loses to Linux in Europe, MeeGo Not for Sale

    Posted in News Roundup at 11:42 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

    GNOME bluefish

    Contents

    GNU/Linux

    • Intel Still MeeGos, Apple Loses Again, Yahoo Presents ‘The Charlie Sheen Show’
    • Applications, Riding High on Linux

      Whether it is a big enterprise company in manufacturing sector or a company in the utilities or power sector, Linux has surely moved inside various systems and has become more than a cult. Over the past few years, Linux adoption rates in the enterprise have increased considerably.

    • Why I Ubuntu

      When I think of empowering, I don’t tend to dwell on the modern first world. They don’t especially need empowerment. I’m thinking of the less-franchised or even our own sci-fi future, when our relationship with technology becomes even more important. Do you think Geordi would run code on the Enterprise for which he doesn’t have source access?

      Also note that this is not a moral argument; I don’t especially consider Open Source a moral directive for these purposes. Users won’t flock to us because Ubuntu is open source, but rather because Ubuntu delights them.

      I understand why people work on splinter efforts or other projects, but for me, I think the work that Canonical does with pre-installs, enterprise support, for-purchase apps, Ubuntu One, and user testing is an invaluable addition to the main Ubuntu project. These are how we reach new users.

    • Kernel Space

      • Kernel comment: The obstacle course of cooperation

        Broadcom has spent a year working on its open source driver for WLAN/Wi-Fi hardware to fulfill the quality demands of the kernel developers, but now they may not even want it any more.

        When it presented Brcm80211 a year ago, Broadcom became the last major manufacturer of WLAN chips for notebooks to get into developing open source drivers for its own WLAN components. The company was praised for this step, and Brcm80211 became a part of the kernel after only a few weeks. But the code landed in the staging area because it did not fulfil the quality demands of kernel developers. The firm then spent part of the past 12 months fulfilling these requirements; now, we have the Brcmsmac and Brcmfmac drivers.

      • Graphics Stack

        • GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap In Software

          Last week I mentioned that Chrome/Chromium OS developers at Google implemented GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap support for software drivers. This is the GLX extension commonly needed by Compiz and other compositing window managers. This work has been merged into Git, so is there new “desktop bling” chewing up your CPU?

    • Applications

    • Devices/Embedded

      • Chumby preps IPTV set-top that uses Android devices as remote

        Chumby is readying a Linux-based IPTV set-top-box that can be remotely controlled by a Wi-Fi connected Android device. Soon to be offered as an open development platform, NeTV is equipped with an 800MHz Marvell processor, and it will include both a Webkit browser that can overlay content on video and a personalized news crawler.

      • Intel Not Selling MeeGo, Says Manager

        Responding to this week’s rumors that Samsung might be looking to acquire MeeGo, the Linux-based mobile operating system introduced by Intel and Nokia, Intel’s Systems Software Division manager Doug Fisher stated that the company remains “committed” to the OS, though he followed that by saying that he could “only comment on what’s happening today.”

      • Blackmagic Design Announces DaVinci Resolve for Linux Price Reduction

      • Phones

        • Android

          • New Android App Smozzy Lets You Surf The Web Without A Data Plan

            Smozzy is a new Android application that lets you search the Web on your mobile phone without a data plan. The app works only in the U.S., only on T-Mobile phones and requires that you have a messaging plan (unless you want to be charged). Despite these restrictions, the app itself is pure genius – it cleverly uses SMS and MMS to send requests and receive the content. And to the end user, the app appears to work just like your own Android phone’s browser, only a bit slower.

          • Huawei and Kyocera Android phones break pricing barrier

            Huawei is launching a 3.8-inch Impulse 4G smartphone on AT&T, offering Android 2.2, 4G service, and a five-megapixel camera for a record-breaking $30 plus contract. Meanwhile, Kyocera teamed with Sprint to announce a three-inch, Kyocera Milano smartphone with Android 2.3 and a 3.2-inch camera for $50 plus contract.

          • Samsung Beats Apple In Europe, Android Leads The Market

            Samsung has beaten Apple in the West European market. The company now holds 22% market share as compared to 21% market share of Apple. The company shipped 4.8 million units in second quarter of 2011, as compared of 4.6 million smartphones shipped by Apple. HTC stands tall at #3 spot with 3.1 million units shipped. HTC now holds 14% market share in the market.

            According to a report by IDC,”All European countries are seeing increasing smartphone adoption, as consumers go for Android-based devices and the iPhone from Apple.”

          • Netflix Updated, Now Runs On All Android Tablets And Smartphones

    Free Software/Open Source

    • Lightworks Open Source Initiative Adds New Features, Membership Program

      The Open Source initiative surrounding the Lightworks nonlinear editing system—which was used to cut such recent films as The King’s Speech, edited by Tariq Anwar; and Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, edited by Jill Bilcock–has continued to progress.

    • Lightworks Open Source Editing Evolves, for a Fee
    • Sacrificing gratis for libre

      That’s where libre comes in. Everyone has the right to use, modify and redistribute the software. If you are a developer, you can fix bugs that the manufacturer doesn’t have time for, add new features and more. If you aren’t, you can reap the rewards of other people’s changes or hire a developer to make the changes for you.

    • Events

      • “Informatica la Castel” Free Software Summer School, 2011 edition, Romania

        At the end of August, I was pleased to participate at “Informatica la Castel” (“Informatics at the Castle”) Free Software Summer School, 2011 edition.

        This annual event – already a tradition among Romanian computer geeks – is kindly hosted by Universitatea de Vest “Vasile Goldiș” (“Vasile Goldiș” West University) and ARLUG, the Arad Linux User Group. It’s like a pleasant summer camp, at the 1724 Cernovici Castle (position), in the beautiful landscape of Macea village – about 20 km away from the city of Arad, Romania and near the Hungarian border.

      • GandhiCon 4.x

        Searches for the word “linux” have been trending downward since early 2004, according to Google. Searches in mid-2011 are about a quarter of what they were in early 2004. On the other hand, searches for “android” more than doubled those for “linux” by mid-2011. So, what should we make of that?

      • OLPC Community Summit 2011 in San Francisco Oct 21-23

    • Web Browsers

      • Mozilla

        • Mozilla asks all CAs to carry out security audits

          Following the attack on Dutch certification authority (CA) DigiNotar, Mozilla has sent a warning email to all CAs with root certificates in Firefox and Thunderbird. Kathleen Wilson, responsible for certificate management at Mozilla, is asking CAs to undertake a security audit of their public key infrastructure (PKI) and to forward the results to Mozilla by 16 September.

    • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

      • LibreOffice Draw — my new favorite application

        I had to generate a report today, one that included a bunch of PDF documents, and I finally figured out how to import PDFs into LibreOffice (with the help of LO’s PDF Import extension, which still appears to have Oracle’s fingerprints all over it, by the way).

        Call it counter-intuitive (or less than intuitive), but once you bring a PDF into LibreOffice, you edit it in LibreOffice Draw.

    • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Licensing

      • FSF’s Star Turn in the Android FUDathon, Part 4

        “Strike while the iron is hot” — and the usual suspects have made Android licensing a hot issue. However, the title of the FSF article, “Android GPLv2 termination worries — one more reason to upgrade to GPLv3,” gives the game away. This is about politics, not licensing. About pushing a specific agenda. About promoting the GPLv3 license at the expense of the GPLv2, Linux, Android and reality.

        It’s natural that there will be people and organizations engaging in bit of opportunistic profile-raising when they see an opportunity. Sometimes, as with the FSF GPLv2 FUD, they overreach and need to be called on it. And sometimes they really put their foot in it, as the Linux Foundation’s Jim Zemlin did when he recently labeled businesses that don’t contribute back code as “idiots.”

    • Openness/Sharing

      • Open Season on Dutch Cultural Innovation

        In a memorandum titled “More than Quality” the Dutch Arts Minister Halbe Zijlstra has announced savage cuts to the country’s arts budget. Among media arts & technology organizations to lose their structural funding are such long-term friends and partners of ours as STEIM, Waag Society, V2, Submarine Channel, and Mediamatic.

        This means that pretty much the entire field of internationally focused and future-oriented innovation, education, and development, which has distinguished the Netherlands for many decades, is to be demolished practically overnight.

    • Programming

    Leftovers

    • Netflix’s Webkit-based UI for TV devices

    • Science

      • Monsanto Denies Superinsect Science

        As the summer growing season draws to a close, 2011 is emerging as the year of the superinsect—the year pests officially developed resistance to Monsanto’s genetically engineered (ostensibly) bug-killing corn.

        While the revelation has given rise to alarming headlines, neither Monsanto nor the EPA, which regulates pesticides and pesticide-infused crops, can credibly claim surprise. Scientists have been warning that the EPA’s rules for planting the crop were too lax to prevent resistance since before the agency approved the crop in 2003. And in 2008, research funded by Monsanto itself showed that resistance was an obvious danger.

    • Security

    • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • Cablegate

      • WikiLeaks cable: US lobbied vs breastfeeding in the Philippines

        The US embassy lobbied against a breastfeeding campaign in the Philippines and blocked revisions in the Philippine Milk Code’s Implementing Rules and Regulations (IRRs), according to a US diplomatic cable released by anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.

      • AP review finds no threatened WikiLeaks sources

        Federica Ferrari Bravo’s story of meeting American diplomats in Rome seven years ago hardly reads like a James Bond spy novel or a Cold War tale of a brave informant sharing secrets to help the United States.

        So it came as a something of a surprise to her to hear that in one of the 250,000-odd State Department cables released by WikiLeaks, she was deemed a source so sensitive U.S. officials were advised not to repeat her name.

      • WikiLeaks US Cables Point to BIN Role in Munir Murder

        Recently leaked US diplomatic cables about the murder of human rights campaigner Munir Said Thalib could help authorities uncover the truth and implicate the real perpetrators, activists said on Friday.

        “The cables convinced us further that top-level officials of the State Intelligence Agency [BIN] were involved in the murder,” said Al Araf, program director of human rights group Imparsial.

        “Then-Chief of National Police Sutanto allegedly knew about the BIN involvement but he was lacking evidence to implicate its officials. Now, after the cables were made public, we encourage Sutanto to testify in the court.”

      • CableGate 2 and the Records Continuum

        The records continuum model was developed by Monash University’s Frank Upward in the mid 1990s as a way of expressing the many recordkeeping processes that occur in society and the contingencies inherent in them. It explains the way in which records are made, organised, shared and used in a variety of times, places and contexts under the influence of changing legal, political and practical constraints. It has been written on extensively, and there are some references included below, so I do not propose to expand on it in detail here.

      • The Julian Assange affect echoes in the Valley

        When the Australian national Julian Assange took upon himself to make public a barrage of the US diplomatic cables—he never probably thought what an upturn it will make in a far off place like Kashmir – a tinderbox zone, bitterly contested between India and Pakistan.

      • Wikileaks:How Kutigi Rejected Obasanjo’s Bribe

        In yet another bombshell in what appears to be an inexhaustible arsenal of dark secrets, internet whistleblower WikiLeaks has disclosed how former President Olusegun Obasanjo offered Justice Ibrahim Kutigi $1.6m bribe to compromise the judiciary and drop a suit by former Vice President Atiku Abubakar.

      • Wikileaks – France Armed Cameroon to Fight Over Bakassi

        he then Minister of Defence, Lt.-Gen Theophilus Y. Danjuma told the former American Ambassador to Nigeria, Howard Franklin Jeter that the Nigeria’s acquisition of military hardware at the heat of its dispute with Cameron over the oil-rich Bakassi peninsula were in response to the arming of Cameroon by France, according to a leaked U.S. diplomatic cables posted by Wikileaks.

      • Activists call on AGO to use Wikileaks cables as new evidence

        Activists from various human rights NGOs urged Attorney General Basrief Arief to challenge a Supreme Court ruling that acquitted the alleged mastermind of the murder of rights activist Munir Said Thalib by using US diplomatic cables recently leaked by whistle-blower website WikiLeaks.

        The cables, which linked the murder to the National Intelligence Agency (BIN), should have been presented as new evidence to prosecute former BIN deputy chairman Muchdi Purwoprandjono, Choirul Anam from the Solidarity Action Committee for Munir (Kasum) told a press conference on Friday.

      • Wikileaks: Gray Companies Enabled Sudan Atrocities

        In 2003, the Government of Sudan summoned Sudanese business leaders and solicited financial assistance from them for its violent campaigns in Darfur, according to a cable published by Wikileaks. At the meeting, officials from Khartoum acknowledged that its operations against rebels in Darfur “would lead to civilian deaths,” and that its response to the Darfur uprising “may require some bombing[,] and civilians would be killed.” From 2003 through 2008, Khartoum regularly sought support from the Sudanese business community for its Darfur operations.

      • Makoni party funded by UK: WikiLeaks

        SIMBA Makoni’s 2008 presidential bid was in part funded by the UK government, leaked United States diplomatic cables reveal.

        The former Finance Minister quit Zanu PF to run as an independent, the result of growing disenchantment within the party over President Robert Mugabe’s reluctance to give up power.

      • Grifters of ‘Al Saud, Inc.’: How Saudi royals get their wealth

        A secret, 1996 cable — sent from the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and released by Wikileaks — offers a detailed account of the mechanisms of wealth distribution and waste within Saudi Arabia’s royal family. Despite the considerable riches doled out to “thousands” of Saudi princes and princesses, the cable observes that Saudi royals “seem more adept at squandering than accumulating wealth.” (The embassy notes that the country has more commoner billionaires than royal billionaires.) As reported in the cable, corruption also abounds largely unchecked.

    • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Civil Rights

      • 9/11: The day we lost our privacy and power

        Investigative reporter Duncan Campbell reflects how 9/11 has torpedoed resistance to intrusion and undermined privacy rights born of earlier struggles. It may, irreversibility, have changed the way we think.

        9/11 was a savage nightmare that took too long to happen for some in the West.

        For 12 fallow years, from the fall of the Wall to the fall of the Towers, there was a brief golden period in which no great common enemy menaced all unseen beyond the distant horizon. There was no simple spectre of fear on which to construct, fund and operate surveillance platforms, or reason to tap data funnels into society’s communications and transport arteries.

    09.09.11

    Links 9/9/2011: NASA and Linux, Samsung Not Buying MeeGo

    Posted in News Roundup at 7:20 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

    GNOME bluefish

    Contents

    GNU/Linux

    Free Software/Open Source

    • Web Browsers

    • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

      • Oracle v. Google – Google’s Expert Report and a Jury Issue

        In our article from September 2nd on the Oracle/Google copyright issues, we included a number of declarations, including that of Prof. Owen Astrachan of Duke University. There were two exhibits identified in the Astrachan declaration, but neither of the exhibits were available at that time. Now Exhibit 3, Astrachan’s Rebuttal Expert Report 391 [PDF] is available in redacted form, and we have reproduced it below.

      • How Open is Oracle?

        Oracle’s history with Sun’s open source projects is one that did not start out well. The openSolaris project was killed off, Apache has left the executive committee of the Java Community Process and multiple projects have been forked including OpenOffice (with LibreOffice), Hudson (with Jenkins) and MySQL (with MariaDB). Oracle has also launched legal action against Google over Java in Android.

    • BSD

      • The New Installer Of FreeBSD 9.0

        FreeBSD 9.0 Beta 2 was officially released yesterday, about one month’s late, but it comes with several new features. One of the new features to FreeBSD 9.0 is a new installer (pc-sysinstall) for this BSD operating system, which the developers have requested that it be put through its paces.

    • Openness/Sharing

      • UniPro: Open Source Bioinformatics Business with UGENE

        Unipro: Unipro is a small company with about 60-70 software engineers. The company expertise is focused on the following areas: compilers and low-level optimizations development, virtual machines development, quality testing, parallel and cloud-based computing.

    • Standards/Consortia

      • Google adds offline support to Docs

        Google Docs is a popular tool for collaboration and web-based document creation: boasting compatibility with common file types including Microsoft Office and the Open Document Format, a generous helping of free storage space, and easy to use web-based tools, it’s proving a tempting move for those unwilling to shell out for the latest iteration of Microsoft’s offering.

    Leftovers

    • Cablegate

    • Finance

      • “Fraud As a Business Model”

        There were many factors that contributed to our recent financial bubble: deregulation, cheap money from the Fed, failure to enforce remaining regulations, crony capitalism, hubris, speculation, leverage, and fraud among other problems. While fraud wasn’t the only issue, it was and is a significant contributor to the credit bubble. Restraining fraud is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a sound financial system. Congressional investigations in recent years have put ample evidence of fraud in the public domain.

      • Goldman Sachs: More Than A Travesty Of A Mockery Of A Sham

        Goldman Sachs isn’t the only bank to rip-off its clients and America. But because it is the best at what it does it is the most profitable bank in the world, for now.

        Regular, old everyday trading is the key to Goldman’s success.What does that mean? I’m not talking about Goldman’s “big short” and how it bet massively against the subprime mortgage market while simultaneously selling huge quantities of designed-to-fail mortgage securities to its own customers.

    • Privacy

      • No, technology is not going to destroy your privacy in the future
      • Hurt Locker File Sharing Suits Come North: Federal Court Orders ISPs to Disclose Subscriber Info

        File sharing lawsuits involving the movie the Hurt Locker have been big news in the United States for months as tens of thousands of lawsuits have been filed. It now appears that the lawsuits are coming to Canada as the Federal Court of Canada has paved the way for the identification of subscribers at Bell Canada, Cogeco, and Videotron who are alleged to have copied the movie. Late last month the court ordered the three ISPs to disclose the names and addresses of subscribers linked to IP addresses alleged to have copied the movie. The ISPs were given two weeks to respond and are entitled to be reimbursed for their expenses. In reaching its decision, the court cited the BMG Canada v. Doe case, the last major Canadian case involving peer-to-peer file sharing lawsuits. That case opened the door to further lawsuits, though it established some privacy safeguards. In this instance, the court cited PIPEDA as evidence that the personal information can be disclosed as well as federal court rules for the legitimacy of the claim and the necessity of acquiring the information for the lawsuit to proceed. There is no indication that the ISPs challenged the order or that there was an opportunity for a public interest intervention as was the case in the earlier CRIA lawsuits.

    • Intellectual Monopolies

      • Copyrights

        • Canada to U.S.: please blacklist us!

          Hyper-vigilant Internet Law Prof Michael Geist seems to be the first to have combed through the latest batch of WikiLeaks diplomatic cables, searching for any document containing the words “Canada” and “copyright.”

        • Long-awaited copyright bill returns, but top court to wade in too

          Heritage Minister James Moore says he’s hoping for long-languishing amendments to the Copyright Act to pass by Christmas, but the Supreme Court of Canada could wind up forcing more tinkering with the law.

          Canada’s top court said Thursday it will rule on five separate intellectual property cases together as a bundle, and what it decides could directly impact the Act or at least its interpretation.

    Links 9/9/2011: Bodhi Linux 1.2.0, VortexBox 1.10

    Posted in News Roundup at 8:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

    GNOME bluefish

    Contents

    GNU/Linux

    • Longene: The Linux Kernel With Windows Support

      This morning after providing benchmarks of FreeBSD with Linux binary compatibility for gaming, which allows unaltered 32-bit Linux binaries to be executed seamlessly with the FreeBSD kernel (and in a rather fast manner), I was reminded on Twitter about another interesting project: Longene. Longene is a “Linux Unified Kernel” that attempts to implement Microsoft Windows APIs within the Linux kernel. In other words, Windows binary compatibility for the Linux kernel, including for Windows device drivers.

    • Desktop

    • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Kernel Space

      • Graphics Stack

        • Two More Developers Join The Chicago Linux Panel

          Next Tuesday during XDC2011 Chicago at the Illinois Institute of Technology I am hosting a panel about contributing to Linux and open-source projects, in particular, X.Org, Mesa, and the Linux kernel, but the information should be largely relevant to any free software project. This discussion panel is largely targeted towards university students and others that aren’t yet contributing to upstream projects, with most of the panel participants having begun their Linux contributions prior to graduating from university and then most of them being poached by major open-source companies.

        • X.Org Smooth Scrolling Prepped For Merging

          One of the features part of the new X Input extension to be included in X.Org Server 1.12 is smooth scrolling support.

    • Applications

    • Desktop Environments

      • Eight Complaints About the Linux Desktop

      • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

        • King of KDistros

          Well, done at last! After some time gathering opinions from readers and quite some more time testing each one of the contenders, I have finished my comparison of the best of the best in KDE distros.

        • Phonon-Xine is dead. Long live Phonon-GStreamer.
        • Moving on

          So amid the upheaval of desktop environments, we have a precedent to look at with KDE having gone through this before. Fortunately for GNOME, KDE’s experience serves as a cautionary tale. KDE seems to have ridden out the rough spots after their release of version 4, though there are some that are just not going to be happy with anything other than their KDE 3.x, and they aren’t shy about saying so.

    • Distributions

      • Which Linux Distro Leads the Pack?

        “Debian is No. 1? Why am I not surprised,” said Roberto Lim, a lawyer and blogger on Mobile Raptor. “Sometimes I really feel like the Linux community, which used to be about innovation and building the best next thing, has lost touch with society and are in danger of becoming irrelevant.” The real No. 1 distro is Ubuntu, Lim asserted: “It is the only one with a shot at becoming more than a niche in a niche market.”

      • New Releases

        • Bodhi Linux 1.2.0
        • VortexBox 1.10 released

          It’s been a while since we released a new version of VortexBox and there are a lot of small fixes and tweaks in this new version. There is the usually updates such as a new Kernel and SqueezeBox server 7.6.1. There are also a lot of small updates such as increased UPnP player support. VortexBox now supports the latest Samsung TVs and the BeoSound 5 from Bang & Olufsen.

      • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

        • Mageia Needs Artists

          Let’s face it. Mageia’s default look for version 1 wasn’t bad. The Ia Ora windec is attractive enough and the backgrounds and splash screens weren’t bad. But “not bad” isn’t beautiful. Attractive isn’t gorgeous. We users want gorgeous.

      • Red Hat Family

        • Red Hat starts marketing Centennial Campus space

          Red Hat Red Hat Latest from The Business Journals TBJ unveils 2011 Best Places to Work in the Triangle Red Hat to move HQ to Progress Energy building Triangle stocks drop along with market Follow this company ’s sublease arrangement at Progress Energy Progress Energy Latest from The Business Journals Duke Energy listed in Dow Jones Sustainability World IndexS.C. advocate supports Duke, Progress mergerDuke Energy, Progress Energy reach merger deal with S.C. advocate Follow this company ’s Two Progress Plaza tower in downtown Raleigh isn’t even official yet, but the technology company is wasting no time trying to find a new tenant for the space it’ll be vacating on N.C. State University N.C. State University Latest from The Business Journals Suddenly, Centennial Campus has space to rentVa. Tech football is top money maker in ACCTBJ Flash: Barkley, Shaq shine at Jimmy V gala Follow this company ’s Centennial Campus.

      • Debian Family

        • Derivatives

          • Canonical/Ubuntu

            • _____[fill in the blank]: “Want me to wipe for you too?”
            • How Useful Is Ubuntu Menu?
            • How Ubuntu One Saved Me In The US

              I had the data sitting right next to me but I couldn’t access it. Lesson learned, if you don’t bring the right key you won’t be able to open the right door. So all my stories that I was working on were locked inside that shiny rectangular box made by Seagate with its cable sitting across the ocean in Belgium.

              Was there a solution late at night when I was stuck in Williamsburg with no option to go out and find a Best Buy when dark clouds were looming overhead, throwing thunderbolts at us and rain was pouring? There was. The solution was in the cloud itself.

              I recalled that before starting off for the trip I had dragged the story folder to my Ubuntu One folder, just in case. My Ubuntu One account is always synced. So there was a possibility that I may be able to access those files.

              I turned on my tablet, logged into my Ubuntu One account and there it was – the folder with all those files. I tried to open the file I was working on. Damn, QuickOffice doesn’t support ISO approved .odt format. I had an inferior (.doc) version of the same file and started working on it. The story was ready in less than half an hour.

            • How To Upgrade From Ubuntu 11.04 To Ubuntu 11.10 Beta
            • Unity Linux | You did not die !

              I wrote a post about Unity Linux ” Why Should I use Unity Linux ? ” back in April 2010 when this distribution was in its prime trying to stand upon its feet . I will not go into the history of the inception of this project because everybody knows about it .

              Things were exciting and promising and the Unity team was in high spirits willing to contribute as much as they could to this new distribution .This project was backed up by good team members pouring in from various former PCLinuxOS derived sister distributions . Many good projects came to surface with remasters based upon Unity Linux core . Two well known were HUMANity (e17) and Synergy (KDE4).

            • Ubuntu Development Update
            • Some Great Alternatives to the Ubuntu Unity Launcher

              We’ve already ranted about the little annoyances of Ubuntu Unity in our earlier article. Though there are many things that are just plain wrong about Unity at this moment, one bad feature that sticks out like a sore thumb is the elusive launcher.

            • A new release process for Ubuntu?

              The Ubuntu release process is well known, and its developers talk regularly about the cadence of it. A new release of Ubuntu comes out every six months, and each release follows a predictable pattern. I’ve stolen the following image from OMG! Ubuntu’s recent series about Ubuntu Development.

            • Flavours and Variants

              • Try Bodhi Linux for Beauty and Customizability

                Scarcely a day goes by without an update being released for one Linux distribution or another, but today saw the launch of one I think is worth some attention.

              • Bodhi Linux 1.2.0 Released

                20,000 forum posts and over 100,000 downloads later the Bodhi team and I are proud to announce our second point release – Bodhi 1.2.0 Current Bodhi users can easily update their system to this latest release.

    • Devices/Embedded

      • Samsung Setting up to Go with MeeGo OS

        Samsung is seemingly intending to purchase Nokia and Intel’s MeeGo operating system after the news arrived that Samsung decided that it was not purchasing Hewlett Packard’s webOS.

      • Phones

        • Android

          • Amazon Renews Call for Android Developers

            Just weeks before their much-anticipated Android-based tablet, Amazon has renewed their call for developers. To sweeten the pot a bit, the online retail behemoth is giving a one-time $50 promo code, good for use on specific Amazon Web Service. AWS offers Android developers a number of helpful tools in the form of data storage, mobile-to-mobile communication, and flexible database options.

          • A Google Android and Java history lesson

            Recently, some people were shocked-shocked I tell you-to discover that Google had looked at Java to help create Android’s Dalvik and that Google kept its Android source code to itself and its closest partners until the final product was released to the public. Oh please. There’s nothing new here. It’s always been that way and everyone who knows anything about Android’s history already knew that.

            First, there’s the accusation that Android used Java code in creating its Dalvik virtual machine (VM). This is news? When Android first came out, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, then Java’s owner, greeted the news of Android’s birth with “heartfelt congratulations.”

          • Android port for HP TouchPad making progress

            After the recent fire sale of the HP TouchPad tablet, hackers and modders quickly began work on porting Google’s open source Android mobile operating system to the device and they are making progress. The developers at Team-Touchdroid have already succeeded in replacing WebOS, which is the tablet’s default OS, with version 2.3.5 of Android.

          • Motorola Announces Android Powered DROID BIONIC

            Motorola has announced DROID BIONIC, the first Verizon Wireless smartphone to combine 4G LTE with the power of dual-core 1 GHz processors, 1 GB of RAM and a stunning 4.3-inch qHD display – all in a sleek form factor that makes it the thinnest 4G LTE smartphone from Verizon Wireless.

            Customers can expect to fly across the Web on the Verizon Wireless 4G LTE network with download speeds of 5 to 12 Mbps and upload speeds of 2 to 5 Mbps in 4G LTE mobile broadband coverage areas.

          • Sony Ericsson Nozomi Rumored to Come with Ice Cream Sandwich, 720p Display, Dual-core Processor

            Earlier reports told of an upcoming Sony Ericsson Nozomi, said to come with a 1.5-GHz single-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and to be released before yearend. Recent buzz at the IT68 forums, however, reveal rumors of more powerful specs than initially reported for the Sony Ericsson Nozomi and a release date slated for first quarter of next year.

          • Amazon Cloud SDKs for Android, IOS Exit Beta Testing

            The company wants make it easier for developers to build mobile applications that take advantage of its cloud-based services. Previously, developers had to do more of the work themselves, according to Amazon.

            Using the SDKs developers can make API (application programming interface) requests directly from a mobile application to Amazon’s Web Services. Developers can integrate their applications with a long list of services, including Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Simple Storage Service (S3), the SimpleDB database and send messages using Simple Notification Service (SNS) and Simple Queue Service (SQS).

      • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

        • NVIDIA CEO: quad-core tablets to launch this year

          NVIDIA’s chief executive officer and president Jen-Hsun Huang confirmed that the company’s quad-core processor, currently codenamed “Kal-El,” will be available in tablets by the end of this year. “We’re the only people seriously on the dance floor with Qualcomm,” Huang told Forbes in a recent interview. “We’re really the only two active players.” Earlier this year, NVIDIA said it expected to ship quad-core tablets and smartphones in 2011, but Huang suggested to Forbes that smartphones may not hit the market until 2012. Read on for more.

          [...]

          Huang also noted that NVIDIA currently has 50% of the Android smartphone market and 70% of the Android tablet market.

    Free Software/Open Source

    • Bossie Awards for best open source software in 2011

      InfoWorld has presented its 2011 Bossie (Best Open Software Source) Awards. Prizes were awarded in the four categories of enterprise open source applications, desktop and mobile software, data centre and cloud solutions, and developer tools.

    • BT software engineer tells how the telco is using open source

      “One reason why culturally eventually open source will be an excellent fit for BT is that old-school engineering idea that ‘I’ll stake my life on this project because I understand the risks myself because I have the necessary professional background to do so’,” he says. BT is, after all, a company that for many years built everything itself.

    • Open source software – Competitiveness through collaboration

      On the 5th of September 2011, the Malta Information Technology Agency (MITA) hosted the third Government of Malta Open Source End User Group (MOSEUG) meeting. The theme, was ‘OSS – Competitiveness through Collaboration’ and the meeting focused on:

    • Morality and Legality of Open Source Code Forking
    • How to build a sustainable nonprofit the open source way
    • BSA secret agenda: open source saves the world

      Assuming that everything the BSA says is right, then it’s as plausible to blame unbearable temptation as it is ignorance. If you could obtain something that was worth a year’s wages at the click of a mouse, and you knew you’d not cost anyone a penny, what would you do?

      Quite. So while it’s perfectly in order for the BSA to wish for more money for its members, and good luck to them all in that, it’s highly unlikely that its proposed solution will in fact liberate that $59 billion — the GDP of Croatia.

      With perfect holiness and inescapable enforcement, in a world with no illicit copying at all, what would happen is that most of the world wouldn’t have most of those copies of the BSA membership’s products.

      Would that bar them from the benefits of IT, and all the necessary economic and social tools needed to be a productive, happy part of the global digital community? Fortunately not.

      A logical conclusion of the BSA’s arguments is that the free and open source software (Foss) model would step in to provide legal alternatives. Of course, for some software such as Adobe’s top-end creative products there is no Foss equivalent; the paid-for market is small enough and the lock-in so significant that there’s not been much point.

      Once the world cannot get what it cannot pay for, though, the motivation to make top-notch Foss products will be much higher, and we can reasonably expect them to appear. Indeed, we can expect the new wave of software to become so good that it will be functionally competitive with the full-price Western option – and competition, as we all know, promotes a healthy, honest market. Something we know the BSA is entirely in favour of.

      Thus, the real message of the BSA’s survey is to actively, even aggressively, promote the development of Foss within the developing world, to create far more competition that will help reduce prices worldwide, and to encourage a truly diverse and equitable digital world for everyone.

    • 4 More Things You Didn’t Know VLC Could Do
    • Three Top Open Source Bug Tracking Apps

    • Web Browsers

    • Databases

    • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • BSD

    • Licensing

    • Openness/Sharing

      • Open Access/Content

        • Michael Hart (1947 – 2011): Prophet of Abundance

          What makes his death particularly tragic is that his name is probably only vaguely known, even to people familiar with the areas he devoted his life to: free etexts and the public domain. In part, that was because he modest, content with only the barest recognition of his huge achievements. It was also because he was so far ahead of his times that there was an unfortunate disconnect between him and the later generation that built on his trailblazing early work.

    • Programming

      • Book Review: HTML5 Media

        I understand that O’Reilly is publishing a series of hardcopy and ebooks that sport a rather modest page count in order to get the material to market very quickly. Shelley Powers’ HTML5 Media is one of them. Please keep in mind this book isn’t intended to teach you everything you want to know about HTML5 but rather, to show web developers how to insert HTML5 media elements into web pages using the new video and audio elements.

    Leftovers

    • Health/Nutrition

      • Dining on Deceit: PR Stunt Backfires for ConAgra

        Hidden cameras captured what was supposed to be the bloggers’ delighted reaction to the meal and dessert of Razzleberry Pie (another frozen Marie Callender’s specialty). But the stunt backfired after bloggers found out the truth. One wrote, “Our entire meal was a SHAM! … We were unwilling participants in a bait-and-switch for Marie Callender’s new frozen three cheese lasagna and there were cameras watching our reactions.”

    • Cablegate

    • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

      • Wealthy Wisconsin Heir Speaks at Koch Brothers Meeting

        Leaked audio from the Koch brothers’ donor meeting in Vail, Colorado, in June reveals, among other things, the connections between the Kochs and a wealthy Wisconsin funder who spent hundreds of thousands that helped elect Ron Johnson as well as Scott Walker and support various right-wing causes.

        An anonymous source released the tapes to blogger Brad Friedman, who published the audio and transcript at Mother Jones and BradBlog. Fred Young, the heir of the Young Radiator fortune in Racine, Wisconsin, addressed the crowd of Koch invitees and introduced Fox News personality Andrew Napolitano.

      • Cantor Introduces ALEC’s Agenda to the House

        Among the regulations targeted by Cantor are the new maximum achievable control technology “MACT” standards, known as the “boiler MACT rules” for utility plants. Analysts at the Center for Progressive Reform estimated that these rules “would annually prevent up to nearly 6,600 premature deaths, more than 4,000 non-fatal heart attacks, more than 1,600 cases of acute bronchitis, and more than 313,000 missed work and school days.”

    • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

      • Yet Another Pro-Keystone XL Pipeline Front Group Set Up In Nebraska

        Last week, lobbyists in Washington, DC announced the creation of yet another front group in Nebraska to support the approval of the controversial Keystone XL, a pipeline running through the Midwest from tar sands mining sites in Canada to refineries in Texas. Given its central location underneath the proposed expansion route for the Keystone XL, Nebraska has become a flash point in the debate over approval of the plan.

        To counteract the broad opposition to the pipeline, oil lobbyists have paid special attention to Nebraska.

    • Intellectual Monopolies

      • Copyrights

        • BC Court Rules Rogers’ Zoocasa Real Estate Site Infringed Copyright, Breached Terms of Use

          The B.C. Supreme Court has issued a lengthy ruling against Rogers Communications and its real estate search site, Zoocasa. The case originates from Century 21′s objections to Zoocasa’s scraping of its real estate listings and incorporating them into its own site. Zoocasa scraped the full listings for several months starting in August 2008, but in November 2008 switched to “truncated” descriptions that provide only basic information. In August 2009, Zoocasa began “framing” other sites, but it stopped that practice in December 2009. Zoocasa stopped indexing Century 21 listings in 2010.

        • EU Officially Seizes The Public Domain, Retroactively Extends Copyright

          As was unfortunately expected, despite no evidence that this made any economic sense at all, the member states of the EU have agreed to retroactively extend copyright another 20 years, at which point you can expect it to be extended again (thanks to jtdeboe for sending this over). This is nothing short of governments and the entertainment industry seizing works from the public domain. As we’ve said before, the purpose of copyright law is to incent the creation of new works. If existing copyright law was enough to incentivize the creation at the time, then there’s simply no reason to retroactively extend the law.

        • Don’t Try To Create An Illustrated Version Of A David Bowie Song… Or The Copyright Police Will Come After You

          Except, as that started to get attention, Kolb was threatened with an infringement claim. Of course, the Star fails Jouranlism 101, in that it never actually names the party who holds the copyright or who threatened the illustrator. One might come away from the article believing it’s David Bowie, but I’m guessing it was someone else. In fact, I reached out to Kolb to find out who sent the takedown, and he said that

    09.08.11

    Links 8/9/2011: Munich’s Migration to GNU/Linux Works, Archbang 2011.09

    Posted in News Roundup at 10:30 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

    GNOME bluefish

    Contents

    GNU/Linux

    • The Great Linux Migration: who’s made the move, why, and what’s in store for the future growth of Linux?
    • Munich Migration From The User’s Viewpoint

      So the FUD about the Munich Migration being a disaster of some kind is not real. They are doing much more than migrating to another OS at the same time by rationalizing IT in other ways (CMS and web-applications) and they are not in any hurry crunching 50-100 per week and likely doing some hand-holding at the same time. It works for them.

    • Server

      • Mainframe Ubuntu Linux?

        When you think of “Ubuntu Linux,” you probably think of the community Linux distribution and the Linux desktop. That’s great, but Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company, also wants you to think of Ubuntu as a server and cloud operating system platform. To that end, Canonical has been working with IBM to get Ubuntu certified on IBM’s high-end System P Power hardware line and System z mainframes.

      • An Open Source Platform for Virtual Supercomputing

        Erlang Solutions and Massive Solutions will soon launch a new cloud platform for high performance computing. Last month they announced their intent to bring a virtual supercomputer (VSC) product to market, the idea being to enable customers to share their HPC resources either externally or internally, in a cloud-like manner, all under the banner of open source software.

    • Kernel Space

      • Kernel Log: Coming in 3.1 (Part 2) – Storage and filesystems

        The software RAID code now supports bad block management and dm-crypt can notify SSDs about freed storage areas. The iSCSI target framework LIO has been updated to Version 4.1 and the default Ext3 settings make the filesystem more robust, but a bit slower.

      • Graphics Stack

        • Two More Developers Join The Chicago Linux Panel

          Next Tuesday during XDC2011 Chicago at the Illinois Institute of Technology I am hosting a panel about contributing to Linux and open-source projects, in particular, X.Org, Mesa, and the Linux kernel, but the information should be largely relevant to any free software project. This discussion panel is largely targeted towards university students and others that aren’t yet contributing to upstream projects, with most of the panel participants having begun their Linux contributions prior to graduating from university and then most of them being poached by major open-source companies.

        • A Happy Four Years To An Open-Source ATI/AMD

          It was four years ago, on the 6th of September 2007, that I exclusively broke the news on AMD’s open-source strategy that would end up greatly changing the open-source Linux graphics driver landscape.

          While the news was delivered on the 6th of September, XDS Cambridge was going on at that point, and it wasn’t until the 17th of September that the RadeonHD Linux driver was published, so it’s hard to call a precise birth-date for this strategy. It could also be considered the point at which SUSE wrote a letter to AMD with this open-source idea.

    • Applications

    • Desktop Environments

      • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

        • KDE Ships September Updates

          September 7, 2011. Today KDE released updates for its Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. These updates are the first in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.7 series. 4.7.1 updates bring many bugfixes and translation updates on top of the latest edition in the 4.7 series and are recommended updates for everyone running 4.7.0 or earlier versions. As the release only contains bugfixes and translation updates, it will be a safe and pleasant update for everyone. KDE’s software is already translated into more than 55 languages, with more to come. To download source code or packages to install go to the 4.7.1 Info Page. The changelog and Bugzilla list more, but not all improvements since 4.7.0. Note that these changelogs are incomplete. For a complete list of changes that went into 4.7.1, you can browse the Subversion and Git logs. 4.7.1 also ships a more complete set of translations for many of the 55+ supported languages. To find out more about the KDE Workspace and Applications 4.7, please refer to the 4.7.0 release notes and its earlier versions.

        • KDE Ships September Updates

    • Distributions

      • Unity Linux 2011 to use Arch-Linux-Like Approach

        In other news another favorite of mine, at least in the rpm universe, has released an Alpha build of what will be Unity Linux 2011. I reviewed Unity Linux last year on this blog and images were 276MB and 277 MB per architecture, and the subsequent update 2010.2 brought it to well over 300 MB. This time the size is only a 100 odd megabyte and the team is making some significant changes.

      • ArchBang 2011.09 Includes the Linux 3.0.4-1 Kernel
      • Archbang 2011.09 Released

        Keeping up the schedule of a new release roughly every six months, a new and updated Archbang live/install image with the 3.0 kernel is out, 2011.09. Read the release announcement and see a screenshot here. As always it is available for i686 and x86_64 architectures. The images are a handy download size of 526 MB and 531 MB respectively. If you already have it installed there’s no need to get this as of course Arch is rolling, but good for if you want to update a copy on your USB stick for newer hardware.

      • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Red Hat Family

        • Red Hat: Java now on firm path for the cloud

          Open source raconteur and Red Hat senior director of middleware engineering Mark Little has laid down some defining comments as to the current state of Java EE7 Enterprise Edition.

          Speaking to a US-based software developer web site, Little has hinted that Java EE7 is a real “milestone release” and that its current status marks the point at which Java truly heads towards the cloud computing of IT delivery.

        • Fedora

          • Fedora Graphics Test Week, Again

            The Fedora Project is having another Graphics Test Week. This time around it’s for testing the Intel, Nouveau, and Radeon drivers for the forthcoming Fedora 16 release.

      • Debian Family

        • Derivatives

          • Canonical/Ubuntu

            • Convoluted Rebuttals – Unity: The War Without End?

              I would assume that Unity is developed to appeal to the mainstream masses. It’s easy for us that are tech interested to believe that Linux and its associated packages are written to cater for and pander to us. The vast majority of users on this planet have no interest in tech other than it’s a medium in which they wish to get tasks done. They don’t care about open source, they don’t care about patents they merely want to use a PC to get a job done. Conversely though, they are happy to learn a new way of working if the benefits are presented to them, it’s a natural progression that any product will undergo change which will require a small investment of time on behalf of the consumer. Compare a smart phone to that of one from the early 90′s. A company’s vision of a product with many competitors is something to be encouraged, not scorned because you think that people can’t or won’t be interested in something new.

            • Ubuntu 11.10 Beta

    • Devices/Embedded

      • Phones

      • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

        • Velocity Micro Unveils 8-inch and 10-inch Tablets, Both Under $300

          Velocity Micro announced a pair of new Android-powered tablets today, the 8-inch Cruz T408 and 10-inch Cruz T410. Due in late September the two feature 1GHz Cortex A8 processors, 512MB RAM, 4GB internal storage, and front-facing cameras. Android enthusiasts might not dig the Android 2.3 Gingerbread OS but average consumer types will like the $239 and $299 price tags. Additional specs for both tablets include Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g/n), Adobe Flash Player 10.3, and preloaded apps in Amazon Kindle, Amazon Appstore, Angry Birds Rio, and QuickOffice.

        • Velocity Micro Introduces Two Sub-$300 Android Slates

          Two new little Android tablets have joined the ever-growing tablet race, this time from Velocity Micro. Both the 8-inch Cruz T408 and the 10-inch Cruz T410 are nice enough, but what’ll really catch your eye are the pricetags. The Cruz T408 and T410 are priced at $239.99 and $299.99 respectively — a comfortable price point for anyone looking to get a starter slate.

    Free Software/Open Source

    • Bossie Awards 2011: The best open source software of the year

      One of the best ways to see the success of the open source philosophy is to pick up a cellphone. If you happen to grab an Android phone — the most popular in the smartphone class — you’ll have a device running a package built by Google and sitting on top of Linux. Almost all of the source code in the stack is released under a generous open source license.

    • Editing Community Offers Input

    • Events

      • Meteorite Consulting to host UK Open Source BI User Group

        On 8 September 2011, Meteorite Consulting are hosting the inaugural UK Open Source BI User Group Event. The UK OSBI User Group aims to provide information to help organisations select and implement innovative commercial and open source business intelligence, data warehousing and data integration solutions.

    • Web Browsers

    • SaaS

      • Why the cloud is accelerating open-source adoption

        In general, open-source projects typically require two components to get community uptake. First, the nature of the project itself has to be technologically challenging. Successful open-source projects are largely about solving a set of complex technological tasks vs. just writing a lot of code to support complex business processes, such as the case with building enterprise software. Linux, MySQL and BitTorrent are all good examples here.

    • Databases

      • NSA open sources Google database mimic

        The US National Security Agency is open sourcing a distributed “NoSQL” database based on Google’s proprietary BigTable platform.

        Known as Accumulo, the platform has been in development at the NSA for over three years, and it’s built atop Hadoop, the open source distributed file system and distributed number-crunching platform that mimics Google’s internal infrastructure.

      • NSA’s open-source project aims for secure, large-scale storage

        The National Security Agency is looking for help from the developer community in contributing to a label-based storage software that could be enable secure, granular access to data in large storage systems.

    • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

      • LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org drift apart

        Michael Meeks, a LibreOffice developer at Novell, compared the codebase of LibreOffice with the OpenOffice.org sources hosted at the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). As he writes in a blog post, the differences are already so great that it will now be hard to exchange new code between the two projects. In light of the several million lines of source code by which the two products now differ, he says users should not assume that code committed to Apache OpenOffice.org will “inevitably and automatically appear in LibreOffice”. “Instead I suspect we will end up cherry-picking and porting only those things that justify the effort, as/when/if there is any such thing,” added Meeks.

    • CMS

      • Switch to Moodle ongoing this academic year

        The university has since decided to use Moodle Rooms, which provides an enhanced version of the free and open source Moodle.

      • Are you really investing in your real estate website?

        There is one solution which is cost effective and will provide you with freedom and choice. That is to use an open source CMS which is free to use on a General Public License. These open source CMS are usually owned by a not for profit organization of web developers and designers, who’s goal is to share code amongst a worldwide community of developers in an effort to provide a free and powerful CMS for websites. PHP is an open source language and a few CMS build upon PHP include Joomla, WordPress, Drupal, CakePHP and Codeigniter.

      • Diaspora still trying to reinvent social networks with open source

        Most people won’t have even heard of it. Diaspora is an up and coming social network which is getting a lot more attention in some circles in the wake of Google+’s ‘real names’ policy.

        Users are climbing on board after being tipped off that there’s a network just like Google+, only without having anything to do with Google, where you can be who you want to be, how you want to be, and still retain full ownership of everything you put there.

    • Healthcare

    • Business

      • Semi-Open Source

        • Review: Jaspersoft’s Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition

          But the suite’s open source codebase also enables it to support third-party commercial and open source BI tools, which gives it its broad range of capabilities. These components include Talend’s open source extract, transform and load (ETL) tool and activity monitoring console; R, an advanced analytics development environment; and JasperAnalysis, an OLAP tool based on the open source Mondrian engine.

    • BSD

      • FreeBSD: A Faster Platform For Linux Gaming Than Linux?

        FreeBSD provides a Linux binary compatibility layer that allows 32-bit Linux binaries to be natively executed on this BSD operating system. Linux binary compatibility on FreeBSD allows Linux-only applications to be executed in a near seamless manner on this alternative platform, even for games. New tests have revealed that the modern FreeBSD operating system (via PC-BSD 8.2) can actually outperform Linux when it comes to running OpenGL Linux game binaries.

    • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Licensing

      • MPL 2.0, copyleft, and license compatibility

        In part one of my Mozilla Public License piece, I mentioned license compatibility as a major feature of MPL 2.0. In fact, it’s such a major – and complicated – issue that it warrants its own explanation.

    • Programming

    Leftovers

    09.07.11

    Links 7/9/2011: Linux World Domination, China Picks IBM’s GNU/Linux Mainframe

    Posted in News Roundup at 4:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

    GNOME bluefish

    Contents

    GNU/Linux

    Free Software/Open Source

    • Project of the Month September 2011 – GCompris
    • New on the site: Open source resources

      We’re happy to announce a new open source resources section. To kick things off, we’ve added pages that highlight open source conferences and events, organizations, and projects and applications. It’s not much, but it’s a start. We have lots of ideas, and want to make this more robust and improve functionality. But for now, let’s see if this idea catches on.

    • Web Browsers

    • SaaS

      • A Way off the Ranch

        In February 2011, Eben Moglen gave a landmark speech to the Internet Society titled “Freedom in the Cloud”, in which he unpacked the problem. In the beginning, he said, the Internet was designed as “a network of peers without any intrinsic need for hierarchical or structural control, and assuming that every switch in the Net is an independent, free-standing entity whose volition is equivalent to the volition of the human beings who want to control it”.

    • Databases

      • NoSQL Benchmarking

        NoSQL is the talk of the town. And we have already covered what it is for in one of our previous blogs. Today I would like to share the NoSQL benchmark test results we have recently conducted. It will help you to understand if the soon to develop system is compatible to NoSQL, and which NoSQL product to select.

        In this article we will reveal the characteristics of Cassandra, HBase and MongoDB identified through multiple workloads.

    • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

      • Board Elections: Nominations Open
      • Developing LibreOffice

        Not being stopped by that knowledge, LibreOffice developers take a strong bite deep in the code base for improvements now and even better future LibreOffice development. I’m not only impressed, but also get more and more confident in the future of this project.

    • CMS

      • Octopress: Create Static Sites with a Full-Featured Framework

        Static sites have better performance than dynamic sites, but you lose a lot of features by giving up a content management system (CMS), right? Maybe not, if you have a framework like Octopress.

        Last week I looked at static sites and cloud services, but even Todd Hoff’s excellent coverage put me off a bit. Then I ran into the Octopress 2.0 announcement.

    • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

      • FSF’s Star Turn in the Android FUDathon, Part 2

        The people and companies … who disregard the Internet “don’t be a dick” rule … need more incentive to comply. However, even they don’t lose the right to use the code permanently unless they decide to “be a dick” permanently. In those cases, it doesn’t matter how many copies of the code they get — each new license for each new copy would be terminated as soon as they attempted distribution outside the terms of the license.

    • Public Services/Government

      • Federal Court may share its DMS as open source, parliament says

        The Swiss Parliament’s control committee for the Federal Court is allowing the publication as open source software of Open Justitia, a document management system developed in-house by the court. The software will be made available under the GPLv3 licence soon.

      • NSA Extends Label-based Security to Big Data Stores

        “There is a need for a flexible, high performance distributed key/value store that provides expressive, fine-grained access labels,” the developers stated on the proposal page submitted to Apache. “We have made much progress in developing this project over the past [three] years and believe both the project and the interested communities would benefit from this work being openly available and having open development.”

      • Open government policy developments in Australasia

        Last week in New Zealand, the Ministers of Finance and Internal Affairs adopted a statement detailing a new Declaration on Open and Transparent Government. The Declaration has been approved by Cabinet, and directs all Public Service departments, the New Zealand Police, the New Zealand Defence Force, the Parliamentary Counsel Office, and the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service; encourages other State Services agencies; and invites State Sector agencies to commit to releasing high value public data actively for re-use, in accordance with the Declaration and Principles, and in accordance with the NZGOAL Review and Release process. More information on this statement can be found at the CC Aotearoa New Zealand blog.

      • Publicly Releasing Open Source Software Developed for the U.S. Government by Dr. David A. Wheeler

        This article summarizes when the U.S. federal government or its contractors may publicly release, as open source software (OSS), software developed with government funds. This section is intended for non-lawyers, to help them understand the basic rules they must follow.

        This article was previously published in the Journal of Software Technology (aka Software Tech News), Vol.14, No.1, February 2011. It is part of “Open Technology Development (OTD): Lessons Learned and Best Practices for Military Software”, and thus is released under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 (CC-BY-SA) License. A one-page summary of this paper is available from MIL-OSS, and the MIL-OSS 2011 conference had a presentation on releasing OSS.

    • Programming

    • Standards/Consortia

      • WS-Calendar 1.0 adopted by OASIS Committee
      • The Next Internet: What’s Holding Us Back?

        Tim Berners-Lee, to his credit, did not invent the Internet. He did have one good idea. He was not the first person or even the twelfth with the same idea, but he did make it work. Yet most of the underlying work – the bringing together of dozens of communications systems with slightly or wildly varying protocols – was done before him. He just plugged it in, and for that, he gets most of the credit.

    Leftovers

    • Security

    • Cablegate

      • Wikileaks Provides Proof that UK is Eradicating Turks and Caicos Islanders Since Early 2000s
      • Talks over Egypt-Israel gas deal took 10 years, says Wikileaks

        Negotiations over the natural gas deal between Egypt and Israel dragged out over 10 years because of “political concerns in Egypt,” a recently revealed Wikileaks cable said.

        A partial extract from cable number 05CAIRO4972 of a confidential document prepared by the US embassy in Cairo one day before the deal was signed said the US described the deal as “the most lucrative ever.”

        On July 1, 2005, then Egyptian Petroleum Minister Sameh Fahmy and Israeli Minister of National Infrastructure Benjamin Ben-Eliezer signed the agreement to supply 1.7 billion cubic meters of natural gas annually to the Israel Electric Corporation (IEC) starting October 2006.

      • Addressing confusion about PFC Bradley Manning’s case

        In online discussions attributed to PFC Bradley Manning, he says that he hopes his actions will spur “discussion, debates, and reforms” and that he “want[s] people to know the truth, no matter who they are, because without information you cannot make informed decisions as a public.” This is the classic definition of a whistle-blower (a person who tells the public about alleged dishonest or illegal activities/misconduct occurring in a government department).

        Unfortunately, the government is charging PFC Bradley Manning with “knowingly [giving] intelligence to the enemy, through indirect means,” under Article 104 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice — an allegation of treason and a capital offense. By this rational, scores of service-person-posted blogs, photos, and videos, would now be punishable by death—simply because they are accessible on the Internet. The charge against Bradley Manning appears to be about sending a message to other would-be whistle-blowers.

      • 2011-09-06 WikiLeaks Notes: Latest News on #Cablegate Releases & #WikiLeaks

    • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

      • Wikileaks has shown us a world we need to know

        Wik­ileaks has its share of crit­ics – the or­gan­i­sa­tion is too cen­tred around Ju­lian As­sange and a per­son­al­ity-type cult ex­ists – but surely the vast bulk of in­for­ma­tion the group has re­leased since 2006 makes it a major force for good (not least be­cause it’s forced gov­ern­ments and many jour­nal­ists on the de­fen­sive about their in­sider tac­tics)…

      • Dolphins call each other by name

        Dave the dolphin whistles, and his friend Alan whistles back. We can’t yet decipher their calls, but some of the time Dave may be calling: “Alan! Alan! Alan! Alan!”

        Stephanie King of the University of St Andrews, UK, and colleagues monitored 179 pairs of wild bottlenose dolphins off the Florida coast between 1988 and 2004. Of these, 10 were seen copying each other’s signature whistles, which the dolphins make to identify themselves to each other.

      • Girl’s sex spy saga shocks staid Swiss

        Even by Romanian standards, the plot beggars belief. A hot-blooded young seductress masquerading as a journalist is order- ed by her masters in the Romanian Intelligence Service to lure the Swiss ambassador into bed.

        Once there, her task is to find out anything and everything she can about “Ceausescu’s Gold” – the millions of dollars Romania’s late dictator is believed to have stashed away in Swiss bank accounts just before his fall.

        Afternoons of passion in the Bucharest penthouse she would persuade him to buy her were to be followed by gentle probing as to the real intentions of ex-King Michael, the former Romanian monarch now exiled in the ambassador’s Swiss homeland.

        And far from keeping the affair discreet, the agent is to make sure that she and her consort – a married man with two children – are frequently seen together wining and dining in public and at diplomatic functions. Just for good measure, the exercise will be called “Operation William Tell”.

    • Finance

      • NY Approves Goldman Sachs’ Sale of Litton with Stipulations

        The New York Department of Financial Services and Banking Department is including several stipulations with its approval of Goldman Sachs’ sale of its Litton Loan Servicing, LP, to special servicer Ocwen Financial Corp.

      • All Work and No Pay: The Great Speedup

        ON A BRIGHT SPRING DAY in a wisteria-bedecked courtyard full of earnest, if half-drunk, conference attendees, we were commiserating with a fellow journalist about all the jobs we knew of that were going unfilled, being absorbed or handled “on the side.” It was tough for all concerned, but necessary—you know, doing more with less.

    • Copyrights

      • Universities flee Access Copyright

        In the wake of a proposed fee increase, universities across Canada have opted to leave contracts with once-popular copyright licenser Access Copyright.
        Many schools, including York University, the University of British Columbia and almost every school in the prairie region have abandoned their contracts with Access Copyright in favour of steering the waters of copyright legislation on their own.

      • MPAA Unsurprisingly Behind Australia iiNet Case

        Hid Behind Scenes to Avoid Impression of Being a Bully

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