12.23.09
Posted in News Roundup at 9:31 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
Based on the results of a recently announcedPDF study it has been decided that the municipal authority of the City of Vienna will not at present be shifting entirely to open source for its software needs. Rather administrative staff will have the choice of running either Windows and Microsoft Office or Linux (in the form of Wienux, a Debian/Ubuntu-based custom distribution) and OpenOffice on their desktop.
-
Kernel Space
-
It’s not all that often that we encounter things from Finland here in Portland. So imagine my surprise when we’re on our way to our weekly date-night with Tove, and our baby-sitter is gushing about this adorable and wonderful Finnish YouTube video.. She apparently have been watching it three or four times a day for the last few days (weeks?), laughing hysterically.
-
Ksplice seems like a very interesting project. The prospect of reboot-less usage is most appealing, considering the complexity and the dire need for availability in some environments, where bringing systems down is simply impossible.
-
Applications
-
There is a huge number of audio players for GNOME which strive to offer as many features as possible, with Banshee, Exaile or Rhythmbox currently being the most popular for this matter. Since features like easy access to lyrics, Wikipedia information or collection management are a must-have for a complex audio player, it looks like Listen makes no exception regarding those either.
-
Instructionals
-
-
[W]e’re rolling out some new tools and techniques to track our development work, which were pioneered by the desktop team in Ubuntu 9.10. We believe this will help us to stay on course, and make adjustments earlier when needed. Taking some pages from the Agile software development playbook, we’ll be planning in smaller increments and tracking our progress using burn-down charts. As always, we aim to make Ubuntu development as transparent as possible, so all of this information is posted publicly so that everyone can see how we’re doing.
-
-
CriticalBlue, which specialises in design software that makes efficient use of complex processor architectures, has joined MontaVista’s partner programme. As part of the move, it will make its Prism software available on MontaVista Linux 6 and Montavista Linux Carrier Grade Edition products. MontaVista is the first commercial Linux provider to be supported by Prism
-
The recent reports on Pandora’s case design and controls have been nothing short of glowing. It’s pretty satisfying information for the most part; there is no doubt that what we’re hearing from the team is genuine delight in what they’ve achieved.
-
Android
-
For HTC, the last 10 years have been a rocket-like rise. But the battle to stay ahead of the game has just begun.
-
Sub-notebooks
-
Behar says he hopes to shrink the frame around the XO-3′s display down to practically nothing, opting for a virtual keyboard instead of a physical one, and no buttons. The result, in his mock-ups, is a screen surrounded by only a thin green rubber gasket. “Nicholas [Negroponte] asked for something extremely simple and practically frameless,” he says. “The media or content on the computer will be the prime visual element.”
-
-
During a FastChat video interview, Augustin said two-thirds of SugarCRM’s business already comes from the channel. No surprise there, since SugarCRM was one of the top companies in the first annual Open Source 50 report, which tracks the most promising open source partner programs (the second-annual survey begins January 2010).
-
Yet while the decision to use free software has obvious benefits to an independent production, it also poses its own risks. Although development body the Blender Foundation (blender.org) has completed several cinema-quality animated shorts using the software (see elephantsdream.org and bigbuckbunny.org), it remains largely unproven in live-action work, particularly on full-length movies.
-
Dreamwidth, the community-based open-source blog service, has been highlighted recently for the diversity of its developer community (specifically, the fact that, very unusually in the OSS world, it has a majority of women developers), and its newbie-friendly dev culture. I spoke to founders Mark Smith and Denise Paolucci about open source, creating community, and how the project has taken off.
Open Source
For community-based software, OSS has clear advantages. Denise and Mark both note how useful it is to have core developers be people who are passionate about your software, and the advantages when users can all contribute. You also get access to a large pool of volunteer developers, and a hugely diverse skillset – need a particular sort of expert? Put the word out on the grapevine, and see if someone will stop by to help out.
-
Everyone loves receiving presents, especially presents which are useful. Likewise, giving presents to others feels wonderful. An important part of the holidays is the spirit of giving. This is where OOo fits in: Not only is the OpenOffice.org office suite a great present to the world, but giving and receiving is also experienced in many more ways within the OpenOffice.org community. There are volunteers working in numerous project groups, from localizations to marketing, documentation to website maintenance, plus mailing lists.
-
CMS
-
GTD is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Templatic also sells support for the theme if desired.
-
Licensing
-
Rosenberg writes that because of Google’s open-source licensing, “others can use our software as a base for their own products if we fail to innovate adequately.” True. Google is clearly betting on its ability to innovate fast, which is incidentally also the very thing that makes the prospect of seeing its code forked so remote.
-
Open Knowledge/Data/Access
-
In this paper we assess the economic viability of innovation by producers relative to two increasingly important alternative models: innovations by single user individuals or firms, and open collaborative innovation projects. We analyze the design costs and architectures and communication costs associated with each model. We conclude that innovation by individual users and also open collaborative innovation increasingly compete with – and may displace – producer innovation in many parts of the economy. We argue that a transition from producer innovation to open single user and open collaborative innovation is desirable in terms of social welfare, and so worthy of support by policymakers.
-
The conversation below is more or less transcribed and edited for clarity. It makes for great holiday or airplane reading, and if you’re pressed for time, you can skip to the topics or projects that interest you. This is CC Learn’s last Inside OER feature of 2009—so enjoy, and happy whatever-it-is-that-you-are-doing-in-your-part-of-the-world!
-
For textual information, Wikipedia has done a tremendous job of creating a vibrant public commons. The Creative Commons license prevents others from ripping off what Wikipedia has seeded. In the software world, the Free Software Foundation and others have had similar success in creating a public commons for source code through the use of the GPL and similar licenses. What is missing today though is a public commons for data.
-
College is becoming more expensive, and some colleges this year have set records with their lowest admissions percentage rates in history. If you cannot afford college and your SAT scores are average, you can attend a larger college where the cost is lower and admission rates are higher. And, you can supplement your education with free courses offered through colleges that are associated with the OCW (Open Courseware) Consortium.
-
-
Commissioner Wallström does not provide an amended Commission proposal for the Cashman report, although the Lisbon treaty makes the older Commission proposal for a EC/1049/2001 reform obsolete. She makes some encouraging points on the criticial reform aspects…
-
The new Microsoft Amazingly Open And Genuine Public License allows you complete freedom to use, modify and redistribute the software provided that every copy comes with a DVD of Windows Vista Ultimate, you acknowledge that Microsoft’s FAT patent protects a remarkable and valuable innovation in computer science and all accompanying documentation is in OOXML. Also, all your data belongs to Microsoft.
The overwhelming dominance of Microsoft was assured, he said, pointing to their success in paying netbook manufacturers to use Windows XP and paying US retailers not to stock the Linux versions of the computers. “We’re also enforcing our patent on right-clicking. And on the number seven.”
-
Original Article: Yahoo will reportedly shut down MyBlogLog in January. Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb claims to have heard from “sources close to the project” that this is the case.
-
Photographers in two-thirds of the country are subject to the rule of Section 44, despite Home Office instructions earlier in the year advising police forces against using the powers to prevent or curtail street photography, finds Olivier Laurent
-
It’s a crowdsourcing application that asks the public to help us dig through and categorise the enormous stack of documents—around 30,000 pages of claim forms, scanned receipts and hand-written letters, all scanned and published as PDFs.
-
Further confusion has broken out over the UK government’s controversial ID scheme, after it emerged that the Home Office was announcing an extension to the scheme, days after Chancellor Alistair Darling questioned the future of the project.
-
In pre-digital times, it would have been possible to restore the sanctity and rule of Parliamentary privilege to the Parliamentary estate to protect MPs from unwarranted intrusion by the state, or officers acting on behalf of the state such as the police. After all, MPs often receive information in confidence from their constituents and others. They rightfully need to be able to preserve such confidentiality, as journalists are likewise able to ensure the confidentiality of their sources. Ensuring that the Parliamentary estate offers such protection would be relatively easy to enforce.
-
Lithuania’s intelligence agency helped the CIA to set up secret prisons in the Baltic country, a parliamentary panel said today.
However, the national security committee found no evidence that any suspects were interrogated in Lithuania.
-
Security
-
An Intel spokesperson says the company has taken down the site and is “investigating the matter.”
-
An article appeared in Phrack magazine 11 years ago that discussed a problem that remains a security headache to this day — SQL injection.
-
Via Jay Rosen we learn of the absolutely bizarre story of how a Washington Post editorial aide witnessed an altercation involving an off-duty police officer who pulled his gun on people in a snowball fight — and the eventual Washington Post writeup on the story which completely ignored the eyewitness account of its editorial aide in favor of the claim by the police that the gun wasn’t drawn. Yes, a Washington Post staffer happened to have been on the scene and witnessed the whole thing.
-
Another chimes in, “When the blocked proxy server you were using got banned, you had another one ready and everyone had at least four that they knew and everyone shared them about.”
-
Environment
-
THERE were 45,000 people at the Copenhagen summit and more than 100 world leaders, but in the end it came down to an extraordinary personal showdown between the leaders of the world’s two superpowers and biggest greenhouse gas emitting countries, China and the US.
The deal itself was anything but historic. But the implications of how the Chinese handled this negotiation well might be.
-
To the uninitiated the thought of a gas or oil well is one where a pipe goes down into the ground, and out of it flows either a steady stream of oil or natural gas, that is fed straight into a pipeline and then delivered to them (often at what they consider to be an outrageous price) with no further treatment.
-
The hopes of the whole world fell when Copenhagen collapsed in a weak agreement this weekend. But one group was cracking open the champagne – the polluting industry lobbyists who have bent our politicians’ ears.
-
I’ve been researching the apparent hack of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU), where a huge amount of email going back more than a decade, plus huge numbers of documents, have been released onto the internet – they’re indexed on various sites in searchable form and through Wikileaks, for example.
What I find interesting is some of the discussion around it. There have been multiple freedom of information (FOI) requests to the CRU from people who want to examine the underlying data used to make the analysis about human-driven global warming.
-
To those who would blame Obama and rich countries in general, know this: it was China’s representative who insisted that industrialised country targets, previously agreed as an 80% cut by 2050, be taken out of the deal. “Why can’t we even mention our own targets?” demanded a furious Angela Merkel. Australia’s prime minister, Kevin Rudd, was annoyed enough to bang his microphone. Brazil’s representative too pointed out the illogicality of China’s position. Why should rich countries not announce even this unilateral cut? The Chinese delegate said no, and I watched, aghast, as Merkel threw up her hands in despair and conceded the point. Now we know why – because China bet, correctly, that Obama would get the blame for the Copenhagen accord’s lack of ambition.
China, backed at times by India, then proceeded to take out all the numbers that mattered. A 2020 peaking year in global emissions, essential to restrain temperatures to 2C, was removed and replaced by woolly language suggesting that emissions should peak “as soon as possible”.
-
The climate secretary, Ed Miliband, today accuses China, Sudan, Bolivia and other leftwing Latin American countries of trying to hijack the UN climate summit and “hold the world to ransom” to prevent a deal being reached.
-
Finance
-
AS we say farewell to a dreadful year and decade, this much we can agree upon: The person of the year is not Ben Bernanke, no matter how insistently Time magazine tries to hype him into its pantheon.
[...]
If there’s been a consistent narrative to this year and every other in this decade, it’s that most of us, Bernanke included, have been so easily bamboozled. The men who played us for suckers, whether at Citigroup or Fannie Mae, at the White House or Ted Haggard’s megachurch, are the real movers and shakers of this century’s history so far. That’s why the obvious person of the year is Tiger Woods.
-
The attack took aim at Citigroup’s Citibank subsidiary, which includes its North American retail bank and other businesses. It couldn’t be learned whether the thieves gained access to Citibank’s systems directly or through third parties.
-
PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
-
The U.S. Olympic Committee nominated Chicago in the race for the 2016 Olympics determined to bring the Summer Games back to American soil for the first time since 1996 in Atlanta. Embarrassed four years ago when New York was eliminated in the second round of voting for the 2012 Games that were awarded to London, the USOC and Chicago bid leaders appeared to have left nothing to chance. They secured airtight funding, a sound infrastructure plan, the relentless enthusiasm of Mayor Richard M. Daley and — in what many viewed to be the clincher — an unprecedented final-hours lobbying appearance by a sitting president.
-
Barack Obama’s promise to break with secrecy has been short-lived, says Melissa Goodman, in an exclusive article for Index on Censorship”s review of 2009
For those looking forward to open, accountable government, Barack Obama began his presidency with a bang. On the campaign trail he had pledged to operate the most transparent administration in the history of the United States and on his first day in office he took decisive steps to make good on that promise.
-
Politics
-
President Barack Obama grimly warned America last week that if his health care plans fail, the nation will go “bankrupt.”
Sure, adding another trillion-dollar entitlement program to our $12 trillion of debt may seem like a counterintuitive way to stave off economic ruin, but who are we to argue? The president’s got smarts.
-
A decisive 58 percent of respondents described the 2000-2009 years as “awful” or “not so good.” Twenty-nine percent called it “fair,” and a mere 12 percent said it was “good” or “great.”
-
Censorship/Civil Rights
-
The Italian court today struck a significant blow in favour of Mediaset, the broadcaster controlled by Silvio Berlusconi, and against YouTube.
[...]
No doubt lawyers in other jurisdictions are already sharpening their writs in pursuit of YouTube – in the meantime, the Viacom v YouTube litigation continues to wend its way through the New York courts, with no sign of an imminent conclusion.
-
The email read as follows:
We see that you are using Vimeo for uploading commercial content.
We’re sorry, but as stated in our Terms and Conditions of Use, on
our Community Guidelines page, and on the upload page itself, Vimeo is for noncommercial use only, and we cannot host this content for you. Please take 24 hours to move your videos to another hosting service.
My immediate reaction was disbelief. After all I had read their guidelines which state:
You may not upload commercials, infomercials, or demos that actively sell or promote a product or service.
I didn’t believe any of my videos fell into this category.
-
Broadcast
-
The Cleveland Plain Dealer has been doing an excellent job this week highlighting a $1.99 “data usage fee” Verizon’s been imposing on wireless customers who, well, aren’t using any data.
-
A few weeks ago, I wrote about two particularly nasty Verizon Wireless practices. First, Verizon doubled the early-cancellation fee for smartphones, the price you pay for canceling before your two-year contract is up (it’s now $350).
-
DirecTV says that the new FCC push to bust open video should only apply to cable; satellite is plenty competitive already. Also, a tale of woe from a Comcast subscriber illustrates just why some common video decryption standards are needed.
-
UK regulator Ofcom has announced it will make 6.8GHz of spectrum – from 57GHz up – licence exempt for fixed-wireless links, unless you’re too near the MoD.
-
Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights
-
“Piracy” makes for an easy — if totally incorrect — scapegoat. The reality is far different. As we’ve seen over and over again, those who learn to properly use file sharing to their advantage don’t see any “problems” from file “piracy,” but actually see it as a huge opportunity.
-
-
Last week (December 14th-18th), the World Intellectual Property Organization’s standing committee on copyright and related rights (SCCR) was considering, among other things, a proposal by Brazil, Ecuador and Paraguay for an international treaty aimed at increasing the accessibility of books for blind people.
-
Multiple music sources have told me over the past month the RIAA leaders were feeling pressure to drop the lawsuit campaign, but were also being lobbied by some at the labels to put some kind of deterrent in place, even if totally toothless. They didn’t want the public to think there weren’t any consequences to pirating music, even if the reality was exactly that.
-
Joerg Heilig, Sun Microsystems Senior Engineering Director talks about OpenOffice.org 10 (2004)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 1:17 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
Most of the business growth and business start-ups will leverage Linux and other so-called open source software projects. This time, though, “dot com” businesses will start and thrive in non-Silicon Valley locations providing a more widespread recovery to historically non-technical regions. Technical folk who’ve made the exodus from high cost, high tech areas of the country will spring up in lower cost locations to capitalize on their newfound frugality.
-
According to Steve Maddox, director of operations at AARNet, the mirror contains “most of the major public domain Unix software” available, including Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian and FreeBSD. The mirror automatically downloads all updates to these systems – such that when systems within Australia’s academic community download an update, they download it from a local source.
-
Kernel Space
-
This was originally sent to the linux-kernel and driver-devel mailing lists. Might as well post it here to get a wider audience as the last report was received well.
Here’s a summary of the state of the drivers/staging/ tree, basically what will be coming in the 2.6.33 merge, and what the status of the different drivers are so far.
-
LCA
-
When Jonathan Oxer turns up at Australia’s national Linux conference, you can be sure that he’ll have an interesting idea, either to talk about or else to demonstrate.
[...]
Oxer, who looks a bit different these days after shedding his locks for a good cause, will be conducting a mini-conference, a one-day workshop, on the Arduino .
-
He’s probably New Zealand’s best-known FOSS figure today but modestly attributes his achievements to seizing opportunities that came his way and, occasionally, creating one or two of his own.
-
Applications
-
I reviewed Shotwell 0.3 a month or so back (see here) and i found myself pleasantly surprised by its feature set, performance over-head and plain-ol’ usefulness. Not being particularly enamoured by Ubuntu’s current default photo organizer, ‘F-Spot’, Shotwell presents itself as an inevitable successor in my book.
Whilst there are issues with it from a “mum-proof” perspective (Those floating windows are annoying and unnecessary – see the new gThumb for in-app editing windows done oh-so-right!), Shotwell nonetheless bags itself a place in my top 12 applications of 2009 out of sheer potential.
-
Hulu has steadily rolled out innovative features to its platform from Hulu Labs including Hulu Desktop, Linux Support, and upgraded publisher tools.
-
MEDUSA4 Personal is used in 109 countries for private projects, such as model engineering. Linux users outnumber Windows users in about half of those countries.
-
I’ve recently come across the application Blogilo, which I from here on out will reference as the Blog Gigolo. Most of my blog posts I do in the wordpress backend, in a web browser since it’s what I knew.
-
This time it’s a different story. The creators of the famous cross-platform program VLC Media Player are going to release a new video editor going by the name of VideoLAN Movie Creator (VLMC).
-
Instructionals
-
-
While you weren’t looking, the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution changed several features under the hood. Kyle Rankin, coauthor of The Official Ubuntu Server Book, points out the most distressing changes and explains why you need to suffer through them and ultimately come to acceptance.
-
-
-
-
-
-
New Releases
-
Summary:
· Announced Distro: Download Linux Mint 8 for 64-Bit Platforms
· Announced Distro: Second Beta of SimplyMEPIS 8.5 Brings KDE SC 4.3.4
· Announced Distro: Available Now: Tiny Core Linux 2.7
· Announced Distro: Parted Magic 4.7 Is Powered by Linux Kernel 2.6.32.2
-
I’m going to create my own distro.
Those who favour “convenience” and “simplicity” over security and Freedom, need not apply.
Like nearly every other distro out there, mine will be initially based off another. In this case, I’m going to start with the source RPMS from Fedora 12, rebuilt to be i386 compatible, and then it’ll slowly diverge from there. Ultimately it will use Alexandre Oliva’s linux-libre, the blob-free version of Linux, with the longer-term goal of possibly even moving to the GNU Hurd, at which point I’ll take great pleasure it telling Linus “Microsoft hatred is a disease” Torvalds where to shove “his” kernel, along with those other things he endorses, like Tivoization. It’ll have a strict “No Microsoft” policy, both in terms of the actual technology, and the paradigms which define the operating system and software.
Other features which will be depreciated include SELinux and PulseAudio, the bane of nearly every Fedora user’s existence. These technologies are “solutions” to entirely fictitious problems, and the former in particular is closely related to the same issues surrounding the PackageKit scandal. If unprivileged users are never given elevated privileges in the first place, then there simply isn’t any need for mandatory access controls – standard UNIX security methods are sufficient.
-
Red Hat Family
-
Results that would make other companies go ho-ho-ho have become ho-hum for Linux software company Red Hat, which on Tuesday posted the latest in a string of strong quarterly results.
The Raleigh-based company, which performed well even when the recession was at its worst, once again exceeded analysts’ expectations for both the top line and the bottom line – revenue and profits.
Investors responded positively to the results, which were released after the markets closed. Red Hat shares rose as much as 7percent in after-hours trading.
-
Commercial Linux distributor and platform wannabe Red Hat ended the year with a peachy quarter. For the third quarter of fiscal 2010, ended November 30, sales jumped 17.5 per cent to $194.3m.
-
Red Hat Inc., the Linux software maker whose sales and profit in the latest quarter exceeded analysts’ estimates, said demand for its products is reviving, especially in North America.
-
-
Debian Family
-
Red Hat is instructive. Though many of us would like to see it broaden its focus, the company remains rooted in the enterprise server and middleware markets. Canonical, in my view, should take a lesson from Red Hat and channel some of its energy into fewer markets, markets where it can thrive.
-
-
The MaxNAS devices give users the option to configure the storage systems with Linux-based ext3 file system or ZFS file systems based on their individual requirements.
-
Fuji Soft has just introduced its first commercial bipedal humanoid robot that will see its official name and price unveiled early next year. For those who have tight purse strings, fret not – Fuji Soft maintains that their robot will be highly affordable.
-
Phones
-
What can we say about the Nokia N900, it is easily the most anticipated Nokia handset in quite some time. The Nokia N900 came out, officially, last week – November 2009 – and has so far been widely received as one of ‘The’ devices of 2009. Obviously, we’ve been covering the Nokia N900 extensively since we first got wind of it at Nokia World 2009 – and rightly so, it is one hell of a device, and completely different direction for Nokia. Read on after the jump to find out more about the device, its capabilities, and why it was so highly anticipated.
-
The Nokia N900 is a powerful smartphone with many options for customization and tinkering. It has a superb browser, and the multimedia features are hard to beat. The user interface, however, can be frustrating to navigate, and consumers who are used to their smartphone’s interface coming in a friendly, pretty package will likely be turned off by the N900. If you’re looking for something a little more intuitive but still customizable, check out the HTC Hero or even the Motorola Droid.
-
-
Android
-
Google unleashed its mobile OS Android in full force this year. The open source operating system, which runs on a Linux kernal, has gone on to power devices such as the HTC Hero and the Motorola Droid. The beauty of Android is that it is open source, meaning its literally a pleasure for developers to work with, and isn’t tied to anyone device in particular – essentially, any mobile phone manufacturer can pick it up and use it to its full potential.
-
Android is an open source mobile operating system running on the Linux kernel. Various Smartphones based on the platform is already available in the market like HTC G1, HTC Droid Eris, Motorola Droid, Samsung Galaxy, GW620 Eve, etc. However, the Android platform still has a long way to cover in the tablet segment. Meanwhile, various PC vendors like Dell, Archos, and IDC are preparing to launch their tablet PCs based on the operating system.
[...]
Various other companies like GiiNii, Camangi, NEC, Moto, etc are also working on the Android-based tablets. The new tablets can differ in sizes, which will resemble iPod touch or MIDs available in the market. However, the success of these devices will depend on the prices, overall functionality and the consumers’ willingness to carry a connected device in addition to mobile phone.
It is assumed that the devices will have Google Talk, which replaces cellular connectivity. Hence, VoIP and other Google support could make a difference for the Android-based tablets.
-
Sub-notebooks
-
The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project today provided a deeper glimpse into its XO-3 tablet, including concept shots and more features. The roughly letter-sized computer will now hopefully include a camera on the back to record video in a more intuitive way than the XO-1. The developers also clarify that founder Nicholas Negroponte’s desire for “no holes” would involve wireless power.
-
Along with announcing two other new models, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project has shown off its latest concept – with a tablet style approaching its previous vision of a dual screen book laptop.
-
“Open sourcing the IHTSDO Workbench will make it easier for developers from around the world to work together to further develop these tools,” said John Gutai, IHTSDO’s chief technical architect. “It also means that organizations and standards bodies from around the world can use the same tools to maintain their own terminologies and coding systems, leveraging the investment that IHTSDO and its Members have made.”
-
This report is a great read for understanding how open source data and BI solutions are being adopted, but it also includes short list of recommendations for those considering open source. I also found the discussion on the difference between “community” and “enterprise” editions helpful in avoiding or at least understanding one of the common gotchas of open source — finding you have to pay if you want to unlock the more useful features.
-
If open source’s collective mission is to change the way software is designed and used, a goal like this would have more genuine benefit than almost anything else I can think of. The real dividing lines would be between what programs are worth using and which ones fall short — not which ones hew to a specific licensing model or were built under the auspices of a given social contract. In many realms, this has already happened: most people don’t care if a given CMS, for instance, is open source or not; they care if it fits their needs as a business. The next step will be to have the software makers themselves reach this stage — where they can consider open vs. non-open without it being a political issue.
I don’t know if that day will ever come, but it sounds like a pretty good goal to me.
-
Free and open-source ERP options proliferate
Going into 2010, companies have more options than ever for free and open-source ERP software. There are at least 10 open-source products in the market, with some more mature than others.
-
Only a few weeks ago (December 1st 2009), Sequoia Voting Systems became the first major company of its kind (Voting Systems Manufacturers) to publish it’s source code openly for public download and study. You can read the following article for more information (http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/topix/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20091201006177&newsLang=en). The move follows an earlier disclosure made by the California based Open Source Digital Voting Foundation (OSDF) which made available the source code of its Prototype Election Software in October 2009 (see: www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/10/open-source/).
-
2009 Prediction #1: Adoption of open source software will increase as the economy worsens.
Accuracy: Grade B+
We can say with some conviction that this indeed was the case in 2009. While we obviously do not have financials for all open source companies we can parse through the data that is available to prove our point.
-
The open source qooxdoo (pronounced “ku:ksdu”) software development framework, which leverages object-oriented JavaScript and enables developers to build rich Internet applications, became available earlier this month in a 1.0 version, developers of the framework said.
-
But we don’t have to wait and repeat the past. Thanks to design thinking and new tools and methods in ethnographic research, we now have a new model of innovation that is flat, open-source and dynamic.
-
Google
-
“There are forces aligned against the open Internet–governments who control access, companies who fight in their own self-interests to preserve the status quo. They are powerful, and if they succeed we will find ourselves inhabiting an Internet of fragmentation, stagnation, higher prices, and less competition,” Rosenberg wrote.
-
Google talks a lot about openness and their commitment to open source software. What they are really doing is practicing a classic business strategy known as “commoditizing the complement“*.
-
He also launches a clear attack on Apple, noting the iPod and iPhone range as examples of how closed technology can produce excellent short-term results but soon leads to a firm only being able to make minor improvements rather than an entire industry creating better products.
-
Mozilla
-
The Mozilla Foundation claims that Fennec, now officially launched as Firefox Mobile, will sound the deathknell for app stores because its browser-based experience will be so advanced as to make downloads, optimized for smartphones, redundant. The open source organization is releasing Firefox Mobile on Nokia’s new N900, Linux-based superphone, and it will come to Windows Mobile and Android early next year.
-
Databases
-
Even with all the drama surrounding Oracle’s pending acquisition of Sun and critics’ concerns about its impact on Oracle’s open source database competition, Sun developers are still hard at work on MySQL. One of the fruits of their labors is the recent MySQL 5.5 milestone 2 development release, which introduces many new features to the open source database — some of which were originally intended for MySQL 6.0.
-
Releases
-
Songbird Logo Six months after the last stable release – version 1.2 (version 3 never got out of beta) the Songbird developers have announced the availability of version 1.4.2 of their popular open source media player. According to a post on the Songbird Blog, the 1.4.2 release, which appeared one day after Songbird 1.4.1, addresses a “UI glitch” bug in the release that “made mashTape and LyricMaster hard to use”. In addition to several bug fixes, the latest stable release of the cross-patform player focuses on improving device and format/codec support.
-
The new version includes more support for Java constructs like anonymous inner classes and nested classes, enhancements to annotations, which allow annotations to be added to imports, packages and variable declarations, and a more expressive and readable output from assertions.
-
Licensing
-
Karen and Bradley discuss enforcement of the GNU General Public License, and in particular the lawsuits recently filed by SFLC against various violators of the GPL.
-
Programming
-
Computer science must be at the center of software systems development. If it is not, we must rely on individual experience and rules of thumb, ending up with less capable, less reliable systems, developed and maintained at unnecessarily high cost. We need changes in education to allow for improvements of industrial practice.
-
The devices underpinning today’s communications networks grow increasingly powerful, in their speed, throughput, features and supported services. That’s great for users – but it presents a significant challenge for manufacturers.
-
The commercial embedded Linux market was created ten years ago when Jim Ready founded MontaVista Software. At the time, skeptics said Linux would never work for embedded development, it lacked key features required for embedded systems, and the performance wasn’t comparable to existing real time operating systems (RTOS).
-
The internet may kill newspapers; but it is not clear if that matters. For society, what matters is that people should have access to news, not that it should be delivered through any particular medium; and, for the consumer, the faster it travels, the better. The telegraph hastened the speed at which news was disseminated. So does the internet. Those in the news business use the new technology at every stage of newsgathering and distribution. A move to electronic distribution—through PCs, mobile phones and e-readers—has started. It seems likely only to accelerate.
The trouble is that nobody knows how to make money in the new environment. That raises questions about how much news will be gathered. But there is no sign of falling demand for news, and technology has cut the cost of collecting and distributing it, so the supply is likely to increase. The internet is shaking up the news business, as the telegraph did; in the same way, mankind will be better informed about his fellow humans than before. If paper editions die, then Bennett’s prediction that communications technology would be the death of newspapers will be belatedly proved right. But that is not the same as the death of news.
-
One sensible use for a last year’s netbook is to turn it into a network-attached storage server. This allows you to store files on the hard drive, assign user groups, and access the drive over your home network. Most of the popular NAS applications — such as Openfiler and Nexenta — provide a few options for how you install the NAS software. You can load it up as a distro that actually takes over the laptop or as a client that runs in Linux or Windows. These open-source tools are similar to Microsoft Home Server and many offer a Web-based console to control the NAS from a remote computer, so once you set up the NAS on your netbook, you can leave it to sit idly next to your router and never have to even open the lid.
-
Censorship/Civil Rights
-
This is crucial decision for all publishers both big and small. It represents a major win for freedom of expression in Canada and should remove some of the libel chill that arises far too frequently.
-
DRM
-
The hack began as an open challenge in this (translated) forum for participants to come up with a way to make ebooks published in Amazon’s proprietary format display on competing readers. Eight days later, a user going by the handle Labba had a working program that did just that.
-
Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights
-
I guess the solution is just to stop recognizing Jordan’s achievements altogether.
-
Now, if you’re at all familiar with the Maoist Cultural Revolution, to compare that to those who are simply pushing for their own consumer rights on copyright issues or asking for actual evidence of the need for increasingly draconian copyright system changes, is downright ridiculous and insulting. No one is acting as a revolutionary, demanding “free access” or any sort of “Maoist” revolution. To make such a claim is pure ignorance.
-
I still can’t comprehend arguments in favor of allowing copyrights on facts. However, over in Europe they do allow copyrighting of facts if they’re in a database, using so-called database rights.
-
I’m a Canadian. Dr. Ficsor’s ‘An invitation to Canada to join the international community by ratifying the WIPO Internet Treaties’ is one of the more insulting, and incorrect documents that I’ve perused over the years. So many errors, where oh where should I begin? How about the start?
Joerg Heilig, Sun Microsystems Senior Engineering Director talks about OpenOffice.org 09 (2004)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
12.22.09
Posted in News Roundup at 9:49 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
This year, we saw the new releases of major distributions such as Ubuntu’s Jaunty Jackalope and Karmic Koala; Mandriva 2009 and 2010; Fedora 11 and 12; and openSUSE 11.2. It was also a big year for Google in the open source arena with the release of the Google Chrome OS beta, the new Chrome browser, and the Android 2.0 platform for the Droid smartphone.
-
2010 is going to be a good year for Linux on the desktop.
-
I believe that at this point there no use anymore in asking the question “Is Linux ready for the desktop?”. It is, and it works so well it’s boring.
-
Desktop
-
At any rate, Daniel was a guest in the home of Mark Van Kingsley. Mark is a long-time Linux Advocate and has his own Linux-based business in New York. He is also a good and treasured friend of The HeliOS Project. He’s one of many who have put their sweat equity and money into doing what we do.
[...]
Oh, did I mention that Daniel had figured out how to dual boot his Windows partition with his new Linux one?
He called Mark the next day too. Not to ask questions but to let him know that he had installed and configured Skype and was talking to his friends in Italy about his new operating system and all the things it could do.
They did not believe him.
Not one of them had heard of Linux.
They have now, I have been so assured.
-
If you really want real technical support for a Linux system, but one from Dell, system76, or another vendor that sells and supports Linux systems. Expecting support from a chain store or a vendor that doesn’t pre-bundle Linux with their systems is just a waste of your time.
-
Server
-
The merger follows the LSE’s £18 million acquisition of MillenniumIT in September, a move that was aimed at replacing its troubled TradElect platform with a faster, Linux-based setup.
-
Google
-
Think about it: Google has primarily been about computer-based search. You sit at your PC and find what you want on the Web. But if you put those three new features together, where do they shine the best? On mobile devices. With Google’s Android powering phones and Chrome OS on netbooks, I see the company making a preemptive strike to take over mobile computing.
-
Kernel Space
-
With the end of the next kernel version’s main development phase, the most important new features of Linux 2.6.33 have been determined: DRBD, Nouveau, support of the Trim ATA command and a bandwidth controller for block devices. The developers have also improved the Radeon drivers and the support of Intel Wi-Fi chips. New stable kernels also fix a vulnerability in the code of Ext4, but will shortly be superseded by even more current versions.
-
Graphics Stack
-
Yesterday some R500+ PowerPlay code was started on (but not yet usable), and now at the same time we have more exciting AMD news to report. AMD has just released their shader instruction set documentation for the R800 “Evergreen” graphics processors!
-
AMD’s Alex Deucher just pushed out new power table define statements for the xf86-video-ati and xf86-video-radeonhd drivers. Nothing is yet depending upon these new C define statements within the open-source ATI drivers, but it will allow a variety of new PowerPlay information to revealed.
-
Mesa 7.7 delivers on VMware’s virtual Gallium3D driver (the SVGA driver) that allows for Gallium3D to be used on their virtualization platform, several new OpenGL extensions, major improvements to the ATI R300 Gallium3D driver (named “r300g”), and a new Mesa texture/surface format infrastructure.
-
The Nouveau driver now has TV-Out working and being considered “done” for the NV30 class GPUs (the GeForce 5 / FX series) and is mostly done for NV40 GPUs (the GeForce 6 series). The TV output support for the earlier GPUs and also the newer GPUs is still considered a work in progress.
-
Applications
-
A few weeks ago when we released Opera 10.20 alpha, many of you were asking for a test version of Opera 10.5. The desktop and core team have been working on 10.5, codename Evenes, for more than 18 months now. As a Christmas present, we’re happy to share all the goodies of Opera 10.5 with Presto 2.5 with you in an early pre-alpha release.
-
DigiKam main developer Gilles Caulier has released version 1.0 of the KDE photo management software just in time for Christmas 2009.
-
DigiKam main developer Gilles Caulier has released version 1.0 of the KDE photo management software just in time for Christmas 2009.
-
Instructionals
-
-
But it got me thinking. A few weeks ago, I asked, Is there a best distro?. The question this phone call raised was, does it matter which distribution you are running? For the moment, let us put aside which has a better desktop and focus on the server. Is there really a difference between distributions when it comes to what you run on a server? Is there anything so specific within a distribution that it matters whether you are experienced with Debian or Red Hat? I will admit that in all my years of working in the Windows world, no one has asked me if I have experience with Datacenter instead of Standard. Why, in the Linux world should it matter if I have experience with CentOS instead of Unbreakable?
-
New Releases
-
Amahi version 5.0 is released. Amahi Linux Home Server is a server targeted for home and home office environments.
-
Tiny Core lead developer Robert Shingledecker has announced the availability of version 2.7 of Tiny Core Linux. Tiny Core is a minimal Linux distribution that’s only about 10 MB in size and is based on the 2.6 Linux kernel. The latest release includes several bug fixes, changes and updates.
-
The founder of the Tiny Core Linux project, Robert Shingledecker, announced on December 19th the immediate availability of the Tiny Core Linux 2.7 operating system, a version that brings lots of updated applications and scripts, various improvements and, of course, a couple of bug fixes. Without further ado, let’s take a closer look at some of the most important changes brought by the new Tiny Core Linux 2.7 operating system:
· appbrowser was updated and it now features a single “Install” button, and the “Download Only” button was renamed to “OnDemand;”
· appsaudit was updated and it now features a new menu option, called “Install Options;”
[...]
-
Debian Family
-
The world of Ubuntu wallpapers is a place full of disaster. There are too many wallpapers of Tux vs Windows, Ubuntu logos printed on sexy ladies (which I believe no Linux geek has any chance with), and many which are just plain unoriginal.
-
-
Phones
-
Acer plans to launch 8-10 new smartphones in 2010 with Android-powered models likely to be slightly more than Windows Mobile-based ones, according to sources at Taiwan handset industry.
Acer will outsource the production of three Android-based smartphones to Foxconn International Holdings (FIH), using ST-Ericsson PNX6719 3G chipset solutions for the entry-level segment, the sources said. On the other hand, Inventec Appliances will roll out entry-level Windows Mobile-based smartphones for Acer.
-
Acer intends to release ten smartphones in 2010. Or possibly only eight. Whatever the total, more of them will run Android than Windows Mobile. Maybe.
You just can’t get quality rumours these days…
-
Tim K alerts us to the news that phone maker HTC has sent a cease & desist nastygram to the developers of an Android widget that certainly had a similar look and feel to HTC’s own Sense UI. Except, many people claim that this newer widget, from LevelUp Studios, was actually better.
-
Sub-notebooks
-
As was alluded to last week, I ended up purchasing the ASUS Eee PC 1201N as soon as it was made available on the Internet. This is now the initial Phoronix rundown on the 1201N for how it works with Ubuntu Linux, including many benchmarks.
-
About 15 years ago I noticed that the explosion of ready to use FOSS tools plus the trend toward general purpose tools and away from custom software was leading to a combinatorial crisis in software maintenance. I saw that it was the systems administrator’s responsibility to address the situation.
It has become apparent to me that the solution would require use of convention, standards and policy to reduce the complexity of the problem to manageable proportions. I searched for the most “standardized” conventions and policy-enforcing environment that would also provide the most flexible access to the most FOSS tools. The solution I found is Debian/GNU Linux, the universal operating system (although Ubuntu and other Debian derivatives also provide most of these benefits as well).
-
It has been roughly a month since Tech Data launched Open Tech — an open source channel partner initiative. Why is the big distributor interested in the open source market? And how is Open Tech performing so far? I caught up with Tech Data VP Stacy Nethercoat for answers.
-
Software can cost you a fortune but there are also hundreds of applications that are essential to have on your desktop and are free. We look at ten of the best free applications.
-
Read “The Meaning of Open” by Jonathan Rosenberg, Google senior vice president of product management, because it’s a great read, but read it knowing a few things.
First, Google open-sources a lot of software; in fact, Rosenberg claims Google is the largest open-source contributor in the world, contributing over 800 projects that total over 20 million lines of code to open source.
-
Google has made some headlines recently about its stance on privacy. This week the company is taliking about what “open” means to Google. Jonathan Rosenberg, senior vice president of product management for Google, says that “open will win” across the Internet and “then cascade across many walks of life.” It might be a good idea for other businesses in the open business to think about what open means to them as well.
The impetus for the post was that Rosenberg had been seeing disagreement within Google about what “open,” means to the company in practice. It’s easy to say that a company should be more “open,” but difficult to execute when the people involved don’t agree on what open is.
-
Mozilla
-
The first mobile phone version of the popular web browser Firefox is “days away” from launch, the head of the project has told the BBC.
The browser, codenamed Fennec, will initially be available for Nokia’s N900 phone, followed by other handsets.
-
Firefox 3.5 trundled passed Internet Explorer 7 in the past few days to become, temporarily at least, the world’s most popular web browser.
According to analysis outfit StatCounter, Mozilla’s latest browser just slipped ahead of Microsoft’s surfing tool in the week commencing 7 December by grabbing 21.93 per cent of the global market.
But it’s of course worth noting that while Firefox might be top dog by version number, it’s important to point out that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 is also pulling in plenty of punters.
-
The release of Firefox 4.0 may still be nearly a year away, but the excitement for the new version is already growing. In July, we revealed the first images of Firefox 4.0. Now one of the designers behind the browser has shared on his blog updated mock-ups of the new design.
-
Mozilla yesterday said that its planned overhaul of Firefox’s interface will be pushed back to Firefox 4.0, the major release now slated to ship before the end of 2010.
Previously, Mozilla said it would revamp the look and feel of its open-source browser in a two-step process, with part of the redesign debuting in Firefox 3.7 — a minor refresh scheduled for late in the first quarter of next year — with the rest following in version 4.0.
Mozilla’s interface plans, particularly those intended for Firefox for Windows, have attracted attention because the company last September said it would “ribbonize” the browser by borrowing graphics concepts from Microsoft’s Windows 7 and Office 2007. Users blasted the idea.
-
With its usual focus on optimization, the chip vendor now provides the Atom 45-nanometer processor, with minimal energy consumption and better performance. Intel claims a 20% reduction in power consumption over Atom’s predecessor. Integrated graphics and memory management for the first time in a CPU do the rest and allow for a smaller form factor. Said differently, the memory controller eliminates one of three chips, with only the CPU and chipset remaining. Intel claims this translates to a 60% smaller footprint for netbooks and mobile Internet devices.
-
One of the major benefits to having a wireless network is when a display device has the facility to utilise the connection, therefore removing any copying of content from one drive to another when the devices are several feet away. The NEC NP901W is a rare beast in that it can connect to a network and stream content, making it perfect for either an office or home cinema.
-
Environment
-
They’ve essentially agreed to, um, well, try – and they’ll think a little bit more about what they’re going to try sometime later. And that’s the best result we could have hoped for. We already know what needs to be done, as the economists have worked it out. It is true that economists are not exactly the flavour of the month right now, but they are still the experts here.
-
PR/AstroTurf
-
If I were a senator, I would not vote for the current health-care bill. Any measure that expands private insurers’ monopoly over health care and transfers millions of taxpayer dollars to private corporations is not real health-care reform. Real reform would insert competition into insurance markets, force insurers to cut unnecessary administrative expenses and spend health-care dollars caring for people. Real reform would significantly lower costs, improve the delivery of health care and give all Americans a meaningful choice of coverage. The current Senate bill accomplishes none of these.
-
Censorship/Civil Rights
-
Norman Eastwood, from Salford, and his wife Jeanette had booked a passage from Hull with P&O Ferries on Saturday. The ID card, which has been offered on a voluntary basis to the public in Greater Manchester as part of a limited trial since last month, is meant to allow travel across Europe as an alternative to a passport.
-
China’s government censors have taken fresh aim at the Internet, rolling out new measures that limit its citizens’ ability to set up personal Web sites and to view hundreds of Web sites offering films, video games and other forms of entertainment.
-
Apparently Demi Moore and her lawyers missed that whole story. Back in November some folks noticed what appeared to be a photoshopping of Demi Moore’s left hip on the cover of W magazine. There was some debate over it, but either way, people moved on and it was forgotten. Not so fast! While there was some discussion about it — and Moore herself chimed in on Twitter to claim that the photo was not altered — she’s now had her lawyers threaten at least two publications over the original story. Their claim is that the posts are defamatory. Even if there was no retouching of the photo, it’s hard to see what is possibly “defamatory” in the story. Digital retouching happens all the time, and claiming that a photo was retouched, if anything, would implicate the photographers or graphic artists at W, not Moore. There’s simply nothing even close to defamatory in regards to Moore herself.
-
Internet/Web Abuse
-
I write a lot of about the battle among large technology corporations in this space and the importance of competitive checks and balances. Yet Comcast seems to be growing into a super power with control over the very pipes that provide many of us with internet access, but without any real competition and often with government support.
Most places in this country get internet access through one or at most two providers. That kind of concentration of power is increasingly a threat to the very foundation of business and society, as so many of us use the internet on one level or another to do our jobs, get our information and connect to one another.
-
Just as the human mind is changeable and inconsistent, so intellectual property law is not without anomalies. For example, while copyright protects even the most banal 2-D images, the Lucasfilm judgment sets the bar for 3-D creations at a daunting height. Another anomaly that has risen to the surface in recent days is the penalty for groundless threats of infringement proceedings. There are stiff penalties for most intellectual property rights – patents, trade marks, registered and unregistered designs – but none for copyright.
Lord Lucas is seeking to set this right by proposing a new section in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The noble lord, as previously noted, is eager to see some checks and balances in the Digital Economy Bill to rein in heavy-handed right owners, especially top-shelf copyright proprietors.
-
Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights
-
If P2P use is declining or holding steady without new “antipiracy” laws, are those laws still needed? Music trade groups say yes.
The UK has just started to consider a new Digital Economy bill that could eventually usher in sanctions for illegal P2P use. From a rightsholder perspective, this makes it an inconvenient time for studies showing that P2P use is actually dropping, so the music industry commissioned a new study of its own which shows that other techniques for infringing copyright are picking up the slack. Would you believe that newsgroup usage is soaring?
-
“It’s nearly the end of 2009. If the 1790 copyright maximum term of 28 years was still in effect, everything that had been published by 1981 would be now be in the public domain — so the original Ultima and God Emperor of Dune and would be available for remixing and mashing up. If the 1909 copyright maximum term of 56 years (if renewed) were still in force, everything published by 1953 would now be in the public domain, freeing The City and the Stars and Forbidden Planet. If the 1976 copyright act term of 75* years (* it’s complicated) still applied, everything published by 1934 would now be in the public domain, including Murder on the Orient Express. But thanks to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, nothing in the US will go free until 2018, when 1923 works expire.”
-
Most companies realize that lowering prices is their only ploy to stay in business. Some companies are unaware, or simply don’t care – that financial times are tough. As an example, Apple Inc. has recently increased the cost of music downloads on their iTunes music site from $0.99 to a staggering $1.29.
-
For quite some time we’ve been covering how the MPAA has been pushing to get the FCC to allow them to use “Selectable Output Control” (SOC) to stop you from being able to record certain movies. In theory, the Hollywood studios claim that this will let them put movies out on video-on-demand offerings earlier than they do now. In actuality, there’s nothing stopping them from putting these VoD offerings out now (and some do already).
-
Argentina has extended the term of protection on sound recordings from 50 to 70 years.
Joerg Heilig, Sun Microsystems Senior Engineering Director talks about OpenOffice.org 08 (2004)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 8:12 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
Why Linux?
Unlike Windows and Mac OS X, which cost money and offer (with some minor exceptions) only one set of features and capabilities for all users, Linux is free and comes in many different flavors. Regardless of what the person on your list likes to do, you’ll almost certainly be able to find the perfect distro for him or her. And if you can’t, you can probably roll your own—try doing that with Windows.
Do Steve Ballmer or Steve Jobs really need any more money? I think not. Rather than giving Microsoft or Apple any of your money during these frugal days, keep your cash and go with Linux instead.
-
I compared the hardware requirements of a popular Linux Desktop: Ubuntu 9.10 with Windows 7 both of which were released last month.
Hardware Windows 7 Ubuntu 9.10
RAM (MB) 1024 MB 256 MB
Processor (MHz) 1000 MHz 300 MHz
Disk Space (MB) 16 GB 4 GB
-
In order to emulate these results, you’ll need the Linux kernel 2.6.31, a modified version of X.org 1.7, and supported hardware and drivers. So we’re not quite at the point where you can just pick up a netbook with a multitouch display, install Fedora or another Linux distro, and expect to tap your way to bliss with up to 10 fingers on the screen. But we’re getting closer.
-
I was watching the Millenium movie last night, and spotted an Ubuntu desktop being used by the “Plague” character…
-
GNU/Linux (especially 2.6.18+)
Never has their been such an uproar in computing as a free kernel and free utilities– all done very well with rapid, mindful if darwinian skill. Linus Torvalds crafted Linux, and has been holding on for dear life ever since. Coupled with the GNU utilities and two main window manager branches (Gnome and KDE), Linux underpinnings now grace objects from tiny wristwatches and clever cell/mobile phones, to IBM mainframes and everything in between. The promise of Linux for civilians is slowly but surely being realized through distros like Ubuntu, Novell/SUSE, Mandrive, Knoppix, and others, but the enterprise server market belongs to Red Hat, Novell/SUSE, and communities formed around each of these. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t worth in the literally hundreds of distros out there.
-
Twenty Ten
-
Everyone has posted their predictions for 2010 but here’s the real scoop on what’s going to happen in 2010 with Linux and Linux-oriented hardware and software products. Get ready to see the biggest increase in Linux adoption in history. You can say you saw it here first. These are in no particular ranking or order.
-
If your new year’s resolution is to kick the Microsoft habit, here are some Linux versions you might want to look at.
Switching to a new operating system is never easy. Particularly if you were brought up on a staple diet of Microsoft Windows. But it’s not as hard as it used to be to switch to Linux because there is a good selection of quality Linux versions that are easy to install and comfortable to use.
-
Applications
-
Inkscape 0.47 by Nathan Willis – Totally solid release with lots of new cool tools and functions
The free open source vector graphics editor Inkscape has released an update packing several new features, new tools, effects, and improved SVG compliance. Version 0.47 is available for Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows, as well as source code. Ubuntu users can also add the Inkscape Testers package archive to automatically upgrade.
-
-
It was a little rough getting there, but KDE 4 has reached a point where I’m using it on all my machines. The pain was worth it (barely) and KDE is by far the most satisfying desktop environment for my personal use.
[...]
If you are in the market for a new bittorrent client, especially once based in QT – I highly recommend giving qBittorrent a look. It’s a solid and reliable client with well implemented features and under active development so chances are good it will continue to improve!
-
Instructionals
-
-
-
-
-
So, there you have it. A rather long description for what is really a rather easy process. As I said at the beginning, if you have Bluetooth and aren’t using it, you are missing out on some convenience and functionality that you would probably like. it’s not hard, especially if you start out like I did, and just get a Bluetooth mouse. You can have it connected in less than a minute, and the confirmation that your system has Bluetooth, and it works, is a good feeling. The experience you gain from doing that can be used for the next step, which might be connecting your mobile phone, and transferring pictures. Then you’re really on your way!
-
-
So, we spoke about a list of top pentesting livecd’s here. We might have to update that list soon! Pentoo is a Live CD and Live USB designed for penetration testing and security assessment. Based on Gentoo Linux, Pentoo includes Nessus and Metasploit for penetration testing and security assessment. The user interface is the Enlightenment window manager. Pentoo is optimized for Pentium III architecture. Pentoo supports package modularity in the same fashion that Slax does.
-
Debian Family
-
Microsoft has restricted Windows 7 Starter to make sure it’s no competition for the more full-featured versions of Windows 7. For example, “It’s got to have a super-small screen, which means it probably has a super-small keyboard, and it has to have a certain processor and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” That ringing endorsement for Windows 7 Starter Edition was made by some guy named Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft.
Ubuntu 9.10, however, is an excellent desktop Linux distribution. While I’ll be the first to admit that Ubuntu 9.10 has its rough-edges when you install it yourself on some systems, Dell has always done an excellent job of fitting Ubuntu on its systems.
-
The recent release of a major new version of Ubuntu means it’s time for new versions of various remastered distros. This time around it’s Linux Mint 8. Linux Mint, as you may already know from previous releases, takes Ubuntu to another level by slicking it up with tools, multimedia codecs and more. Linux Mint 8 makes it easy to get started with Linux even if you haven’t run it before. Pretty much everything you need for your daily computing tasks is included in Linux Mint 8 or available in the Linux Mint software repository.
-
-
This write-up was intended as a very high-level review of my experience setting up this unusual system, and is by no means a step-by-step walkthrough. There is plenty of detailed information available online on websites such as plugcomputer.org and computingplugs.com that can prove invaluable to get things working on the SheevaPlug. As remarked before, the system is sold as a developer’s kit and setting it up is definitely not for the faint of heart or for those who avoid the terminal like the plague. In the end, I had a lot of fun getting this to work and the system is working beautifully. I learned a lot in the process and am amazed yet again at how flexible Debian is as an operating system for just about any computer, even embedded systems like this one.
-
Look up open source. You’ll get 203,000,000 results. How come? While credit goes to many, including Bruce Perens, who chose the term, I see widespread usage largely as the direct result of a “call to the community” by Eric S. Raymond on 8 February 1998. Plus the runaway successes of Linux, Apache and thousands of other open source code bases, and the Internet they all run on. (And the Net is essentially a pile of open and free protocols.)
-
As demonstrated by the nearly 500 open source downloads on this list, open source software has benefited from an explosion of creativity in the last several years. Indeed, the first decade of the 21st century could be called “the Decade of Open Source.”
Since 2006, Datamation has put together at least 15 different lists of open source software, for file sharing, enterprises, small businesses, windows users, netbooks, security professionals, and others. (And check out the hot new open source list from late 2009). For this list of open source downloads, we revisited all those applications that we’ve featured before, culled out the projects that are no longer active (or no longer open source), made updates, and organized them alphabetically in categories.
-
The next step in the OpenOffice.org 3 series is coming closer: OpenOffice.org 3.2.0 Release Candidate 1 is now available on the download website.
-
-
CMS
-
Following hot on the heels of US President Barack Obama, Albert II, King of the Belgians, just relaunched his website on Drupal. Check it out at http://www.monarchie.be. The site was built by Connexion.
-
Programming
-
A Qt application, running inside the Native Client sandbox, inside the Firefox browser Vergrößern
Source: Qt Labs A first shot at creating a port of the Qt toolkit to Google’s Native Client (NaCL) environment allows Qt applications to run as applets within a browser. The port is not yet complete, but it already offers mouse and keyboard support, rudimentary support for the QtGUI and QtCore libraries and several more complex widgets. The biggest problem with the current port though is that the event handling in NaCL is polling based which makes applications spin using 100% of the CPU; the developers descibe this as “not quite our preferred style”.
-
Finance
-
Talk about a slap in the face. Goldman Sachs (GS), in a bid to keep employees away from the UK’s new onerous bonus tax, is threatening to shift a chunk of its London bankers over to highly troubled spain.
-
Goldman Sachs could move up to one fifth of its 5,000 London-based staff to Spain, the Independent has reported.
-
They’re not going to take it sitting down. Goldman Sachs told the British Treasury that it would move up to 20 percent of its London staff to Spain if the government does not relent on plans for a windfall tax on bonuses, The Independent writes.
-
In the first six months of 2010, about 6,000 employees of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. will take a break from their spreadsheets and move across the southern tip of Manhattan to a new 43-story, steel-and-glass skyscraper.
-
The $2.3 billion steel-and-glass skyscraper was given a Liberty Bond tax break that allowed it to sell tax-free bonds to support the tower’s construction.
-
The Goldman PAC raised $205,000 in the past month, so these are just initial numbers, but the early filings show that Goldman is hitting up the left, the right and the center, but the company is also being opportunistic. Waters is the third ranking Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee and Lincoln is chairwoman of the Agriculture Committee — which could have a role in regulation of derivatives.
-
Working people, seniors and oraganizers from Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project, Americans for Financial Reform, NY Jobs for justice, NYPIRDG posed as carol singers today outside the New York downtown offices of Goldman Sachs on West Street protesting the banks plan to hand out $150 billion compensation and bonuses today.
-
It’s quite the scam. You make tons of money by sitting in a chair.
Sitting – with stock options and all – can net you far more than your university salary.
And what’s in it for the university? Well, Brown gets to be associated with Goldman Sachs — one of the country’s most disgusting greed-machines.
Joerg Heilig, Sun Microsystems Senior Engineering Director talks about OpenOffice.org 07 (2004)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
12.21.09
Posted in News Roundup at 10:51 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
Graphics Stack
-
With there being just more than three months left until the planned release of X Server 1.8, Keith Packard has just issued the second snapshot for those interested in trying out this developmental X.Org server. The first X Server 1.8 snapshot came two months ago, but this second snapshot is arriving later than expected after having to deal with some bugs.
-
In separate commits, a few dozen lines of code dealing with Cairo’s surface code was also re-factored. The Wayland Display Server still will not work with all of the latest mainline packages in an “out of the box” configuration, but we’re getting closer to a point where more Linux desktop users can experiment with this unique display server that fully leverages kernel mode-setting and other newer technologies.
-
Instructionals
-
Google Map Saver is a portable software program that feels more responsive and less complicated to use. The user can enter a location or point of interest and the program will download the available data from Google Maps. Then just click on the Go! button and the map of the location will be displayed, this process takes only a few seconds on a fast Internet connection. The usual Google Maps controls are available including zooming in and out, moving around with the mouse or switching between map, satellite and terrain view. The ability to save loaded maps as images, so that you can use them offline or take them anywhere with you is really nice.
-
-
-
-
-
K Desktop Environment
-
In just a bit over a month should be the release of KDE 4.4, or more properly known now as KDE Software Compilation 4.4. A month and a half ago was the first beta release, but now KDE Software Compilation 4.4 Beta 2 is ready and has been released to the public this morning.
-
December 21st, 2009. Today, KDE has released a second preview the KDE Software Compilation (KDE SC), 4.4 Beta 2. The second beta version of KDE SC 4.4 provides a preview and base for helping to stabilize the next version of the KDE Plasma Workspaces, Applications and Development Platform.
The list of changes this time around is especially long.
-
Dear all digiKam fans and users!
digiKam team is proud to announce digiKam 1.0.0 !
-
-
Parted Magic Logo Developer Patrick Verner has announced the availability of version 4.7 of Parted Magic, an open source multi-platform partitioning tool. Parted Magic can be used to create, move, delete and resize drive partitions and will run on a machine with as little as 64MB of RAM. Supported file systems include NTFS, FAT, ReiserFS, Reiser4 and HFS+, LVM and RAID are also supported. The latest 4.7 release is based on the 2.6.32.2 Linux kernel with squashfs-lzma compression and includes several bug fixes, performance improvements, updates and new features.
-
Debian Family
-
Ubuntu: Nine Priorities for Canonical’s Incoming CEO
-
“On my last visit to Zimbabwe,” he says, “I saw an entire lab of 87 Computer Aid computers running Ubuntu [a free, open-source operating system]. Ten years ago, no one really used open-source software of this kind, because despite the philosophical reasons for doing so it was often impractical. But it seems that those problems may be disappearing.”
-
-
Businesses can never have enough hard drive capacity, and two new offerings from NAS (network attached storage) expert MicroNet Technology help ensure that even a fast-growing organization has plenty of storage headroom.
-
MontaVista Software LLC announced a partnership with CriticalBlue to integrate the latter’s embedded multi-core analysis Eclipse plug-in into the MontaVista DevRocket integrated development environment (IDE). The CriticalBlue Prism plug-in enables MontaVista Linux customers to run simulations to analyze and tune the behavior of their code on multi-core processors, says MontaVista.
-
Phones
-
Worse, if efforts to enable Android apps to run on distros like Ubuntu succeed, then we may see closed-source software being used on the free software stack there, too. Ironically, Android’s success could harm not just open source’s chances in the world of mobile phones, but even on the desktop.
The free software community needs to address these problems by encouraging many more developers to build great Android apps that are truly free. In fact, we have an excellent example of how to do that with the rich ecosystem of Firefox add-ons that are free software. Moreover, this should be an attractive challenge to ambitious coders given the exciting possibilities that mobile offers for new kinds of programs (and not just those based on trendy areas like augmented reality). Maybe the time has come to shift the emphasis away from trying in vain to conquer the legacy desktop, towards excelling on mobile, likely to be the main computing platform for most of humanity.
-
Sub-notebooks
-
Some packages are already Ubuntu One aware or at least have optional Ubuntu One integration; Tomboy Notes, for instance, to keep track of all those little ideas floating around in your head. You can also load up the evolution-couchdb package if you would like to keep your contact information in sync using Ubuntu One. Client packages come in a desktop-agnostic python version, and a nice GNOME-integrated version (which comes with the Ubuntu Netbook Remix). There is also a KDE client under development if you’d like to give it a try.
-
Overall this distro is pretty slick. It generally succeeds on the stated goal of delivering a Linux version that’s easy to install and works well either as a replacement for your original Netbook OS or alongside. With the extensive list of supported Netbooks, it should prove to be a winner. You have no more excuses if you’re looking for a solid Netbook OS without the Windows baggage.
-
The webpages on the Jolicloud site are also well thought out and well designed. More information about Jolicloud and support can be found on the community page. While you are here you will also notice that you can contact the Jolicloud crowd through Facebook, Flickr or IRC. The online documentation is quite good, although not as good or extensive as the documentation you will find in mainline GNU/Linux distributions such as Fedora, CentOS, Debian and Ubuntu.
-
Announced in February, the Dell Mini 10 appears to be the one of the more popular netbooks on the market, along with the similar, scaled down Mini 10v. The Dell Mini models are also some of the few netbooks from mainstream PC vendors that currently offer Linux (Ubuntu) as a pre-installed option.
-
During a working visit and as part of the 5th edition of the free software forum which was recently held in Tunisia, Mr. Robert Sutor, Vice President of Open Source and Linux at IBM met with Mr. Hadj Gley Minister of Communication Technologies and Mrs. Lamia Chafei Sghaier, Secretary of State to the Minister of communication technologies in charge of Informatics, the Internet and free software.
During his visit, Mr. Sutor presented projects and programs aiming at fostering partnership between IBM and Tunisia namely in the sector of technological innovations and open source softwares.
-
Identi.ca is the best-known open-source alternative to Twitter. The microblogging platform is used by lots of people in the open source community, and is a good choice for the business or organization that wants to customize an internal microblogging strategy. Laconica is also worth looking into.
-
Take a look at the Debian developer map again. You’ll see that Debian is certainly not an Americans-only project, or even an English-speakers-only project. South America has a respectable dotting of developers, and Western- to Central-Europe are packed.
I have strong feelings about Free Software. It emerges from an ethos of personal empowerment, and with open source it has become a dominant force in computing. Yet there are plenty of sharp people — at least women and South Asians — who, somehow, become culturally excluded from participating.
-
Even though the open source licensing of SaaS app doesn’t guarantee that the app will flourish after the demise of the original developer/vendor, it lives long enough to ensure business continuity and, with some luck, it can even flourish. I still feel it is still a better option to have open source as an endgame for SaaS. Even if the open source version is of no use to the users, the very fact that it will be available as open source helps the users trust SaaS more than what they do now. It gives them a confidence that their business continuity will not be affected with a move to SaaS.
-
In June SAP moved up its membership level at the Eclipse Foundation from Strategic Consumer to Strategic Developer, meaning that SAP commits to having at least 8 full-time developers on the project. However, what is more important than the membership level, is that SAP contributed a lot more code than in the past. SAP now has 13 active contributors at Eclipse and contributed more than 1.8 million lines of code in 2009 which makes SAP the third largest corporate contributor to Eclipse. In 2009 SAP even initiated or co-innitiated two new projects at Eclipse, i.e. the Eclipse Pave project and the Eclipse EGit project.
-
After going from proprietary to Open Source product, Qlusters shutting down shop, openQRM now gets a bright new future, openQRM Enterprise GMBH could well become the RedHat of the Open Source Enterrpise Management tools, or Open Source Entrprise Virtualization tools, or Open Source Cloud tools ..
-
Bad Homburg-based OTRS AG, the company behind popular open source help desk system Open Ticket Request System (OTRS), will float on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange on the 23rd of December, 2009.
-
Christmas-Themed
-
Ebenezer recognised his office, it was in the early days. He was there laughing and joking and so were his old friends. The atmosphere was jubilant. No one minded that all the computers had blue-screened with cryptic messages, they were all toasting the new Government and the newly signed ‘Memorandum of no-understanding’ that would guarantee many years of great prosperity.
-
Last night a colleague of mine was giving me a lesson in accounting (as I am going to start rolling out Point Of Sale systems with him). The lesson was valuable and, in a word, confusing (accountants do have a language of their own). At one point in the lesson I brought up open source, and he nearly turned red saying, “Nothing is free.” That statement got me to thinking about free, open source, and open source projects. He is right – nothing is free. At some point, someone had to make some sort of investment into a project to bring it to life (be that investment money, time, labor, etc). This thought sparked another and led me to, are you ready…
Santa Claus.
-
Mozilla
-
According to new data from the StatCounter.com, Firefox 3.5 is now the most popular browser version in the world at 21.9 percent, surpassing IE 7 21.2 percent.
The catch (because there always is one with stats) is that on a cumulative basis – that is including all versions of IE currently in use and all Firefox versions currently in use – IE is still ahead.
-
THE MOZILLA FOUNDATION will be celebrating after the web counter outfit Stat Counter revealed that its open source Firefox browser overtook Microsoft’s Internet Explorer as the world’s most popular browser for the first time.
-
CMS
-
Normally in this space we look back over the current month and forward into the next month at what the various open source CMS projects are up to. But rather than blindly putting out an update for January, we thought we’d look farther ahead into what everyone wants to accomplish throughout next year. Call it our open source 2010 predictions with less guesswork and high hopes.
-
If you’ve ever wanted to run your own blogging platform, bug tracking system, or wiki but were afraid of getting in over your head, BitNami is definitely worth checking out.
-
FSF/FSFE/GNU
-
But Stallman — a legend in the programmer community for more than a quarter century — considers it his life’s work to proselytize the free-software gospel, educating the lay people who’d otherwise assume that Microsoft or Apple are exclusively synonymous with computing.
“They think it’s natural that the software developers will have power over them,” he says. “My mission is to point out to them that that isn’t natural. It’s wrong. It’s an injustice. And they shouldn’t stand for it.”
Some in the open-source community (a note about semantics anon) have griped that Stallman is a stubborn utopian, whose Manichean worldview and rhetoric are counterproductive to the larger cause.
Others hail him as a principled and pugnacious advocate for freedom and cooperation, waging war against any and all outside interference with the way we engage with technology — which, of course, is these days tantamount to the way we live.
-
Releases
-
The OpenNebula team is proud to announce the availability of OpenNebula 1.4 (Hourglass), a new stable release of the OpenNebula Virtual Infrastructure Manager.
-
collectd Logo The collectd developers have released version 4.9 of their open source tool for collecting, transferring and storing system performance statistics. The latest release of collected daemon features a number of new plugins, such as as the ContextSitch, CPU, cURL and Network plugins, and the integration of Python as a new language binding.
-
Standards/Consortia
-
The Hungarian government has mandated the use of open standards in its departments in a move to help “foster” competition in the software market.
The Open Standards Alliance said that the Hungarian Parliament amended Act LX of 2009 on electronic public services last week.
-
At first pass, it’s hard to argue with this reasoning, particularly when many of the Google efforts are free and available as open-source software, which anyone can adopt, modify and use.
Plus, Web latency remains a chronic, thorny problem with many improvement opportunities, and Google has the financial and talent resources needed to lead the way and tackle the bottlenecks.
-
You’re probably talking about this terrible security disaster already: the largest database leak ever. Arweena, a spokes-elf for Santa Claus, admitted a few hours ago that the database posted at WikiLeaks yesterday is indeed the comprehensive 2009 list of which kids have been naughty, and which were nice. The source of the leak is unclear. It may have come from a renegade reindeer, or it could be the work of a clever programmer in the Ukraine. Either way, it’s a terrible black eye for Santa. Arweena promised that in the future, access to this database would be restricted on a “need to know” basis. And you know who that means!
-
Bucks rookie Brandon Jennings has been fined $7,500 for posting a message on his Twitter account after Milwaukee’s 108-101 double-overtime win over Portland last weekend.
-
A privacy group has filed a lawsuit against the US Department of Justice for allegedly failing to disclose information about the use of devices that capture black ‘n’ white images of people stripped naked.
-
The allegations aren’t the first time a large internet company has been accused of breaching customer privacy when releasing data it claimed was anonymized. In 2006, AOL released 20 million search queries from 658,000 users. Although the company removed names and other personal information, the disclosure proved to be a debacle after privacy advocates showed the data could still be used to identify the people making the searches.
-
As we count down to end of 2009, the emerging star of this year’s holiday shopping season is shaping up to be the electronic book reader (or e-reader). From Amazon’s Kindle to Barnes and Noble’s forthcoming Nook, e-readers are starting to transform how we buy and read books in the same way mp3s changed how we buy and listen to music.
-
Environment
-
So, as the UN Conference toiled away through the night hammering out the final agreement, the Klimaforum was disassembling itself, and the attendees were morphing into party mode. But all were aware that after the weekend blowout the workload was going to have to ramp up severely if we were to avoid catastrophic climate change. My take is that this Conference achieved a very valuable thing: now we know what each nation is willing to do when some pressure is applied. Yes, the answer is “not nearly enough to avoid catastrophic climate change,” because that would require replacing coal as a source for electricity by 2030.
-
Finance
-
More than a year after reckless Wall Street gambling collapsed the economy, no employee of a major American bank or financial institution is behind bars. This fact is all the more astounding when it comes to AIG.
AIG was at the heart of the financial meltdown. Their “innovative” use of risky credit default swaps (a type of insurance policy on bonds) helped transform boring bond trading into a highly leveraged, high-velocity global business.
AIGs built up a $500 billion swaps portfolio, but didn’t have the cash when the bond market started to tank. The result? A $180 billion taxpayer bailout. While some of that money may be paid back, we are likely to lose a chunk of it for good.
The American taxpayer owns 80% of AIG right now, and AIG doesn’t like it at all. It wants to pay back that money lickity split. Wells Fargo and Citibank paid back TARP bailout funds last week. Of course, we didn’t find out until late in the game that Citi was only able to do so because it received billions of dollars in tax breaks from the IRS.
-
The authors want to see the communications between the AIG Financial Products division, the emails between AIG and their counter-parties at the financial firms, and more. As experienced hands at determining the timelines and circumstances of financial fraud, these three know exactly where to go to find out the truth – the email record. And as an 80% owner in AIG, the trustees of the taxpayers could make this a reality by demanding such disclosure from the board.
-
Internet/Censorship/Web Abuse/Rights
-
Despite frequent press confusion, Wikileaks is nothing to do with Wikimedia at all — “wiki” is a generic term for “mass-editable website” and they use MediaWiki, but there’s no connection.
-
With the news that Australia has decided to censor the internet, a group of protesters decided to set up a website complaining about this effort by Communications Minister Stephen Conroy (who laughably called internet filters “100% effective” based on absolutely no metrics). In setting up this protest site, they were able to register the domain stephenconroy.com.au. Not surprisingly, that got some press attention, and suddenly the Australian domain authority, AuDA, took notice.
-
The Australian company that runs the .com.au domain registry has been accused of abandoning its own procedures to censor a website satirising communications minister Stephen Conroy’s ISP filtering regime.
-
Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights
-
OK, I’m going to try and explain why Big Music genuinely doesn’t get what’s happening with the online stuff. It’s easy to dismiss the thoughts coming out about ‘3 Strikes Laws’, and Bit Torrent being to blame for the death of musicians’ livelihoods etc. as being a bunch of really rich people want to keep their massive piece of the pie – and there is some of that, for sure. But there’s also an entire way of thinking that explains why they feel the way they do.
-
As in the innovator’s dilemma, however, the labels still don’t recognize this. They can only think in terms of the incremental change of “how can we sell more units of music.” That’s the only change they’ve ever really known. They’re not prepared for a situation where the selling of music may not even make sense, and the level of control over an artist has changed dramatically. But they still view — as is often the case in the innovator’s dilemma — as something to be dismissed. The fact that musicians can record for less money… well, it’s not as good as having a record label bankroll you hundreds of thousands of dollars.
-
And, of course, acting in a maximalist manner also means little respect for anyone else’s intellectual property or free speech rights. We’ve already noted that some musicians have complained about a contractual gag order, that forbids any musician performing at any Olympics event to speak ill of the Olympics ever. However, it appears that the Vancouver Olympics folks are taking the maximalism even further. Michael Scott points us to a complaint from a musician who wrote a song which she thought the Olympic committee might like. She sent it to them, and was surprised to get back a contract demanding she sign over all ownership and royalties associated with the song before they would even listen to it. And, of course, it would also grant them the ability to do whatever they wanted with the song.
-
A few weeks ago, I wrote about a deluge of DMCA notices and pre-settlement letters that CoralCDN experienced in late August. This article actually received a bit of press, including MediaPost, ArsTechnica, TechDirt, and, very recently, Slashdot. I’m glad that my own experience was able to shed some light on the more insidious practices that are still going on under the umbrella of copyright enforcement. More transparency is especially important at this time, given the current debate over the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.
Given this discussion, I wanted to write a short follow-on to my previous post.
-
Lawyer says Channel 4 failed to seek consent for trailers featuring Jamie Oliver dressed as members of the Village People
-
Daniel Moore, the artist who has memorialized some of the Alabama Crimson Tide’s greatest football feats, has objected to part of a judge’s order that says he can’t reproduce his artwork for things such as calendars.
Joerg Heilig, Sun Microsystems Senior Engineering Director talks about OpenOffice.org 06 (2004)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 7:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
Larry appears on the Fresh Ubuntu podcast. Harlem Quijano and Peter Nikolaidis welcome Larry as their guest host for this episode.
-
Kernel Space
-
Simple NVIDIA driver fixes this year were scattered all over the board from addressing issues with Plasma in KDE 4.x to fixing up some GPU memory problems that was present in the 180.xx series to cleaning up many other areas of this binary-only driver.
-
Applications
-
Screenshot tool ‘Shutter’ shuffles into view as we continue our 12 favourite applications of 2009 countdown.
-
Instructionals
-
-
Lots of important changes happened in Mandriva Cooker during the last few weeks. Here is a quick summary:
* GNOME has been updated to the development version 2.29.3. There is a new game, called LightsOff, Empathy has improved IRC support, Evince supports PDF file attachment annotations and opens each document in a separate process, more and more applications support Seed and more applications have been ported to new APIs such as GtkBuilder.
* KDE is now at version 4.4 beta 1.
-
New Releases
-
The Sabayon Linux CoreCD 5.1 release is available for download now at Sabayon’s mirror sites:http://www.sabayonlinux.org/mirrors
This updated release keeps with the tradition of the CoreCD 4.2 release. The CoreCD is designed with a minimalistic feature set to provide a foundation for building a customized installation tailored to the users specific needs.
-
Also removed Brasero (CD Burning) as it is too dependent upon Gnome and switched to simpler xfburn. Has a few xfce-related dependencies but these are small and also allow easier development for users if they want to use the libraries. You may also notice that wxGTK libraries are in the base install, used by the the chm help viewer and also support Audacity, now compiled and sitting on CD2 in the multimedia folder.
-
The first update version of Parsix GNU/Linux 3.0 aka `Kev` is available for immediate download. This version merges all security and bug fix updates published on the APT repositories.
-
Parted Magic 4.7 adds and removes some programs and fixes a few bugs.
-
-
-
Red Hat Family
-
Tech companies reporting next week include electronics-component maker Jabil Circuit (JBL) on Monday and memory-chip maker Micron Technology Inc. (MU) and open-software developer Red Hat Inc. (RHT), both Tuesday.
-
By now you would know that the next Fedora release, Fedora 13, will be named “Goddard”, after the famous Rocket scientist Robert H Goddard. After deciding on the name, fedora contributors have started working on the designs, themes and other artwork for the next release. There are a few ideas in the air about Rocketry related artwork but they are also looking of other fedora users and enthusiasts to come up with their more innovative stuff.
-
Smooth and easy. That’s how Linux should be. My compliments to the UNetbootin author, and to the Fedora team, for a painless experience!
-
Debian Family
-
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #173 for the week December 13th – December 19th, 2009. In this issue we cover: Mark Shuttleworth: My new focus at Canonical, Lucid Community Team Plans, Michal Zajac (quintasan) Interview, Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Notification, New update coming for the Ubuntu Israeli website, Ubuntu Catalan: What a LoCo November, James Westby: Ubuntu Distributed Development Overview, Ubuntuforums: In a month, Ubuntu’s Jono Bacon: Managing an Open Source Community, Cloud-oriented netbook distro arrives in beta, and much, much more!
-
-
simavr is a software simulator for the AVR line of microcontrollers. You might be asking why anyone would write this sort of thing considering the simulator provided with AVR Studio is a wonderful tool? Well, a lot of folks don’t run Windows and don’t wish to use that development environment even if Wine or Virtualbox could make it happen.
-
Nokia N900 is the final product which opens up a new path for the Finnish smartphone producer. After Google, which launched its new open source operating system for mobile phones, Nokia raised the stakes a few months later with its own vision, which is called Maemo. Android OS, as well as Maemo are both based on the well-known Linux platform, but they are pretty much different because they are the results of two different working teams. Before getting into more in-depth information, do not overlook the fact that we will be reviewing an Internet tablet, with some limited phone capabilities.
-
Sub-notebooks
-
In San Francisco, a startup company called Fusion Garage showed off the JooJoo, a touch-screen device that looks like the iPhone’s big brother. The JooJoo is one of the first of a new generation of tablet computers expected to hit store shelves in the coming year.
-
After much deliberation I settled on a black friday Amazon deal, $431 for an Asus Eee Top ET2002 (video review) with free shipping. This is an all in one box with a 20″ monitor, Atom 330 processor, and 2gb of RAM , and ~240gb drive. This is quite an amazing deal so I went with it. Having seen one of these at an Ubuntu booth at Ontario Linuxfest I was confident that everything would just work. Keep in mind at this price this is the non-touchscreen screen. (EDIT: Correction to the price, this PC was $431, not $331, that would be ridiculous!)
-
I’ve been in Free Software for a few years now and learned a ton from it. Sure, I learned how to use new types of software, became efficient on them, and honed my programming skills, but stopping there would be missing the point. Free software has so much more to offer than just computing and technical benefits. In fact, the technical side is the least important thing I’ve learned from my experiences. Free Software has brought me far beyond knowledge of its source code and taught me lessons I will value for a lifetime.
1. Centralized control isn’t worth it
When one single governing body gains absolute control over something, it is only a matter of time before that governing body increases its power tremendously. Many times, it does this in order to avoid vice, but counterintuitively, only ends up creating more of it in the process. Take any modern established proprietary software company that started out in the 60’s or 70’s for example. These software companies were revolutionary in their decision not to share their software for the benefit of learning, but rather, keep it a secret in order to make money from it. As time went on, the companies began imposing slightly harsher methods upon users in an attempt to foil the plans of those who refused to pay. This was the beginning of techniques such as license keys. As users developed ways around the methods, the methods kept getting progressively harsher, severely punishing casual proprietary software users who had been legally using and paying full price for the software since the beginning.
-
To make sure you realize all the benefits of open source, run these simple background checks on an open source project.
-
This edition of Netspeak features a few open source tools that facilitate the research process with special reference to the free statistical software ‘R’.
-
Open-source software – free-to-use programs donated by developers which can then be customised to particular needs – has proved to be a boon. Computer Aid has employed its own research and development officer, Ugo Vallauri, to collect feedback from African users.
Putting a Braille machine in front of a child costs an initial $600 (£375). A digital book stored on a USB stick with open-source software to read aloud to the child costs about $3. “This has been a big step for us,” says Martin Kieti, the head of KUB. “We’re looking at a 95 per cent reduction in costs.”
-
Open Source: Such software has a great opportunity to benefit, because more and more organisations realise the importance of BI as a key business strategy, even while striving to keep a check on the huge licensing and maintenance costs associated with commercial software.
-
One example is Sahana, a free and open source disaster management system. This Web-based collaboration tool addresses the common coordination problems during a disaster, such as finding missing people, managing aid and volunteers, tracking camps effectively between government groups, the civil society (NGOs), and the victims themselves.
-
CMS
-
As part of my annual Drupal prediction, I was going to predict that in 2010, someone would get a Drupal tattoo. Of course, Kristof De Jaeger (aka swentel), fast as always, would get one just before the start of the new year. Who else has a Drupal tattoo?
-
Another fantastic addition to 2.9 is the WordPress image editor. With this, you can edit an image inside WordPress, like cropping, flipping and do more magical stuff that no other blogging platform can do.
What I like most about 2.9 is the batch plugin update. You can update 5, 10 or even 20 plugins at the same time with just one click. Now that’s what makes WP2.9 really awesome!
-
Licensing
-
As director of intellectual property strategy for the Linux Foundation and an attorney at Choate Hall & Stewart, Karen Copenhaver knows a bit about open source software licensing. She recently spoke with Dr. Dobb’s editor in chief Jonathan Erickson.
Dr. Dobb’s: Are open source and public domain the same thing?
Copenhaver: Not at all. Open source licenses are granted by the copyright holder and the license is an exercise of the copyright. In order to enjoy the benefits of the license, you must comply with its terms. If you don’t comply with the license, you’re not licensed–and another word for unlicensed use is “infringement.”
-
If it wasn’t for technology, I’d be tempted to leave a note for future time travelers to please, somehow erase the years 1999-2009 from all memory and reality. But even though every other culture and category is weeping in its collective beer, the 2000s might go down in history as the best decade ever for technology!
-
“Today’s FTC announcement highlights the industry-changing impact of the GPU and the importance of our work,” he says. “Our innovation is making the PC magical and amazing again. I can now imagine the day when Intel can no longer block consumers from enjoying our creation and experience computing in a way we know is possible.”
-
The Obama administration “artfully pursues a policy of smiles and handshakes all around while undermining democratic forces through proxies whenever the opportunity arises.” Washington reserves its rawest deceits for the small countries of the Americas like Honduras and Haiti.
[...]
The Haitian government-under-US/UN-occupation has again excluded Haiti’s largest political party from participating in upcoming elections financed, orchestrated and supported by the United States and the International Community. This time, the February and March 2010 legislative elections where the 99 seats in the Parliament’s Chamber of Deputies will be at stake, along with, one-third (10) of the 30-member Senate seats.
-
Anyone who’s a regular Google search user will know that the only way to avoid the company tracking your online activities is to log out of Gmail or whatever Google account you use. Not any more.
-
Environment
-
While protests are expected to start later this week in Copenhagen, tens of thousands of people marched throughout Europe on Saturday calling on world leaders to reach an agreement to reduce emissions in Copenhagen. Protesters took to the streets in Belfast, Glasgow, Paris, Brussels, Berlin and London. The largest protest was in London, where organizers of the Stop Climate Chaos protest put the crowd total at 50,000. Participants in the march included Britain Climate and Energy Secretary Ed Miliband, actor Peter Capaldi and former BBC weather presenter Michael Fish.
-
Finance
-
The ex-wife of Wall Street magnate Steven Cohen, founder of the $13 billion hedge fund SAC Capital Advisors, has filed a civil racketeering suit against Cohen in which she accuses him of committing insider trading violations.
The suit, according to The New York Times, was filed Wednesday in federal district court in Manhattan under a civil version of RICO laws used mostly against organized crime figures. The suit accuses Cohen of understating his income during divorce proceedings and hiding money from his ex-wife, Patricia. She is seeking $300 million. Her attorney, Paul Batista, did not immediately return a call seeking comment. An attorney for Cohen could not immediately be located.
-
Citigroup’s planned exit from the bailout — like Bank of America’s earlier this month — would be welcome if the banks were the picture of health. But their main motive is to get out from under the bailout’s pay caps and other restraints. The Treasury Department’s approval is a grim reminder of the political power of the banks, even as the economy they did so much to damage continues to struggle.
-
Why has there been NO serious investigation of ANY kind of the recipient of such extraordinary taxpayer largesse? Why has virtually NOTHING been demanded of them? Why the unseemly rush to let them off the hook and let them “pay back the TARP”? This is completely unwarranted in the case of AIG, which has had its deal with the government retraded in AIG’s favor a full four times. Why has AIG at every turn gotten a better and better deal, each time at the public’s expense, and is now allowed to lobby that it should be freed of its obligations? No private sector lender would allow a troubled borrower that could not meet its commitments to renegotiate and get IMPROVED terms. The inability to meet the terms of the original funding (one on terms private sector lenders were willing to consider, and that per Sorkin, AIG itself proposed) only strengthens the case to continue with the original plan, which is to break up AIG and sell the pieces for what they can fetch. This is the course that would yield the highest returns to the public, and that program will not produce a systemic event, which should be the ONLY offsetting consideration. There is no business rationale to have an agglomeration of diverse insurance businesses, particularly one that has been as badly managed as AIG (Sorkin’s account also reveals a shocking lack of financial and operational controls).
-
AstroTurf
-
Kevin Wolf, a partner in the Washington office of Bryan Cave who raised money for President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, is the president’s pick for a top trade position.
-
Internet/Censorship/Web Abuse/Rights
-
I make no bones about my ferocity in support of open government. I believe religiously in the time-honored words spoken in 1933 by Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, “Sunlight is the greatest disinfectant.” I write about open meetings and public records issues at my Media Law blog and lobby around them on behalf of my state’s newspaper association.
[...]
Thus, it should surprise no one that I consider it outrageous that a coalition of Texas municipalities and elected officials have filed a federal lawsuit claiming they have a First Amendment right to conduct the public’s business in secret. The lawsuit, filed Monday in federal court in Pecos, by four Texas cities and 15 elected officials, alleges that the Texas Open Meetings Act violates officials’ free speech rights by preventing them from speaking in private on issues facing the public. No, I’m not making this up.
-
Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights
-
The video is not only an unwanted internet triumph – it has got the Jeunes Populaires into legal hot water. The group obtained permission to use the song, written and recorded by the French-Canadians Luc Plamondon and Christian St-Roch in 1976. By mistake, the video used another version, recorded recently by a Quebec singer, Marie-Mai. Legal negotiations are in progess.
Joerg Heilig, Sun Microsystems Senior Engineering Director talks about OpenOffice.org 05 (2004)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
12.20.09
Posted in News Roundup at 10:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
The Linux® technology, development model, and community have all been game-changing influences on the IT industry, and all we can really do is stand back and look at it all, happy to have been along for the ride for developerWorks’ first 10 years. The Linux zone team has put together this greatly abbreviated collection of things that stand out in our minds as having rocked the world of Linux in a significant way.
Much too much has happened with Linux in the last 10 years to do anything like a complete job of listing the important events and technological advances surrounding this operating system. But nevertheless, in celebration of our 10th birthday, the Linux zone team looks back and presents to you some major milestones, why they matter, and what we wrote about them. Please to enjoy.
-
Currently I think that, until Linux came along, the normal pc user didn’t have a choice in operating systems. They had windows and whether they liked it or not they were stuck with it. Now that Linux has evolved into a useful package which anybody can use, people do have a viable choice and they are choosing it.
Tell us. Do you use windows only because you didn’t think you had a choice? Now that you have a choice and you can choose to use Linux, BSD or windows, has that available choice effected your decision? Do you think differently about your operating system now that you know there are alternatives?
-
I know this is extreme, but I’m far from the only person offering this advice. Firefox, running off a bootable copy of Linux on a CD, USB flash drive or SD memory card can be your best friend. For more, see my trio of articles on this at eSecurity Planet:
* Consider Linux for Secure Online Banking August 2009
* Windows and Online Banking: A Dangerous Mix October 2009
* Online Banking: Taking Issue With The New York Times December 2009
There are so many choices and options. Hopefully this list will help you prioritize your time and money.
-
Applications
-
Packages are available on arora-browser.org.
Over the past year when compiling with Qt 4.6 Arora had been using a number of new API’s. Shortly before 4.6.0 was released all the new API’s went through several rounds of API reviews and were improved. Shortly after the changes were made Arora’s code has been updated to reflect the new api. This is also why 0.10.1 doesn’t build on the older Qt 4.6 release candidate for those who have seen that build errors.
-
-
Docky an AWN look-alike hits the road all alone. Formerly integrated with GNOME Do, Docky is now an independent application that has maintained many of its goodies like the in-built plug-ins and hopes to bring in more. This application is still at an early alpha level but it’s worth a try as its even very stable for an alpha.
-
Instructionals
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Most of the modern Linux distros can easily detect & mount external drives automatically. In extremely rare case they may fail to mount. At such times, knowing how to manually mount the external drives will come handy. This simple guide will show you to mount external drives like pendrive, external hard-disks, card reader etc in Linux.
-
The Day of Ubuntu wallpaper is a beautiful and subtle transitioning wallpaper that makes your desktop scene of a tree in a field change with the passing of time. To complement this effect I’ve written a conky configuration that changes colour along with it.
-
Games
-
-
Team Allita, Inc. is today announcing the Andromeda release of Dread Moon Linux along with a support site at http://dreadmoon.com/. Dread Moon is a remix of Ubuntu 9.04 that provides a complete Linux development environment for game and multi-media developers. This release is primarily intended to eliminate a major roadblock to the development of games and multimedia applications under Linux that is a consequence of the fact that many of the related software libraries are not available as installable packages.
-
Graphical computer games are a part of software, even free software. They are fun and are useful for making the free software user happier.
Michael will be demonstrating 100% free software graphical games on 100% free software system. There are lots of free software graphical games. Unfortunately, many are not in a suitable state of completion, are not good games or require non-free video drivers. The talk will show top quality free software graphical games that work well on free video drivers.
-
-
United Electronic Industries (UEI) released Version 2.0 of its UEIPAC Programmable Automation Controller. Some of the new features of the popular Linux-based controller are:
-
Android
-
The big issue remaining is price, and so far we’re not sure exactly what sort of MRSP Notion Ink expect their Android Tegra tablet to command. The general consensus seems to be that a $300 price point is roughly what the market expects; however we’re not sure everything on the smartpad’s spec-sheet could be brought in for that price, at least not without carrier subsidies. We’ll update with more information when we have it, together with video.
-
Before, we have featured here several killer apps for Android. Now that there are a growing number of third-party applications that are made for the Android platform, let’s take a look at a few of them.
The following are some of the best Android apps that you can get for free…
-
Nokia
-
The N900 is Nokia’s most hyped phone this year, running on the Linux-based Maemo OS. Does it show that Symbian should be scrapped or is it just another touch screen disappointment? We review the N900 to find out.
Nokia’s recent news that it may make the move from Symbian to Maemo for all its smartphones won’t come as a disappointment to those who have been tut tutting over Symbian’s antiquated S60 OS.
-
On the first note, Nokia’s N900 is a highly successful handset that came in the market. It is full packaged smartphone comprised with speedy multitasking, complete range of applications desired, big screen and large storage capacity. The only things which slightly letdown in the handset are it’s less than pocket able size and shirk keyboard.
-
Sub-notebooks
-
The first Sri Lankan project of the internationally lauded One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Foundation was officially launched on Thursday with “over 400″ primary school children being presented OLPC XO laptops “personally” by the country’s President, Mahinda Rajapaksa, according to a statement by the local arm of OLPC.
-
-
Abstract: In the early days of information technology (IT), computers were delivered with operating systems and basic application software already installed, without additional cost, and in editable (source code) form. But as software emerged as a stand-alone product, the independent software vendors (ISVs) that were launched to take advantage of this commercial opportunity no longer delivered source code, in order to prevent competitors from gaining access to their trade secrets. The practice also had the (intended) result that computer users became dependent on their ISVs for support and upgrades. Due to the increasingly substantial investments computer users made in application software, they also became “locked in” to their hardware and software vendors’ products, because of the high cost of abandoning, or reconfiguring, their existing application software to run on the proprietary operating system of a new vendor. In response, a movement in support of “free software” (i.e., programs accompanied both by source code as well as the legal right to modify, share and distribute that code) emerged in the mid 1980s. The early proponents of free software regarded the right to share source code as an essential freedom, but a later faction focused only on the practical advantages of freely sharable code, which they called “open source.” Concurrently, the Internet enabled a highly distributed model of software development to become pervasive, based upon voluntary code contributions and globally collaborative efforts. The combined force of these developments resulted in the rapid proliferation of “free and open source software” (FOSS) development projects that have created many “best of breed” operating system and application software products, such that the economic importance of FOSS has now become very substantial. In this article, I trace the origins and theories of the free software and open source movements, the complicated legal implications of FOSS development and use, and the supporting infrastructural ecosystem that has grown up to support this increasingly vital component of our modern, IT based society.
-
I know the holidays are drawing near and you are twiddling your thumbs, bored, not knowing what to do now that you already bought and wrapped all the presents and sent all the cards. 
Well, never fear! I have just the thing to keep you from falling asleep at your keyboard while watching animated snowfall.
-
As part of its strategy to help firms build public and private data clouds that are open and interoperable, Sun Microsystems has unveiled a set of open source cloud security tools.
-
JP Morgan Chase led the way by open-sourcing its AMQP project. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange has also jumped into the fray with Linux. Reuters has its OpenCalais project, a project that is even being used here at CNET.
And so on. It’s happening. It’s real. And for those enterprises that jump into this third phase of open-source participation, the benefits promise to be palpable.
-
Simons: The OpenSocial community is quite active. The Apache Shindig project is also quite active. The OpenSocial specification 1.0 (it’s on v0.9 currently) should be released in January 2010.
-
After the online CAT’s huge debacle on debut, the IIMs are reportedly planning to use Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) for next year’s test. FOSS will substitute the proprietary software in use right now to avoid system crashes in the future.
This year’s CAT faced crash issues mostly due to attacks by viruses like Conficker and W32.NIMDA that hit several exam centres and slowed down systems which eventually led to cancellations at some centres.
-
We’re going to look at 10 of the most intriguing open-source operating systems in this brave new world. In most cases these are available as CD ISO images that you can burn to CD-Rs and boot up for testing if you fancy it.
Alternatively, a simpler approach is to use a PC emulator such as VirtualBox or Qemu. With these and similar tools you can use ‘.iso’ image files (or ‘.flp’ floppy disc images) as virtual drives, so there’s no need to write any physical media.
-
FSF/FSFE/GNU
-
The Free Software Foundation Bulletin from December 2009, presented here for viewing online, or for download as a PDF file.
-
Openness
-
EU access to documents laws should be widened to cover all European institutions, bodies and agencies following the adoption of the Lisbon Treaty, MEPs said yesterday (17 December), criticising the European Commission for failing to update the rules.
-
Given that the OU is a publication house, publishing research and teaching materials as a way of generating income, I wonder if there is an opportunity for the Library to support the research publication process providing specialist support for research authors, including optimising them for discovery!
-
For years, the free culture world was resolutely focused on building its eclectic array of commons projects — free software, open-access journals, wikis, and pools of creative works using Creative Commons licenses. History may record that the free culture reached a turning point in Barcelona, Spain, in November 2009. At the Free Culture Forum, a conference that just concluded this week, free culture activists from about twenty countries came together to assert a shared political and policy agenda.
-
Background: these videos were made at US taxpayer expense, and they are in the public domain. However, they aren’t distributed for free by the National Archives; instead they’re sold through Amazon as a money-maker for the government, which charges you to get access to the stuff you already own and paid for. The Archives get a minuscule amount of money by doing this: $3,273.66 over the past two years! In order to make a measly three grand, the National Archives have closed off the entire USA’s access to its video treasures.
-
Programming
-
Macraigor Systems has ported their proprietary On-Chip Debug Technology (OCDemon), GNU Tools Suite and Eclipse Ganymede/Galileo platform to the ARM Cortex-A8 processor. The Cortex-A8 is ARM’s first superscalar processor featuring technology for enhanced code density and performance, NEON technology for multimedia and signal processing, and Jazelle RCT (Runtime Compilation Target) technology for high performance, power-efficient mobile devices.
-
Alisher Usmanov is nicknamed “the hard man of Russia,” but he’s good at seducing the softies in California’s tech community: An investment firm he backs lead a $180 million investment in Zynga, the gaming company that trafficked in scammy ads.
-
Google
-
Google, which is currently on one heck of a spending spree, is closing an acquisition of San Francisco based DocVerse, a service that lets users collaborate around Microsoft Office documents, we’ve heard from a source with knowledge of the deal. The purchase price is supposed to be around $25 million.
-
Google has released the source code of EtherPad, a Web-hosted word processor designed for real-time workgroup collaboration, in a move aimed at appeasing users of the product who complained about plans to discontinue it.
-
On the latest This Week in Google, we talked about many of Google’s product announcements and enhancements and though none on its own was earthshattering, as we added them up, I started to see synchronicity approaching — all the moreso last night when TechCrunch reported that Google’s negotiating to buy Yelp.
I see a strategy emerging that has Google profoundly improve search by better anticipating our intent and then moving past search to build hegemony in local and mobile (which will come to mean the same thing).
-
Police State
-
Conflicts with EU free movement rules have thrown the UK’s £1.2 billion electronic borders program into disarray.
-
The names of nearly a million people who have not been convicted or cautioned for any crime will continue to be stored on the police national computer, even though the government is changing the law so that their DNA profiles are deleted.
The revelation has provoked outrage among human rights groups who warn that it could affect the job prospects of the innocent. They fear that whenever an employer carries out an “enhanced criminal records” check on a potential employee, the system would flag up the fact that the person had been arrested.
-
Environment
-
As the holidays approach we will probably be highlighting some of our better content from years past. The below essay, on the day of Fed Chairman Bernanke’s reappointment, is perhaps an apppropriate example of such. Originally from May 2008 the essay is written by Herman Daly, who popularized the term “Steady State Economy” over 3 decades ago. (Professor Daly subsequently contributed another TOD essay on the credit crisis). Just as Paul Volcker’s recent comments are a refreshing departure from the garbage of Greenspan (who has been saying that market reflation creates its own wealth),
-
The UN climate summit reached a weak outline of a global agreement in Copenhagen tonight, falling far short of what Britain and many poor countries were seeking and leaving months of tough negotiations to come.
-
Internet/Censorship/Web Abuse/Rights
-
China wants to meter all internet traffic that passes through its borders, it has emerged.
The move would require international agreement – but it is being discussed by the United Nations body in charge of internet standards.
-
Today I received the following communication via email from one of Nottingham City Council’s senior solicitors.
-
Nottingham City Council has made the unprecedented step of threatening a critical local blogger via its solicitors. In a letter sent to the author of the Nottingham City Council LOLs (NCCLOLs) blog, solicitor Jon Ludford-Thomas states that the blog “contains personal, derogatory comments regarding a number of [the City Council's] councillors and employees that could cause distress to those individuals.” It requests that the author “remove these personal, derogatory comments from ncclols and refrain from posting similar such comments on ncclols or elsewhere on the internet.”
-
Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights
-
A new survey carried out on behalf of the BPI in the UK indicates that despite best efforts, P2P use is not in decline. As the industry continues to drag its feet when it comes to competing against other suppliers of music online, many consumers are branching out and turning to several alternative methods for acquiring their sounds.
-
Since moving to the US and started to write for TechCrunch, I now have more people reading my words each week in North America than I do in the UK. Every week I delight in annoying commenters by promoting my war-of-the-worlds-winning book, to the point where people seem genuinely upset when I miss an opportunity to do so. And yet barely a day goes by without someone telling me they tried to find my book in the US, only to be disappointed that – due to publishing’s ridiculous obsession with territories – it’s only available outside North America. “It’s available on the Kindle” I say. “Pft” they reply, “I don’t have a Kindle”. In most cases I end up emailing them a PDF – a distribution model that doesn’t really scale.
-
The Vatican made a declaration on the protection of the figure of the Pope on Saturday morning. The statement seeks to establish and safeguard the name, image and any symbols of the Pope as being expressly for official use of the Holy See unless otherwise authorized.
Joerg Heilig, Sun Microsystems Senior Engineering Director talks about OpenOffice.org 05 (2004)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
12.19.09
Posted in News Roundup at 8:09 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
Carbon Mountain is redefining the way Linux
is used in the Data Center with an innovative
new Hypervisor Platform, KaOS™.
-
In particular, the online contract worker marketplace said 2010 is shaping up to be a hot year for developers with PHP, HTML, CSS, WordPress and Adobe Flash skills, as well as designers with Photoshop expertise. Demand for those skilled in the MySQL database also cracked a Elance’s top-ten list of 2010′s most requested skills.
-
Linux Foundation President, Jim Zemlin, will continue to push his notion of “Linux everywhere” for the new year. He pointed out that Linux is the heart of connected televisions, cameras, set top boxes, netbooks, smartphones, video games, tablet PCs, smart homes, automotive, GPS, and much more.
-
Desktop
-
Good looks was never supposed to be a priority for Linux apps. It wasn’t so long ago that we seemed to be struggling to get even basic eye-candy such as anti-aliased fonts to work on the Linux desktop, but things have changed almost beyond recognition.
It’s now fair to say that the Linux desktop is at the forefront of visual effect, a cornucopia of eye-candy overflowing on to your desktop. And with a few tweaks, it can look even better.
-
Linux boots up faster than Windows and has a snappy feel. With Ubuntu on my notebook, for instance, double clicking a 1 mb Word document takes 15 seconds to start Open Office and open the document. Using Microsoft Word in Vista takes 50 seconds. In both systems the task is much faster when run a second time, possibly due to caching – two seconds for Linux and six for Vista.
No OS is perfect, but I’ve found Linux to be fast, stable, and secure. While I still use Windows for a few specific programs, Linux offers greater peace of mind in everyday use – especially when online.
-
As you can, we can save lots of money in the basics by taking the Linux route, versus the mainstream-friendly Windows path.
Grand total for a full-featured operating system, and robust office-suite:
Windows = $349.94
Linux = $0.00
-
Kernel Space
-
-
Graphics Stack
-
As a result of the MPX support in the mainline X.Org Server, the Interactive Computing Lab has produced a new video to show off this support as they had informed us this morning. In the video (below) they are using Fedora 12 with its X Server 1.7 and Linux 2.6.31 kernel.
-
AMD’s Richard Li recently introduced a commit that enables GL2 and there has been other AMD/ATI 3D work going on too. The Radeon Feature Matrix has also been updated to reflect the GLSL support now being mostly done for the ATI Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 series and its OpenGL 2.0 compatibility.
-
Applications
-
The Wine development release 1.1.35 is now available.
What’s new in this release:
* Support for OLE transacted storage.
* Better certificate checking on secure connections.
* More progress on the 16-bit separation.
* Left 4 Dead 2 DRM really supported now.
* MSI performance improvements.
* 64-bit fixes in debugger support.
* Various bug fixes.
-
Remember the last time I said elements was ported? Well, turns out I lied. It only compiled and loaded, then I went off to study for exams, totally forgot about it and in reality it was really really broken. I had to spend about 3 days fixing it.
-
We have received confirmation from Unigine Corp that with Catalyst 9.12 for Linux now released with its proper OpenGL 3.2 support and bug-fixes, this paves the way for Unigine Heaven to be released possibly as soon as next week.
-
The interface is amazing and simple, if I were to recommend any ripper to a first time Linux user or a person well versed in Linux I would submit this, even experienced Linux users will have their productivity increased through it’s simple lay out.
I think one last thing I should mention is that after you are done making your favorite movie even better is that you can then burn it back DVD for play in any DVD player.
-
Instructionals
-
-
-
In the fall of the year 2000, Stanford University first released the Folding @ Home project to the public, which allowed household computers the ability to contribute to cancer research. Now, nearly a decade later, there are roughly 250,000 regular contributors to the project and over 2,000,000 that have ever contributed at all. This article by Christer Edwards outlines the benefits of contributing to Folding @ Home as well as how to begin contributing yourself.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
GIMP
-
Desktop Environments
-
Among the broad selection of software offered in the KDE Software Compilation is Parley, an application for vocabulary training. Recently people from Vox Humanitatis came in and provided a set of vocabulary data files for Parley for less known languages. This piqued our curiosity, so we did an interview with Sabine Emmy Eller, CCO of Vox Humanitatis.
-
-
So how do free software projects develop and host web services? Do they use business models like advertising to be self sustaining? Do they start foundations like the GNOME Foundation that will run as a nonprofit but make enough money of the hosted version to at least cover expenses? Or will all hosted services be essentially startup companies done by free software developers hoping to create a successful company?
-
-
Releases (Also BSD and Solaris)
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
1.2.3 release is now available! This is a maintenance release in the 1.2.x series, bringing an updated FreeBSD base, some minor enhancements, some bug fixes, and a couple security updates. We’ve been waiting a few weeks in anticipation of a FreeBSD security advisory for the SSL/TLS renegotiation vulnerability, which came last week and allowed us to finalize the release.
-
-
Red Hat Family
-
Debian Family
-
For Ubuntu 10.04 in fact they would like a 10 second boot time for Intel netbook hardware. Not only are they speeding up the boot process, but they are also working to beautify the boot process with Plymouth (video). For this article we checked out the boot performance with a Samsung NC10 that had an after-market OCZ SSD and 2GB of RAM along with a stock Dell Mini 9. Starting off, below are the Dell Mini 9 boot chart results for clean installations of Ubuntu 9.10 and then Ubuntu 10.04 Alpha 1.
-
-
Audio file support is limited to MP3 and Audible, and the music player, such as it is, does nothing more than play MP3 files in the order they happen to be in the Kindle’s music folder. There is no UI of any sort to manage music content but you can sync content via an MTP media player. Both the music player and text-to-voice feature are currently housed in the “Experimental” menu, which suggests they may be improved by future firmware updates.
[...]
Assuming you plan on buying all your books from Amazon, won’t miss a decent music player and don’t have any ePub files you want to read, the Kindle should satisfy. The screen is good, it’s easy to use and, file support aside, the features list is up with the best of the competition. The problem is that if you live outside the US, Amazon will happily take your money but treat you like a second-class citizen. And if you do buy your books from Amazon, you’re stuck with its e-readers no matter what else comes along from the likes of Sony, iRiver or Samsung.
-
The EeeBot project will focus on building content and services around the robot to subsidize the cost of the hardware and make them more affordable to families. Technologies involved in the project include human robot interaction, voice and visual technologies, as well as positioning and navigation, in addition to software and other hardware.
-
Synology America Corp. is shipping a two-bay network-attached storage (NAS) device, offering up to 4TB of sharable storage for home and entry-level business users. The Linux-based DS210j is equipped with an 800MHz processor, a gigabit Ethernet port, two USB ports, and version 2.2 of Synology’s DNLA-compliant Disk Station Manager software.
-
Hey, we just discovered that our very own DIY BoxeeBox has made LifeHacker.com’s list of the “Most Popular DIY Projects of 2009.”
-
THE ASUS EEE KEYBOARD might be the most desirable computer in a keyboard design, but it’s unlikely to be cheap once it launches considering all the little tweaks Asus had done to it since it was announced. Enter the NorhTec Gecko Surfboard, the $99 PC in a keyboard that runs Linux on a 1GHz x86 SoC. If you found the Eee Keyboard to be way too powerful for your needs, then look no further as the Gecko Surfboard won’t break any performance records.
-
Android
-
ACCORDING TO STATISTICS from Comscore, Google’s Android OS has made a quick and big impression on US mobile users.
User statistics compiled by the firm show that Android has had an impact on Americans already and is the second most popular platform for accessing social media sites and mobile media.
-
The Taiwanese government on Thursday announced support for a new project based on Google’s Android mobile operating system, one of a number of moves by Taipei this year to support Android.
-
AT&T, the exclusive U.S. distributor of Apple’s iPhone, is rumored to be adding an Android smartphone to its lineup. Named either the “Backflip” or the “Enzo” — previously known as the “Motus” — the device sports an unusual design. The Querty keyboard flips back behind the screen instead of sliding under it.
-
Sub-notebooks
-
I’ve only had limited time with two XOs in connected mode so far, but they are so easy to hook up via their built-in mesh networking that almost every activity can be shared between multiple students. This includes co-writing or drawing, or even controlling each others camera, or using the sonar sound activity to measure distance between machines. It really is the learning theory of connectivism personified in a device.
Even the Sugar OS that they run has an interface of brilliant simplicity, with every activity running full screen and auto-saving, while a ‘journal’ of every activity they have done is accessible with just one button push. I’m looking forward to using them outside regularly thanks to the special LCD screen they have that allows full readability in sunlight.
-
Thomas Lottmann is providing experimental Mandriva-based Moblin LiveCD images. Theses images are provided in order to help testing Mandriva Moblin implementation.
-
With regard to Arrington’s claims that the company was not financially stable, FG said it was a properly capitalized start up that has received $3 million in funding to date. Additionally, the company claimed it has numerous international angel investors and said it is preparing to announce a new round within the coming weeks.
-
I believe it should be an obvious idea that clean air is good. Telling the world they want to breathe less pollutantsis a lot like telling everyone that free and open source software is in their best interest. Even though it seems like common sense to the believers, it is inconveniently inconsistent with the way of life in economic powerhouses like the United States.
Most computing environments contain an overwhelming quantity of Microsoft software. Even if the products we use every day are tainted, nobody wants to believe it. Instead users, even those who prefer open source, silently stick to status-quo. It’s easier to shell out $100 here and there to ignore the issue.
Open source software is an ideal which is competing against tangible products that come in shrink-wrapped boxes. All of the answers on how sharing code with your neighbor his commercially healthy are detailed in the 1985 GNU Manifesto. That was almost 25 years ago, why the world does the political agenda of software freedom seem radical? The answer is that proprietary software companies have been pushing their counter-propaganda.
-
During summer of 2009 I received an invitation to explain how Free Software can help developing countries at SFK09, the first Software Freedom Conference in Kosova. Here is why and how, after SFK09, some people continue to propose “Free as in Freedom” digital technologies as an important tool to solve the serious problem of people in Kosova (or any other country, really).
[...]
Besides the GNU Project and Linux, the Conference introduced what are probably the most relevant FLOSS/Open Culture projects for teenagers these days: Wikipedia, the Creative Commons and two projects already covered here at Stop! /Zona-M: “One Laptop per Child” and OpenStreetMap.
-
Audio
-
Chris DiBona drops back in for episode 100 to talk Google and open source.
-
A few weeks back I became aware that FLOSS Weekly started advertising for the Ford Sync product which is co-developed by Microsoft. I know Leo Laporte only cares about money. That’s fine, he’s a businessman and wants to make as much money as possible. Fair enough. I do think it’s atrociously bad taste to advertise for one of the most closed and predatory companies in the world on a show geared towards Free & Open Source users/supporters.
-
-
Topics for this podcast:
*2009 review and 2010 preview
*New CAOS survey and report – Climate Change
*Ups and downs in new round of GPL lawsuits
*Oracle-Sun-MySQL saga continues
-
Kudos
-
So I suggest taking Val’s Thank-You Meme a step further and take a minute to send a thank-you to your favorite FOSS project. Or three or ten or however many. It’s fast, easy, and encouraging. Just like Valerie said, on the Internet no one can see you nod, so consider taking that extra step to let some of our fine FOSS contributors know that you appreciate what they’re doing. And remember that’s not just developers, but packagers, artists, distro maintainers, people who help in forums, howto authors, Linux OEM vendors, independent consultants, and so on. We need all of us.
-
As a consumer, I’ve never really minded paying for software, and while I’m far from made of money, the free that interests me the most where open source software is concerned is the kind that lets me use said programs for what I want, without the fussiness and demands of a publisher on the other side of the planet getting in my way. Bluntly, I’d rather commercial publishers just said thanks and went on their way, rather than filling my in-box with junk.
To those, therefore, who work away on open source software: my thanks. Because even though the comments on message boards and suchlike may kid you otherwise, your work is appreciated. And your ethos most certainly is too…
-
Mozilla
-
The most important platform in 2010 for Mozilla might just be mobile. The Moz folks have been putting a lot of work into Fennec, which is finally nearing 1.0. A unified desktop and mobile strategy might help Mozilla quite a bit, but they’re going to be facing stiff competition — especially since two of the popular smartphone platforms have their own built-in Web browser. Mozilla might be able to level the playing field a bit on Android devices, but it’s hard to picture Apple giving any space in the app store to a competing browser.
-
Databases
-
Database giant Oracle expects European Commission antitrust watchdogs to give the thumbs up to the company’s multi-billion takeover bid for Sun Microsystems after Christmas.
-
CMS
-
The Japanese Fujifilm, with more than 75,000 employees the world’s largest photographic and imaging company, is using Drupal for a community site at http://www.myfinepix.com. It is a website where FinePix camera owners come together to share images, knowledge and inspiration.
-
BSD
-
FreeBSD is free; it can be downloaded, used and adapted without paying any fees, unlike other major operating systems. This is why the FreeBSD Foundation needs donations to be able to fund new projects and conferences.
-
Licensing
-
On the heels of a recent lawsuit over GPLv2 violations filed against 14 companies by the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), open source software service provider OpenLogic has launched a service that helps companies ensure compliance with GPL licenses. The Open Source Fulfillment Center offers services including consulting, application audits, license analysis, and fulfillment support.
-
In the past two installments, I suggested a basic icon theme to describe the important points of a variety of Free Software licenses, applied those icons to the top ten most popular Free Software licenses and found that several of them are “the same” in terms of icons — which suggests that either what the two licenses does is roughly the same (so we can consider them equivalent) or that there is a distinguishing characteristic that hasn’t been taken into account yet. The second installment took a close look at two licenses that were “the same” and illustrated a third option: that I’d applied the icons wrongly.
-
Programming
-
Nokia updated its Qt application framework to version 4.6 on December 1st, adding support for several operating systems — most notably its own mobile platforms: the recently open source Symbian and the Linux-based Maemo. Qt 4.6 introduces new graphics features, new input methods, and updates to the QtScript scripting engine. Along with the framework itself, Nokia updated its cross-platform Qt integrated development environment (IDE) Qt Creator to support the new features and new target platforms.
-
-
Python is an open-source, dynamically typed, object-oriented programming language that can be used in nearly the entire range of technology applications. It offers an easy learning curve and access to a vast array of libraries.
-
Now that this decade is coming to an end, we thought it would be a good time to list the very worst Internet disasters that happened between 2000 and 2009. And believe us, there have been some really big ones. Some you may remember, and some may be new to you, but they all affected a huge amount of Internet users.
-
-
More misconduct has been alleged against Arizona Republican Party executive director Brett Mecum, who is now the subject of a criminal complaint alleging he used the Republican’s voter database to stalk a young female graduate student.
-
Environment
-
Over the past two weeks, citizens of countries all over the world have come to Copenhagen for the UN COP-15 climate negotiations. Many have engaged in peaceful, nonviolent protest, trying to push world leaders to sign a meaningful deal that will save our planet for future generations.
Rather that giving them the space, the Danish police have used extremely heavy-handed and cruel mass arrest tactics, potentially violating European human rights laws. The Danish police are out of control, and they need to be held accountable.
-
Over the past week, the Danish capital has welcomed delegates, corporate lobbyists, and representatives of mainstream, moderate NGOs with open arms; however, they’ve shown a somewhat uglier face towards activists advocating climate justice.
-
I walked into the Klimaforum hall and saw a group of newly arrived Bolivians organizing themselves near the entrance. I had just read some great quotes from South American leaders–Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez saying if the climate crisis was a banking problem it would be already solved, and Bolivia’s Evo Morales calling “shame” on America, as he compared the 687 billion dollar defense budget of the U.S. to the 10 billion America is offering to finance the third world climate budget being negotiated now at the Conference.
-
Finally, I was accosted by a large penguin holding a submachine gun and holding a sign with the demand “Move It!” He told me that his home had melted but now he has a gun and is headed for some bars in Copenhagen looking for ice machines to bring back to Antarctica.
-
Australia, the world’s largest global coal-exporting country, was careful to avoid any discussion of its own self-interest, preferring to hype the technology and its global potential. Citing a draft report presented to the Executive Board of the CDM, the Australian representative claimed that it “clearly shows that CCS is a mature technology that will be progressively deployed across developed and developing countries over the coming decade”. He also claimed that “business and host governments need to receive a clear early signal before they commit to such large scale early investments. We should send that signal at Copenhagen.”
-
Finance
-
Drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis, the United Nations’ drugs and crime tsar has told the Observer.
Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were “the only liquid investment capital” available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result.
-
AstroTurf
-
But the main reason could be that, over his political career, Senator Lieberman has accepted more than $1 million from large, Connectucut-based health insurance companies, a figure which led the New York Times to dub him the “Million Dollar Man.” In his 2006 re-election campaign, Lieberman ranked second in the Senate in accepting insurance industry contributions.
-
In 2005, when Democrats vowed to filibuster several judicial nominees of President George W. Bush, Republican Leader Bill Frist threatened a “nuclear option,” declaring such use of the filibuster unconstitutional. Later, with Democrats in charge, Republicans demanded a filibuster as a prerequisite to any vote. Meaning: even if you have the support of 51 senators necessary to pass a bill, you can’t schedule a vote unless you first deliver 60 senators. That’s how just one man can now prevent senators from doing their job. It’s in the interest of both parties to end that potential for abuse, once and for all.
-
Internet/Censorship/Web Abuse/Rights
-
Yota denied that it was blocking those sites. But Denis Sverdlov, chief executive of WiMax operator Skartel, which runs the Yota brand, did acknowledge that Yota blocks access to sites that are classified as extremist by the Justice Ministry. Because of that, Yota users cannot open the Chechen rebel web site Kavkazcenter.com.
-
The city issued the order under its graffiti bylaw, but it comes in the wake of a debate over a controversial city sign bylaw that opponents feared would allow officials to stifle anti-Olympic expression.
-
THE Australian Olympic Committee is preparing legal action against a company behind the Federal Government’s report into the future of Australian sport.
The Crawford report, which last week called for a shift in funding away from Olympic sports towards professional and ”national pysche” sports, paid for advice from a company part-owned by former AFL star James Hird.
The company, Gemba Group, criticised the AOC, comparing it unfavourably to the US Olympic Committee in its report to the panel of experts.
-
Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights
-
The Digital Economy Bill would give the Government the power to control the internet access of UK citizens by ministerial order, bypassing Parliament and without an adequate right of appeal, according to one legal expert.
Barrister Francis Davey has examined clause 11 of the Bill and believes that it puts extraordinary powers to control the information available to UK internet users in the hands of the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, currently Lord Mandelson.
-
The number of people downloading music illegally is not decreasing, despite the availability of new legal services, according to a music industry research.
-
Still, what strikes me as interesting is that BPI still keeps insisting that this is a “problem,” without any evidence that this is true. The only real “problem” is the failure of the record labels that BPI represents to adjust their business models. If they did that, there wouldn’t be much of a problem at all. But, the labels don’t want to do that. They want the government to rescue them and to pretend they can keep doing business they way they always did.
-
BUCKIE Thistle may not enjoy the sophisticated multi-camera TV coverage afforded to more illustrious clubs.
But for two years David Smith has stoically filmed his beloved Buckie and posted the footage on YouTube for the enjoyment of the elderly, housebound and loyal fans off-shore and abroad.
The ten-minute clips, complete with team credits, have earned a cult following on the internet, but the Highland League has now threatened the schoolboy with a £5,000 fine for breach of copyright.
-
A federal judge has ruled the owners of six Tucson Chuy’s Mesquite Broiler restaurants must pay almost $49,000 for playing songs without permission.
-
So, with all that, you’d have to imagine that if he found out about a company associated with the Olympics copied someone’s blog post without first getting their permission, he’d be pretty upset. But what if that company was NBC Universal? Reader JC points us to the news that NBC Universal’s Olympics website has been caught copying a blog post and then when alerted to it, rather than removing the content, it just removed the writer’s name. It looks like the attention this story has received has resulted in NBC Universal putting her name back on the story, but the story remains on the site.
-
When I wrote about my concerns a year ago, my readers took me to task. “For all you know,” went their counterargument, “the illegal copies are just advertising for you; people will download them, try them out, then go by the physical book. Either that, or they’re being downloaded by people who would not have bought your book anyway. Why don’t you try a controlled experiment and see?”
Well, it sounded like it could be a very costly experiment. But I agreed. My publisher, O’Reilly, decided to try an experiment, offering one of my Windows books for sale as an unprotected PDF file.
After a year, we could compare the results with the previous year’s sales.
The results? It was true. The thing was pirated to the skies. It’s all over the Web now, ridiculously easy to download without paying.
The crazy thing was, sales of the book did not fall. In fact, sales rose slightly during that year.
Joerg Heilig, Sun Microsystems Senior Engineering Director talks about OpenOffice.org 04 (2004)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
« Previous Page — « Previous entries « Previous Page · Next Page » Next entries » — Next Page »
Content is available under CC-BY-SA