Summary: The 75th episode of this nearly two year old show
This short episode speaks about the “Ogg only” policy we’ve adopted after suggestions from Richard Stallman (MP3 is a patent problem). I explain that Techrights came into existence/need because of the first software patents deal against GNU/Linux, namely the Microsoft-Novell deal of 2006 (5 years later Microsoft reaffirmed this relationship with SUSE) Ever since, Techrights has been collecting daily links and it regularly remarks on some. Any links needing extensive commentary on them (usually countering disinformation or responding to baseless attacks on Free software) turn into articles which are then researched on. As I explain in this recording, several blogs and even some domain names (with active sites) have been dedicated to just attacking Techrights, the messengers in particular. The reality is, behind the scenes there are transparent discussions with various well-regarded individuals, who, although they may not be publicly associating with the site and stand behind all of its messages, have been actively reading it and sharing links to it for years. Some translated articles and corresponding (manually produced) hard copies that were handed out to readers helped raise the issues and some made banners with the graphics for public protest, at times leaflets too, to raise awareness with.
When it comes to TechBytes, Tim is expected to be back soon. We were surprised by the quickly-gained popularity of thus audio show, which some people say they listen to in the car, at work, etc. We always recorded without scripting and always in one single take, essentially unedited. This one recording is no exception. At the end I added the track “You Do Run” by Cocktail Slippers.
Summary: Analysis of the latest patent troll that Microsoft/Nokia give smartphone ammunition to; a word about Digia
Microsoft has got Nokia by its sack, but in order not to arouse too much suspicion (keeping regulators at bay [1, 2) Microsoft has been using proxies. We shall come to that later and we will also mention SCO tomorrow.
“This has helped distract from a backroom deal that weaponises a troll.”So the big news right now is that “Nokia, the one time king of the mobile phone market, really seems to have no clue when it comes to open source. These are the same geniuses that killed MeeGo (and all its iterations) abandoning Linux in favor of Windows.”
This has helped distract from a backroom deal that weaponises a troll. It is an issue which we’ll come to in a moment. As many people point out, the orphaned Qt [1, 2] is being instantaneously passed to another entity, as Nokia made assurances long ago:
For those you who are keeping count of Nokia’s mistakes, here’s another one to add to your list : Nokia plans to spurn of it’s Qt Business to Digia.
Digia, a Finnish software company, had already acquired the Qt commercial licensing business from Nokia last year. It has now finally decided to go the whole nine yards and buy the entire Qt software business from Nokia.
Following the recent announcement that Digia will be acquiring the complete Qt business from Nokia, Digia has set out its plans in a letter to the KDE Community.
Nokia, which ruled the mobile phone market only a few years ago, but made huge missteps in not executing quickly on criticial open source initiatives, is now selling off one of its only open source jewels. In 2011, the company began selling some assets related to Qt, a popular framework for mobile application developers, and now Digia is acquiring all of QT from Nokia. The sales serves as a denoument to Nokia’s recent woes in the mobile market, many of which came of not responding to open source trends quickly enough.
In Digia’s statement on the Qt acquisition, Sebastian Nyström, head of Nokia Strategy, said this:
Some readers have asked us whether there is a link to Microsoft, but we could find none. In fact, the most prominent link we found between Microsoft and Nokia’s offshoots/proxies is patent trolls who immune Microsoft/Windows against litigation while exposing rivals like Android. As Slashdot puts it, “Nokia Feeds a Patent Troll” (that’s the headline).
This shows how the Qt news contributed to distraction. Based on this report, Nokia is assembling and arming another patent troll, perhaps this time too with Microsoft involvement (which Microsoft admitted to).
To quote the summary: “In case anyone missed the other Nokia news: on the same day they announced the sale of Qt to Digia, they also sold 500 patents to Vringo. Vringo, a video ring tone company, recently merged with patent portfolio company Innovate/Protect which includes Donald Stout, the founder of patent holding company NTP, on its board. Forbes refers to NTP as ‘a patent troll which milked Research In Motion for $612.5 million in a patent infringement settlement reached in 2006.’ As Eric Savitz writes in the article, ‘Vringo decided to basically turn itself into a patent troll.’”
“Sadly enough, Nokia is arming Android-hostile trolls and they too may be targeting Android, but “targeting” in another sense of the word.”Digia seems to be more benign than some readers have told us (worrying that it might be a liquidator or Microsoft proxy), but the patent troll sure seems troubling and oddly enoughsoftware patents foe Mark Cuban buys its stock. Is it another MOSAID in the making? Are Nokia and Microsoft spawning more and more Android-hostile trolls to elevate the cost of Android and create a burden for Google? Oracle lost its case, but the case continues, costing Google millions and acting as a deterrent against Android.
Based on reports of interest, “Nokia acquired Qt back in 2008 from its original developers, Trolltech. But since Nokia shifted its smartphone strategy away from Qt in favor of Microsoft’s Windows Phone, the future of the platform has been in question. Nokia last year denied that Qt was dead, but later said there would be no Qt for Windows Phone 7.”
It is said that Android will be targeted, so perhaps the Digia part has none of the same disturbing aspects that we find in the patent trolls. Sadly enough, Nokia is arming Android-hostile trolls and they too may be targeting Android, but “targeting” in another sense of the word. Android is, after all, the top dog now. █
Posted in Patents at 10:36 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: How out-of-tune the patent system has become, based on some of the latest news
THERE is a real issue going on when producing companies like RIM face possible death due to patents on software. The pro-patents press named the issue some days ago [1, 2], but it lacked criticism.
One new article, titled “Software Patent Dispute Costs RIM $147 Million (NASDAQ: RIMM),” does decent work. To quote this article, “Research in Motion has been found liable for $147.2 million in damages for infringing patents held by Mformation Technologies. Mformation sued RIM in federal court in San Francisco in 2008, accusing it of infringement of two patents. Mformation is a maker of mobile-device management software. The software in question is called BlackBerry Enterprise Server.
“Mformation claimed that during licensing discussions, it had disclosed details of the technology to RIM. The company said in its complaint that after declining to take a license, the BlackBerry maker modified its software to include the patented systems. Jurors determined that RIM software that allows companies to manage their workers’ BlackBerry devices remotely infringed on Mformation’s patents. The verdict came after a trial that lasted three weeks.”
“This is lunacy and the amount of money is staggering.”The patent system is rotten to its core and it’s not just about software patents; patents on life are another notable example. Monsanto, for example, is grabbing billions by polluting fields and claiming a monopoly over altered life, as explained here: “We’ve had plenty of stories over the years of Monsanto’s incredibly aggressive stance when it comes to its “Roundup Ready” patents. The company has now been awarded $1 billion from Dupont for infringing on of these patents. Now, here’s a case where we’re talking about competing companies, so perhaps no big deal, right? Except there’s one tidbit here that makes this interesting: Dupont never brought the product in question to market. So the “damages” to Monsanto would seem to be minimal… except in a court of law apparently.”
Here are the lawyers covering this as though it’s acceptable. In another case, the one of Brocade (essentially killed by the same vulture who killed Novell), a victory is declared where vast amounts of money are involved. To quote: “Brocade Communications Systems Inc. was awarded $112 million in damages in its intellectual property trial against rival A10 Networks Inc. on claims that the latter infringed on patents related to server load balancing software and equipment.”
“What about the cost of unethical monopolists like Monsanto? The parasitical nature of the patent system goes beyond trolls.”This is lunacy and the amount of money is staggering. When penalties verge billions of dollars (see Oracle’s case against Android) real products have their liability compromised. Often this is done for the enrichment of mere parasites, such as patent trolls or dying companies which are unable to make or sell products. Take Nokia for example. We are going to deal with it in the next post.
Apple boosters are blaming trolls while ignoring Apple’s behaviour and NBC [1, 2] gives exposure to Bessen et al. with the figures on the cost of patent trolls. To quote: “Patent trolling got the academic treatment from the Boston University School of Law in a recent study. The sum total cost in 2005 was only $6.7 billion.”
What about the cost of unethical monopolists like Monsanto? The parasitical nature of the patent system goes beyond trolls. The system needs to be changed. █
Based on the events of recent weeks, it very much looks like Microsoft is heading to make Windows a closed ecosystem (a la Apple). They want to make both the hardware and the OS and third-party applications can only be sold with their approval and only through their App Store (with a 30% commission to Microsoft).
With the upcoming release of Windows 8 in October, the computer world appears to be divided in its opinion of Microsoft’s new operating system. Following the release preview of Windows 8 a few months ago, some are excited about the new interface, while others feel it was built only to be more convenient for tablet or touchscreen users. If Windows 8 turns out to be another Vista, Linux is expected to eat another inch more of Microsoft’s market share.
When I initially switched to Linux from Windows, I was a Gentoo user, and I still recommend that distribution for anyone looking to learn more about how Linux actually works and is built. These days, however, I’m an Ubuntu user (12.04), simply because it mostly just works. I’m not in love with Unity, but then I’m not really a fan of any of the desktop user interfaces these days, OS X included.
The Allwinner A10 chipset – which features an ARM Cortex-A8 processor – currently powers a number of Android devices, including the MK802 PC on a stick, the ZaReason tablet and Hackberry A10 dev board.
I’m not a big Linux user, so I was surprised and impressed when I stumbled across StartOS today, the first Linux-based operating system from Chinese startup Ivali. StartOS is a Linux-based system that’s targeted at Chinese users and boasts simplicity and stability as its primary advantages.
Linux computer builder ZaReason is launching a thin and light laptop called the UltraLap 430 which has all the specs you’d expect from a modern ultrabook. But what sets it apart from pretty much every other ultrabook on the market is the fact that the UltraLap 430 ships with a Linux-based operating system rather than Windows.
You don’t have to be a Linux user, or even a nerd, to love Linus Torvalds. His arrogant and irreverant sense of humor draws scores of views, shares and upvotes on almost anything he says online.
He cares very little about what others think, and will publicly lambaste anyone he deems deserving. Which to be honest, appears to be most people.
From an abundant smorgasbord, we’ve chosen 14 of our favorite smackdowns from King Linus.
The order has come down from Paris. The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service has spoken and its word is final: No more leap seconds this year.
Continuing on from yesterday’s news about Ubuntu delaying their Wayland-based system compositor, a new Wayland LiveCD release, and a preview of where Wayland’s at today, Kristian Høgsberg confirmed his attendance for next month’s XDC2012 conference. He also added two items to the program:
The Khronos Group has announced the availability of version 3.0 of the OpenGL ES open mobile graphics interface specification, code-named “Haiti”, at this year’s SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles. OpenGL ES is the most important 3D graphics interface for SoC GPUs, which can be found in tablets and smartphones, and is supported by Google’s Android, Apple’s iOS and other systems. OpenGL ES 3.0 has been significantly improved compared to its predecessors but is still backwards compatible with ES 2.0.
One of the weaknesses in Windows Explorer, OS X Finder and a myriad of Linux file managers is the fact they insist on opening two separate windows to view two different folders or drives. If you’re frequently shunting files between two locations on your hard drive, one of the best things you can do is reach for a third-party file manager that lets you open a single window with two (or more) panes allowing you to set up source and destination locations quickly and easily.
Can video games art? This is a really dumb question. Of course they are. Or rather they can be. Anyone who would say no to this is wrong. Artists can choose to express themselves in just about any medium and this includes the interactive and the digital. Dismissing one for expression as invalid and unsuited to properly conveying creative ideas is silly.
That said, if you rephrase the question and ask whether or not the modern triple A mainstream releases are art, then no they are not. Or rather they are as much art as Michael Bay’s Transformers. They are commercial products first and foremost. They trade in the same distractions as Hollywood blockbusters: guns, sex and explosions. They are made to excite, titillate and provide the player with a quick adrenaline rush. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, but there is usually not much artistry involved. These games are to be consumed as entertainment, and if they do contain some deeper meaning, or give you reasons for contemplation it is usually just a nice bonus.
You know what I don’t miss? I don’t miss installing software from disks. Back in the olden tymes, when I had to walk to school barefoot and all that, software like WordPerfect would come on a stack of floppy disks and you’d have to sit there feeding them into the drive one by one for an hour. Infuriating!
Prior to commencing the weekend, the Enlightenment crew released a new round of alpha releases for EFL 1.7.
The updated Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL) this time around include Eina, Eet, Evas, Ecore, Embryo, Edje, Efreet, E_dbus, Eeze, Expedite, Evas Generic Loaders, Eio, Emotion, Ethumb, and Elementary.
The Open Group, the steward of the UNIX standards, has open sourced the CDE classic desktop for Unix under the LGPLv2 licence. The Common Desktop Environment and the Motif toolkit on which it is based, itself open sourced in 2000, became the de facto standard for Unix desktops in Unix’s commercial hay day in the 1990s. CDE broadened the concept of simple window managers configured by means of text files which had previously dominated the Unix world; it included a desktop offering integrated applications and graphical configuration tools.
Competition may be good for business, but competition among Linux desktops is currently so fierce that it may end up being to everyone’s detriment in the medium-term.
The developers at the GNOME project have published GNOME 3.5.5, the latest unstable development version of what will eventually become the stable 3.6 branch of GNOME. The new pre-release version implements more of the planned new features and goals, such as the new lock screen and new input methods for entering, for example, Japanese or Chinese characters.
Two months after the most recent update to the 4.8.x branch of the KDE Software Collection (KDE SC), the project has delivered the 4.8.5 stabilisation update to the software suite. Usually, these updates are provided at monthly intervals, but the release of KDE SC 4.9 most likely delayed the scheduled publication.
There were lot of voices against the replacement of categories with pagination, and that was another controversial feature originally planned for Gnome 3.6.
The former Google’s employee and currently Executive Director of Yorba, talks about developing with Gnome and he spots the strategies that a company should use to have profit by developing Open Source Desktop Applications.
Adam has an impressive bio in Google’s desktop projects and his company has already released 2 top quality Apps for Gnome; Shotwell and Geary.
The GNOME project, which is facing heavy criticism over usability issues, is to build a touch-capable ‘GNOME OS’ as a way of improving the overall experience for users and developers
There’s been plenty of excitement surrounding Firefox OS ever since Mozilla announced its first hardware partners earlier this year, but now it looks like there’s yet another open source operating system entering the scene.
The last version (4.4) of DSL came, I guess in 2008. Hence, in my article on lightweight Linux distros, I didn’t include DSL. But, now I have to include it. DSL 4.11 is here and boy! What a lightweight OS it is! I couldn’t imagine a fully functional distro with graphical desktop taking only 18-20 MB of RAM! Incredible!
These were reviews of Zorin OS 5 Core, Zorin OS 6 Lite and Zorin OS 6 Core. Also, there were guest posts from different authors who took part in the Zorin OS contest.
In addition to the Lite and Core versions, the Zorin team releases an Ultimate edition.
While the Core and Lite versions of Zorin OS are free as beer, Ultimate is not a free Operating System.
The next edition of Bridge Linux to be released is Bridge Light. This release also features the Terminator swap, a smaller iso, the new installer, updated README, and GRUB2 along with the system-wide features of 2012.8 which can be found here.
Patrick Volkerding received a tremendous bug reports after announcing Slackware 14.0 Beta and he compiled all those bug reports and fixed them in private along with the Core Team. When he sees it ready for public, it’s time to release thus Slackware 14 RC1 has been announced.
The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editor Meemaw. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.
The Scientific Linux (SL) project has announced the availability of version 6.3 of its Linux distribution. The new SL release is based on the sources of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.3 released six weeks ago. As usual, it therefore contains all of the features introduced in the most recent RHEL release which, in addition to bug fixes and optimisations, saw several new virtualisation features added.
Now after three years of effort, Deltacloud has finally hit its 1.0 release. A 1.0 release is usually a major milestone signifying that an open source project is mature and ready for consumption. In Deltacloud’s case, the effort has already been deployed and integrated into Red Hat’s commercial CloudForms effort that officially launched in June.
This simple tutorial will explain how to turn off discrete card on a Ubuntu laptop with two graphic cards. Discrete graphic card takes up more energy and the processor usage. If you seldom use the discrete card, follow the steps to turn it off.
It reports the system architecture you use, the version of popularity-contest you use and the list of packages installed on your system. For each package, popularity-contest looks at the most recently used files, and reports the filename, its last access time and last change time.
I recently reviewed Linux Mint 13 LTS “Maya” KDE, and I was quite pleased with it. My long-term review of the Xfce edition just ended, so this one will go for another 8 days. This will be the last such long-term review of the summer, because after this I am going home and won’t be back until just before the semester starts, at which point I probably will not be able to continue this.
After doing some research and testing for the last week I have arrived at the conclusion that Bodhi’s ARM branch will best serve our users by moving our core from Debian Wheezy ARMEL to utilize Debian Wheezy ARMHF. I’m not going to get into the technical difference between the two platforms here – just know that in general ARMHF is faster.
Peppermint OS 3 has been released. If you aren’t familiar with it, Peppermint OS is a cloud-oriented distribution. It’s based on Ubuntu 12.04 (it’s actually a fork of Lubuntu 12.04).
Unlike most other distributions, it’s geared toward letting you use your favorite web apps as well as desktop software. Web apps such as Editor by Pixlr run in the Ice SSB framework, which makes these applications a part of your desktop rather than running them in a browser. This makes them feel like they are running locally rather than in the cloud.
BeagleBone adopted by thousands for creative development of electronics and applications., – BeagleBone eliminates barriers with easy development on one-of-a-kind, credit-card-sized Linux computer platform based on ARM® Cortex™-A8 processor
Quite a co-incidence. We just published an article about managing your Nikon DSLR cameras using your Android devices, and here comes a rumor that Nikon is planning to announce Android based cameras.
Damn Small Linux is a light-weight operating system designed to run on older computers which might not have the speedy processors, large hard drives, or vast amounts of RAM available on newer systems.
The majority of Android tablets and mobile phones run on embedded processors based on a core licensed for ARM Inc. However, there are a small number of tablets which also run on the MIPS processors.
Cyanogenmod is an alternative Android firmware which can flashed to get software tweaks, performance optimizations and other additional customizations not possible with the stock Android provided with the phones.
It is extremely popular with geeks who like to tinker with Android based devices.
When the Android-based Ouya was announced last month, founder Julie Uhrman said she wanted the system to be more than just a game console, and it now has support for apps like Twitch.TV and Vevo music streaming. The non-gaming options on the console seem set to increase, as the team behind the popular XBMC media manager have pledged to bring the program to the system.
Since the HTC G1 introduced Android in October 2008, a multitude of vendors have shipped thousands of different smartphone models around the world. Yet only a few dozen have made a major impact. Here, I single out the 10 most significant Android smartphones in the platform’s short history. My criteria includes popularity, technological and design breakthroughs, and their debut of new Android releases. These were the phones that not only showed there were viable alternatives to the highly controlled, one-size-fits-all philosophy of the Apple iPhone – they were the phones that made people go “Wow.”
The world of data storage is changing and open source is helping (well, trying extremely hard) to shake up a few traditional technology standards.
For many years, storage has been about big boxes from big name storage vendors. Usual suspects here might include EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, NetApp, Oracle Exadata and obviously we could extend this list ad infinitum if we started to add hard drive manufacturers, big data players and database shops.
Liferay, maker of an enterprise-class, open-source portal, has announced the public launch of Liferay Marketplace, a new marketplace that offers more than 70 enterprise tools and apps developed by Liferay.
Both Tactic Team and Tactic Enterprise have been released as open-source software. An earlier version of this story indicated that the Enterprise version would require a paid license, but that is not the case. We regret the error.
The Open Source Initiative and Open Source Hardware Association are apparently swinging handbags at each other over two logos which they claim are similar.
The Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA) has a gear logo where part of it is broken to indicate open source goodness. The Open Source Initiative has a green circle which has been broken to indicate open sauciness. We would have thought both symbols mean that open source software is broken, but apparently they are supposed to symbolise keyholes.
Version 1.2 of the open source Instantbird instant messaging (IM) client is now available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. The latest version has been ten months in the making; a large part of that time has been taken in moving to share code with Thunderbird 15, currently in beta, which will also offer instant messaging features. Because of this the developers note that there aren’t any major new features, but there are a large number of improvements to existing features and numerous under-the hood changes.
TextMate, which is considered to be one of the best text editors for Mac, has gone open source. In less than 24 hours, over 500 branches/forks have already been created and many improvements are already landing into the codebase.
Lazarus (so named because it’s an older project, reborn) is a full-featured graphical IDE for Free Pascal, an open-source implementation of Object Pascal. While the Lazarus developers politely ask that it not be called a Delphi clone… if it walks, talks, and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. This should not be considered a slam. I found it because I went looking for a free or low-cost Delphi clone, because there’s a powerful market niche for one.
Open-source software is everywhere. Chances are you use it every day in such creations as Google, Android or Mozilla Firefox. Its source code is wide open – anyone can study, improve or modify it if they like.
Among the biggest reasons to use open-source software is price: It’s usually free.
But specialized pieces of software – tools such as Photoshop – often have price tags that reflect their power. If you just want it for the occasional project, those prices can be hard to justify.
But it’s also known for some amazing parties (ahem, “evening events”). The Linux community knows how to have a good time; we just try to provide the best venues possible for facilitating FUN as well as learning and networking.
The Summit will feature more than 30 eminent panelists and speakers, including government officials, health care leaders, clinical care providers and policymakers. The event will bring together the OSEHRA community, now totaling more than 1,000 members, for the first time and provide a venue for Open Source Health IT training and educational workshops.
NEW YORK (TheStreet) — Only three years ago, companies were nervous about the potential security and management risks of sending critical data and services into the “cloud.” Today, the cloud-computing industry has developed so rapidly that Rackspace(RAX) has put its faith in open-source cloud technology.
Platform-as-a-service provider dotCloud has made Hipache, its distributed HTTP and WebSocket proxy, available as open source. Based on the node-http-proxy library, the distributed proxy is designed to handle high volumes of HTTP and WebSocket traffic to large numbers of virtual hosts.
Intel and several Chinese organizations have set up a technical community which will focus on the development and support of open-source cloudplatform OpenStack, and hopes to increase China’s contribution to the OpenStack global community.
According to a report Thursday by Sina Tech, Intel Asia-Pacific Research and Development, Chinese Internet company Sina, China Standard Software, and Shanghai Jiaotong University signed an agreement to set up the China Open Source Cloud League.
OpenStack is a strange beast. The open-source cloud computing platform is a darling of IT vendors and some major end-users clamoring for an open cloud ecosystem, yet it generates a lot of criticism. Some folks question its governance model, while others question its technological maturity against more-established alternatives such as Amazon Web Services and VMware. So, what’s with the schizophrenia around OpenStack as the cloud’s open source savior?
The latest major update to Riak – Basho’s open source clustered NoSQL database – adds official support for FreeBSD and features new approaches to cluster management. In version 1.2 of the highly scalable distributed database, developers can stage and review multiple cluster changes to see how they affect the system before committing them; this is especially useful for cancelling changes or delaying them until off-peak hours.
Version 3.6.0 of LibreOffice, the fourth major iteration of The Document Foundation’s open source productivity suite, is now available to download. While the release doesn’t include any outstanding changes, it does bring with it a number of incremental improvements that result in better overall performance and interoperability, while also adding some new features.
Bob Evans has a colorful past. He works at Oracle these days as what I would call a king’s blogger except that he isn’t doing very well even with the apparent influence of the king himself.
Bob used to write for SAP where he penned his own gems about Oracle. The watchmen at Oracle thought Bob did such a good job that they decided to hire him. Now Bob turns on his blog flame against Oracle’s critics.
Bob decided to attack me yesterday in a post he wrote. It’s an odd one about how “TechCrunch is Clueless About The Cloud.” It’s their attempt to rebuke my post last week about how Oracle will be the big loser when IT gets virtualized.
Any industry requires a proper technology set-up to accelerate growth. Modern trend speaks out loud about the use of ERPs (Enterprise Resource Planning) in the corporate world for a smooth and efficient functioning of any enterprise.
WriteType 1.3.163 is now available! WriteType is a word-processor designed to help elementary school students write better. It gives students who have a hard time writing an easier approach in putting their ideas on paper. In addition to fixing many bugs, the latest WriteType release has several new features to help students succeed.
3D printing is slowly becoming the next big thing. Over the last few weeks, we’ve heard of people making everything from blood vessels to kid-sized exoskeletons–the possibilities seem almost endless. But what if you’re too broke to buy yourself a 3D printer and too cool make yet another RepRep 3D printer? The answer is simple: cement your individuality and build yourself a Pwdr instead.
Though paying for tuition and housing eat up more money, textbook costs are among the most groan-inducing expenses incurred by college students. With tools like Amazon and chegg.com, only the least resourceful of freshmen are blowing $200 for a brand new textbook these days. But a new type of textbook is threatening to disrupt a $4.5 billion industry that has so far avoided the media upheavals experienced in music, movies and trade publications. Open-source textbooks, free for students to use and for professors to modify, are being developed by more companies and adopted in more classrooms. They may work hand-in-hand with the rise in free online courses to revolutionize the way we view—and pay for—higher education.
Identifying a gap in the market has been the key to many successful open source projects. In the case of the participants in Project Hexapod, a group of robotics enthusiasts based at the Artisan Asylum makerspace in Massachusetts, they identified a clear lack of six-legged, rideable robots.
Members of Project Hexapod, which comprises three instructors, one teaching assistant, and 15 students, have launched a crowdfunding Kickstarter project to raise $65,000 to build ‘Stompy’: A arachnid-esque, six-legged, 1800kg hydraulic robot.
The latest addition to the Arduino open source prototyping platform, the Leonardo microcontroller board is available from Rapid Electronics, writes Richard Wilson.
Java runtime maker Azul Systems recently made its flagship Zing Java Virtual Machine (JVM) available to open source developers for free for use in development, qualification and testing.
The U.S. Justice Department’s decision not to prosecute Goldman Sachs Group Inc for its subprime mortgage trades resulted from either “weak laws or weak enforcement,” the senator who asked for a criminal investigation of the firm said on Friday.
I mentioned yesterday that Goldman Sachs got a rare “reverse Wells notice” from the SEC, when they were told that a mortgage-backed securities deal which they earlier heard they would face prosecution for would not net them any civil enforcement. But that was just the beginning. Later in the day, they learned they would not face any prosecution from the Justice Department for the misdealings brought to light in a Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations report a year ago.
Australian Attorney-General Nicola Roxon has been forced to back down on her government’s unpopular plan to force ISPs to store the web history and social networking of all Australians for two years. The plan has been deeply unpopular with the public, with hackers attacking the government’s spy agency
If you didn’t believe that everything you do is monitored before today, this latest confirmation should seal the deal. The information, of course, was not officially released, but when hackers gained access to highly secure emails at global analysis firm Stratfor earlier this year the cat came out of the bag.
With New York recently launching an all-seeing domestic awareness system, many Americans who don’t live in Mayor Bloomberg’s police state believe they are safe from the watchful eye of Big Brother.
The latest WikiLeaks release has shone a spotlight on an alleged domestic and foreign surveillance program run with cloud-based software provided by Virginia company TrapWire, many of whose top leaders and employees are former members of three-letter American intelligence agencies.
The U.S. cable networks won’t be covering this one tonight (not accurately, anyway), but Trapwire is making the rounds on social media today—it reportedly became a Trending hashtag on Twitter earlier in the day.
Trapwire is the name of a program revealed in the latest Wikileaks bonanza—it is the mother of all leaks, by the way. Trapwire would make something like disclosure of UFO contact or imminent failure of a major U.S. bank fairly boring news by comparison.
Lon Seidman knew he wasn’t going to get rich from his three-hour video discussion of the Curiosity rover landing on Mars. The local media entrepreneur did a live Google+ Hangout about the event and posted the resulting video to YouTube, expecting it would earn him a few bucks and attract some new readers to his site, CT Tech Junkie. During the discussion, Seidman played a number of NASA videos about the Curiosity mission. He knew he was on safe ground because works of the federal government are automatically in the public domain.
For a lot of geeks, the Texas Instrument Scientific Calculator was their best friends during classes in high school. Not so long ago, I remember programming a Space Invader game in TI-Basic during a Maths lesson. But as a downside to growing up: a lot of us had to leave our precious TI at the bottom of a drawer. Thanks to emulation and our favorite OS, it is possible to use a TI again with nostalgia. Two programs are available for that purpose, both with their advantages.
The company that introduced the Textspresso machine to the world has now released its desktop cloud texting application for Linux.
Zipwhip’s Android app, which sends text messages to and from your desktop or tablet via the cloud is now available on Ubuntu and Mint, as well as Windows and Mac.
Acer’s disquiet over Surface betrays the tough position manufacturers find themselves in. If Microsoft is no longer a reliable partner, what are the alternatives for kit makers who want to survive the post-PC era?
Linux operating system distributor Suse says it is gaining ground among cloud service providers as their choice platform for delivering the open source OS to customers, but at least one analyst says the market is still split between the Suse, Red Hat and Canonical’s Ubuntu.
Suse issued updated figures this week saying that it works with 20 cloud service providers (CSPs) to offer Linux OS to 15,000 enterprises. It lists major CSP customers as Amazon Web Services, Dell, Intel, Verizon and, most recently, Microsoft Azure.
“The latest addition of Microsoft Windows Azure to the Suse Cloud Program demonstrates Suse’s growing momentum as the de facto standard enterprise Linux operating system offered by cloud providers,” the company said in a press release issued this week.
HelenOS 0.5.0 represents improvements made to this open-source operating system since March of 2011. Some of the key improvements to this original operating system are USB support (USB v1.1). a re-implemented networking stack with full TCP support, Realtek RTL8139 / Intel E1000 network drivers, read-only EXT2 and ISO9660 file-system support, read-write MINIX FS support, and some new ported applications. The ported applications to HelenOS include GNU Binutils, PCC (Portable C Compiler), and MSIM (MIPS R4000 simulator).
The Linux Foundation is bringing Linus Torvalds to South Korea. Torvalds will be a key speaker at the inaugural Korea Linux Forum which is set to occur October 11 to 12 in Seoul, South Korea.
Linux is certainly no stranger to Asia, though the Linux Foundation seems to have had more events (and success) in Japan in recent years. The move to have an event in Korea is being driven by consumer electronics giant Samsung.
Apple’s logo is a half-bitten apple. Windows’s logo somewhat looks like a window (at least in the beginning). So why is there a penguin as a mascot for Linux? And why is it called Tux? And where does it come from? And why is it a mascot and not a logo? And so on. Yes, we have a lot of questions about Linux, but strangely, there is a lot more about the penguin.
The kernel driver for NVIDIA graphics chips is undergoing a major overhaul. KVM is now available for MIPS. The new “lslocks” lists locked files and displays the programs that locked them.
Well, there isn’t a major Mesa release happening this month as was originally planned. There also isn’t going to be a Mesa 8.1 release. Instead, Mesa 9.0 will be released in September.
Intel’s Ian Romanick began laying out these new plans last night with the other Mesa developers. This shake-up is happening in part because Intel’s planning for OpenGL ES 3.0 support in Mesa by early next year — plans they publicly announced earlier this week at SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles.
SIGGRAPH 2012 in Los Angeles is in full swing this week and beyond the usual exciting announcements — new OpenGL specifications and other Khronos announcements — the 20th anniversary of OpenGL is being celebrated from this leading industry graphics conference.
For those not at SIGGRAPH LA 2012 (unfortunately I’m not there to provide any live coverage on Phoronix), here are some Internet resources:
The non-critical bug window for X.Org Server 1.13 is now closed and Keith Packard has announced the release of xorg-server 1.12.99.904.
The new features, like the driver re-work for PRIME DRI2 offloading and the nuking of XAA and new GLX support, is detailed in X.Org Server 1.13 RC1 Packs In Many Changes.
NVIDIA doesn’t usually show up at the annual X.Org Developers’ Summits/Conferences, but for some reason at least one NVIDIA employee will be trekking to Germany for meeting with the open-source developers.
Earlier this week I was surprised (as shared on Twitter) when I received an automated notification that Andy Ritger signed up to be at XDC2012. Andy Ritger is a long-time NVIDIA Linux/UNIX engineer who served as the manager of the NVIDIA Linux Graphics Driver Software until Hardy Doelfel took over in late 2011.
If you’re sad about Ubuntu delaying their Wayland System Compositor and want to take Wayland/Weston for a spin, there’s another alternative for playing with this next-generation Linux desktop technology.
For a Wayland-based LiveCD that is designed for showing off Wayland/Weston and related technologies, there is the oddly-named RebeccaBlack OS. The developer of this Linux OS, who says that distribution is named in honor of his favorite celebrity (Rebecca Black), released a new spin this week.
Following the news shared today that Ubuntu’s delayed their Wayland System Compositor adoption from Ubuntu 12.10 to at least Ubuntu 13.04 there was the more positive news that there’s an updated third-party spin of an Ubuntu derivative running Wayland. This article has some more information on that new “RebeccaBlack OS” release along with screenshots that provide a glimpse of where the Wayland adoption is at today.
The non-critical bug window for X.Org Server 1.13 is now closed and Keith Packard has announced the release of xorg-server 1.12.99.904.
The new features, like the driver re-work for PRIME DRI2 offloading and the nuking of XAA and new GLX support, is detailed in X.Org Server 1.13 RC1 Packs In Many Changes.
More than a month ago I wrote about ARM working on Linux virtualization support via Xen. This work still hasn’t landed in the mainline Linux kernel, but it continues to move along.
Coming out of SIGGRAPH 2012 is a new branch of Mesa from Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center that’s working on full open-source OpenGL ES 3.0 support for Intel HD hardware.
This OpenGL ES 3.0 branch of Mesa currently has “pre-alpha quality” support for OpenGL ES 3.0 for Intel HD hardware and it won’t be merged until after the Mesa 8.1 release. However, Intel hopes to have beta OpenGL ES 3.0 support officially ready and in mainline Mesa for Q1’2013.
Celestia is a captivating space navigator that allows you to explore and discover our known universe in three dimensions.
Unlike most planetarium software, Celestia doesn’t confine you to the surface of the Earth. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond our galaxy using zooming, point and go and time accelerating / freezing features.
Valve’s SIGGRAPH 2012 presentation last night — about the Source Engine on Linux and their experiences with maximizing the OpenGL performance of their game engine on Linux — was a success.
More details about the presentation will be available in the coming days, including the slides. However, for those overly-excited, here’s a few photos from the Valve Linux presentation in Los Angeles. There’s also a photo of Left 4 Dead 2 on Linux, although it’s not too clear and doesn’t show (Ubuntu) Linux in the background with my photos from April when at Valve HQ being much more clear.
Back in 1991, a computer science student named Linus Torvalds announced on a newsgroup that he was creating a “hobby OS.” That hobby was Linux, and today it’s much more than a tinkerer’s operating system, with availability on all manner of hardware and a seemingly unlimited array of flavors, or “distributions.” Maybe you’re new to Linux, or maybe you’re itching to graduate from Ubuntu to something with a little more geek cred. Whatever the case, we’re going to take the sting out of all those command prompts, using two great distros as examples.
That’s it. No mention of past titles, “goodwill”, a lack of “positive results” or “paying the bills”. The rest was basically just an anti-Linux smear job, fabricated entirely by Walrath.
Watch it yourself if you don’t believe me. It’s quite an ordeal, though. Carmack somehow manages to talk non-stop for the full three and a half hours without so much as pausing for breath. He didn’t even move for the first hour and a half, when he eventually sat down, talked non-stop for another two hours, then took his first swig of water. If nothing else, you have to admire his sheer stamina. He had an iPad toy with him, but it seemed mainly for show, because he only glanced at it a couple of times near the end, during the Q&A session. Yes, he ad-libbed his way through the entire keynote, at high speed, and it wasn’t exactly Jobsian gibberish either, it was mostly pretty technical stuff. Impressive.
After Doom 3 was open-sourced in November last year, efforts had been made to improve th source code and port it to different platforms. Polish developer, Krzysztof Klinikowski has ported Doom 3 to Android and the below video shows Doom 3 running on HTC Desire HD (Android).
You pilot your humble thrust ship through tense battles with aliens and hone your piloting skills, rescue survivors, solve puzzles, blow up horrors that lurk in the darkest corners of the galaxy.
Until now, I have remained quite reserved about any serious Linux gaming, which seems to have gained quite some momentum thanks to Valve’s recent announcement to release game titles on the Linux platform. I should probably point out that I do wish Valve all the best and hope that their Linux games perform well for them and any future Linux games that are released on the platform by games publishers.
John Carmack is the face of some of the most iconic games in PC and console history. Not only has he spearheaded AAA titles like Doom and Quake, he is also the motor that drives id Software, who as a team are solely responsible for the first-person-shooter niche that lives on the Linux platform.
id Software‘s decision to successively deliver each of the company’s game engines into the realm of open source has enabled small, passionate teams to develop their own visions atop the foundation of these engines. In addition to being a great enabler of free software, it has also allowed titles like Quake and Doom and their subsequent installments to exist on Linux. In fact, if you were to check the pulse of Linux gaming before the announcement of Steam for Linux, you might come to a startling realization; id Software is responsible for the majority of the AAA titles available for Linux.
Unknown Horizons is a 2D realtime strategy simulation with an emphasis on economy and city building. It is basically a game heavily inspired from the popular Anno series were you have to build, sustain and lead colonies into evolution.
Valve officially confirmed today that their Steam distribution software will go beyond just offering games and will provide applications from “creativity to productivity” software.
Valve’s new Steam will go beyond just games and offer all sorts of software while still providing the same Steamworks benefits like easy/automated installation, automatic updating, and being able to safe your work into the Steam Cloud.
GNOME and KDE are the top desktop environment choices you come across when you are about to choose a Linux distribution. Choosing between them isn’t much of a pain if you are going straight for Ubuntu, but if you’re a bit picky about your desktop, then knowing a bit more about desktop environments becomes a must. So, what are desktop environments anyway?
A desktop environment consists mainly of the graphical user interface and a collection of tightly integrated applications blended seamlessly to provide a complete user experience. So, in a desktop environment you’ll most likely find a common set of elements like icons, menus, pointers, panels, desktop widgets, and even wallpapers. Basically, a desktop environment is what you see when you log in to your computer. An operating system on the other hand is the one that lies underneath, helping your computer to boot and manage a bunch of other processes.
I’ve been browsing distrowatch.com lately noticing something that is happening for some time now, but maybe surprised me for the first time because it is still happening. What I am talking about is that there are more Linux distributions releasing new versions using Gnome 2.32 than Gnome 3.4!
Like many, I read this already famous blog post about the stripped-down Nautilus with growing surprise. I won’t go into what I think it’s wrong with it as others have said enough already. I’d like to focus on the positive: the very first point made.
What a KDE does in a Gnome blog? Normally it gets FUD, but this time we are going to praise it! I got double hit from KDE yesterday. First by the awesome news that Digia Committed to Thriving Qt Ecosystem and secondly by trying Rebecca Black.
Gnome PackageKit, the tool that is used to install packages and apps in most distros like Fedora now supports parallelization. For developers, it means that they can now process several jobs at the same time, while for end users, it means that they can now expect a faster PackageKit.
At the GUADEC conference in Spain, GNOME’s annual conference for developers, some of the core developers have decided to go ahead with a concept they are calling GNOME OS.
Before you start rolling your eyes, expecting Yet-Another-Linux-Distro, let me reveal that is is slightly more complicated than that.
In my last post I described how, during this year’s GUADEC, members of the GNOME community came together to plan where the project could go in the next 18 months or so. The slides from Xan and Juanjo’s talk give some of the background to those discussions. We took copious notes during the planning sessions that were held; these will all be available online soon, so you can get a more detailed picture if you want one. In what follows I’ll try to give a bit an overview.
But first, a clarification. The idea of GNOME OS has been around for a couple of years, and there has been a fair amount of confusion about what it means. Some people seem to have assumed that GNOME OS is an effort to replace distributions, so let me be clear: that is not the case. While the creation of a standalone GNOME OS install does feature as a part of our plans, this is primarily intended as a platform for testing and development. In actual fact, all of the improvements that we hope to make through the GNOME OS initiative will directly improve what the GNOME project is able to offer distributions.
The GNOME project, which is facing heavy criticism over usability issues, is to build a touch-capable ‘GNOME OS’ as a way of improving the overall experience for users and developers
Developers have revealed they are working on a Gnome OS, potentially extending the reach of the open-source platform to tablets.
At the moment, Gnome is a desktop environment that sits on top of Linux OSes – but has been ditched by Ubuntu in favour of its own Unity interface.
At a Gnome conference, developers said they were working on an OS, targeting a release date of March 2014, according to their slides. However, the Gnome OS isn’t meant to replace existing distros, such as Ubuntu or Mint.
This is a quick look to the new Lock (Screen Shield) of Gnome Shell, and the new interface of GDM, which both come to brake more the visual coherence between Gnome and Ubuntu that ships LightDM.
LightDM or GDM is just a small detail, but it’s not the only one. It’s the File Manager, the File Previewer (aka Sushi), the Scroll bars.. So even if you install GS in Ubuntu, experience will be much different from the Vanilla Gnome. Anyway.
“If you want to make the transition easy for Windows users, you have to be talking about KDE,” said Google+ blogger Kevin O’Brien. In fact, “there was even a great video a couple of years ago from ZDNet Australia where they showed people the new KDE and told them it was the new Windows,” he recalled. “Not only did folks believe it, but they said it was a much improved Windows.”
Linux Deepin is a distribution derived from Ubuntu Desktop. The latest edition, Linux Deepin 12.06, which is based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, was released on July 17, That means it was released later than expected, as the version number clearly indicates that the release date should have been in June, not July. But that is a minor issue. Better released late with major bugs quashed, than on time, but bug-ridden.
It’s nearly impossible to tell how many people are using any given Linux distribution. Each distro probably has some internal statistics that they can use to judge relative popularity, but tracking how many people have installed a distro or use it regularly is currently not possible. However, we can look at some general trends online to get an idea of a distro’s relative popularity.
Some time ago I made a decision not to look at LXDE-based distributions. One of the reasons for me was a lack of usability, because of keyboard layout configuration. I need to type in Russian and English both, which means I need to switch between different layouts quickly and often. None of the LXDE distributions I’ve tried had this option: Debian, Fedora, Knoppix, PCLOS, Porteus, SliTaz, Zorin OS 6 Lite.
The previous CrunchBang 11 “Waldorf” development images have now been replaced by some updated builds. For anyone unaware, these builds are based on Debian Wheezy sources. Wheezy is the current testing branch of Debian and therefore is likely to experience changes, bugs and breakages. These builds are not recommended for anyone who requires a stable system, or is not happy running into occasional breakages.
The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the August 2012 issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editor Meemaw. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.
The Motley Fool’s readers have spoken, and I have heeded your cries. After months of pointing out CEO gaffes and faux pas, I’ve decided to make it a weekly tradition to also point out corporate leaders who are putting the interests of shareholders and the public first and are generally deserving of praise from investors. For reference, here is last week’s selection.
This week, I want to take a closer look at Red Hat (NYS: RHT) CEO Jim Whitehurst and show you why a mixture of growth, hiring, and humility makes him a fantastic leader.
Yesterday, 8th Aug., Connie Sieh announced the release of Scientific Linux 6.3, an enterprise-class distribution built from source package for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3: “Scientific Linux 6.3 i386/x86_64 is now available.
When I was at the Community Leadership Summit and OSCON a few weeks back I had the pleasure of meeting Masafumi Ohta who is a passionate Ubuntu user who had flown from Nerima-ku in Japan to the event. Masafumi very generously gave me a print copy of Ubunchu; thanks, Masafumi, for the kindness!
Ubuntu App Showdown contest was introduced more than a month ago by Canonical to encourage application development for Ubuntu in a big way. And the initiative is showing results already. More than 150 applications were submitted out of which, 133 has been qualified and made it to the final list. Judges will vote on the apps and will declare the winners very soon. Meanwhile, here’s our list of top 15 apps (in no particular order) from Ubuntu App Showdown contest, which we think are the best of the lot. Read on.
These are really interesting news that come directly from Ubuntu’s Sebastien Bacher in Launchpad Bug Tracker. Sebastian basically says that Ubuntu cannot follow Gnome upstream as Gnome lack to plan their work in advance or communicate enough with Ubuntu about their new features.
In a bug report on Launchpad, Ubuntu developer Sebatien Bacher has suggested that Ubuntu might ship Nautilus 3.4 with version 12.10 of the Linux distribution – currently available as a third alpha – instead of the latest upstream version of the file manager. Nautilus 3.6, which is currently in development, would be included in the repositories but not be bundled by default. This would mark a departure from recent practices where the Ubuntu developers had always shipped the latest version of Nautilus with their custom Unity desktop interface.
Dell might be preparing to offer its XPS 13 with Ubuntu 12.04 this Fall, but Linux boutique ZaReason has beaten them to the punch by putting the UltraLap 430 up for sale. It’s the first Ultrabook on the market that’s shipping with Linux.
The $899 base price gets you a decently-specced unit. A 1.8GHz 3rd generation Intel Core i3 processor starts things off, and it’s teamed up with 4GB of DDR3 memory and a 32GB mSATA SSD. The Intel base hardware adds 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and HD 4000 graphics to the mix — as well as a pair of USB 3.0 ports. The UltraLap’s 14.1-inch display offers a native resolution of 1366 x 768, and there’s an HDMI port in case you want to output video to a secondary display.
Ubuntu 12.10 will not be shipping with a Wayland-based system compositor as was once hoped for, but the experimental system compositor can be enabled from a PPA in a very primitive state.
Canonical published today, August 3rd, this month’s top 10 app downloads from Ubuntu Software Center. As you can see below, the most appreciated apps are still the games from the Humble Indie Bundle V. Without further ado here they are!
Fuduntu is mentioned in several comments in my blog and that makes me want to try it. I have never used Fuduntu before and at the first glance, I thought it is just a derivative of Ubuntu with Fluxbox ( I thought the name was Fubuntu), but then I checked again and realized it is based on Fedora and the name is Fuduntu. And the perfect time has come, a friend just gave me an old laptop yesterday and I am also having some free time so I decided to download and try the newest version of Fuduntu (2012) that uses kernel 3.4.4.
Our favourite little board is determined not to stay away from the news for long. In yet another innovation for Raspberry Pi, the low-cost, credit-card sized hobbyist board, a new add-on interface was announced.
The Raspberry Pi mini-computer has taken the tech world by storm. If you’re one of the lucky few to get one, one of the first things you’ll need is a case. Here’s a few to choose from.
The BeagleBoard organization recently announced the availability of over 20 new plug-in boards for its ARM-powered computer platform – which runs both Google Android 4.0 and Linux Ubuntu.
Essentially, the plug-in boards, or “capes” are designed to extend the already formidable (developer) BeagleBoard ecosystem with additional hardware, such as robot motor drivers and sensors that measure location and pressure.
If you are looking for something similar to the Raspberry Pi Mini PC, but with a faster processor, extra memory, built in storage and wireless connectivity.
You might be interested in the new Hackberry A10 Developer Board which is now available to purchase for around $60, and is capable of running a variety of operating systems including Ubuntu, Fedora, and other Linux based distros.
Canonical had earlier announced plans to launch Ubuntu in Android based devices. Ubuntu for Android is a new initiative that will allow your high-end phone to work as a full desktop computer. In a video shown below, we can have an idea of what it will actually look like.
Is Google preparing to do what it was rumored to do for so long, namely bring the Android mobile OS to the desktop? Today’s Android user on a smartphone may scoff at the idea but there are signs that Google might have the desktop in its sights, and it’s also clear that Chrome OS has not been the revolution on laptops or desktops that Google had hoped it woud be. Here are some of the rumblings about the possibility of Android on the desktop.
Up until now, we have only heard rumors and seen still pictures of what Ubuntu running on an Android device will look like. Today however, a video has surfaced of the service up and running and it is exciting to see. It was promised that Ubuntu for Android “transforms your high-end phone into your productive desktop, whenever you need it.” While you might be skeptical at that claim, after watching the video your opinion might change.
Samsung has woken up to context: the Galaxy Note 10.1 has a fast quadcore processor and twice as much memory as most rivals, but listen to Samsung’s pitch and you’d hardly know it. Instead of the usual breathless glee over hardware and technical abilities, the Note 10.1 tells you exactly what it can do with all that’s under the hood. Namely, bring the stylus back in style, and create a compellingly different approach to tableteering, distinct to what Apple’s iPad offers.
We just received confirmation that OSI’s request to be added as a signatory to the Declaration of Internet Freedom has been accepted. We endorse this Declaration and encourage authorities worldwide to embrace it and implement regulations protecting the principles it espouses.
Open source has created a new way of mobilising communities but it has also allowed a democratic deficit to open up between developers and users. Glyn Moody offers his take on this gap and how it is being slowly closed.
Penguinistas used to worry about the dreaded fork, especially of Linux. “What if Linux forks and becomes like Unix?” was a question often being posed in the open source media. Linus Torvalds would do his best to put those fears to rest, explaining that under the GPL forks are usually to be welcomed.
He was of the opinion that if a fork improves a product and is liked by the users, those changes will almost certainly be rolled back into the originating application. If not, and the fork is indeed a marked improvement on the original, then the fork becomes the standard bearer at the expense of the original application.
A gear logo proposed to represent and easily identify open-source hardware has caught the eyes of the The Open Source Initiative, which believes the logo infringes its trademark.
The gear logo is backed by the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA), which was formally established earlier this year to promote hardware innovation and unite the fragmented community of hackers and do-it-yourselfers. The gear mark is now being increasingly used on boards and circuits to indicate that the hardware is open-source and designs can be openly shared and modified.
Earlier this year I said VMware’s virtual GPU driver was running fast for Linux — in comparison to Oracle’s VM VirtualBox 3D guest acceleration support. This continues to be the case with VMware’s OpenGL stack leading the way with superior support and performance. Recently I ran some desktop virtualization tests under VMware Fusion 4.1.3 and Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.1.18 from the Retina MacBook Pro with OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion host. Even with the OS X host, VMware’s 3D support exposed to the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS virtualized guest was much faster.
Aside from VMware virtualization smacking Oracle VirtualBox when it comes to the OpenGL support that’s passed through to VM guests, VMware Fusion 4 also does a nice job at outperforming VirtualBox when it comes to computational-focused workloads.
In yesterday’s New York Times, Ellen Ullman criticized the SEC’s suggestion that mandated software testing could prevent automated-trading catastrophes like the one that shook the market and nearly bankrupted Knight Capital at the beginning of this month. More testing won’t work, according to Ullman, for a few reasons. First, computer systems are too complex to ever “fully test,” because they comprise multiple software and hardware subsystems, some proprietary, others (like routers) containing “inaccessible” embedded code. Second, all code contains bugs, and because bugs can be caused by interactions between modules and even by attempts to fix other bugs, no code will ever be completely bug-free. And finally, it is too difficult to delineate insignificant changes to the software from those that really require testing.
And we’re sure not going to let the Luddites have their way, so we better get used to a society with an ever-smaller number of available jobs.
* Remember bank tellers? ATMs do most of the work they used to do.
* Remember paper maps? GPSs fill that gap now.
* Newspapers? Magazines? Paper books? Electronic media is eating them all.
* Records and CDs? I don’t have to tell you what happened to those, do I?
* Media production in general? Technology does 90% of that now.
* When’s the last time you dropped off a roll of film to be developed?
* Office jobs? Sure, they’re still there in a FIRE economy. But each office gets more done with fewer heads.
* Phone operators? Radio station DJs? Most of that’s automated now.
* Fewer cops on the streets? Well, good thing we have those red-light automatic-ticket machines at every intersection, isn’t it?
The Sensata plant in Freeport is profitable and competitive, but its majority owner, Bain Capital, has decided to ship jobs to China – and forced workers to train their overseas replacements
Goldman Sachs Group (GS) employees have changed to red from blue.
Four years ago, employees of New York-based Goldman gave three-fourths of their campaign donations to Democratic candidates and committees, including presidential nominee Barack Obama. This time, they’re showering 70 percent of their contributions on Republicans.
A mysterious dark money group that has received Koch-connected funding called “Americans for Job Security” has dropped $689,000 on ads in Wisconsin attacking GOP Senate candidate (and billionaire hedge fund manager) Eric Hovde. It is the first major ad buy in the 2012 election cycle from the secretly-funded group, which is officially registered as a 501(c)(6) nonprofit “trade association” like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce or PhRMA, but does not appear to advance the interests of any particular industry or trade.
The American Federation for Children Action Fund Inc., a pro-school privatization group bankrolled by conservative financiers, has spent more than $113,000 supporting five Milwaukee Democrats running for State Assembly and Senate, who are facing primaries on August 14.
I am one of the lead plaintiffs in the civil lawsuit against the National Defense Authorization Act, which gives the president the power to hold any US citizen anywhere for as long as he wants, without charge or trial.
In a May hearing, Judge Katherine Forrest issued an injunction against it; this week, in a final hearing in New York City, US government lawyers asserted even more extreme powers – the right to disregard entirely the judge and the law. On Monday 6 August, Obama’s lawyers filed an appeal to the injunction – a profoundly important development that, as of this writing, has been scarcely reported.
As of today, Tor UK, Pan Macmillan’s science fiction and fantasy imprint, has made its ebooks DRM-free and available to purchase from the Tor UK Ebookstore. In a move announced earlier this year, Tor UK has joined sister company Tor Books in New York in removing Digital Rights Management from all its titles so that once you purchase a Tor UK book, you can download it as many times as you like, on as many ereaders as you like.
Free/Open Source software in the currency and trading world promised to emancipate us from the yoke of banking conglomerates, but a gold rush for software patents threatens to jeopardise any meaningful change or progress
To nobody's surprise, the past half a decade saw accelerating demise in quality of European Patents (EPs) and it is the fault of Battistelli's notorious policies
New trouble for Željko Topić in Strasbourg, making it yet another EPO Vice-President who is on shaky grounds and paving the way to managerial collapse/avalanche at the EPO
The utter lack of participation, involvement or even intervention by German authorities serve to confirm that the government of Germany is very much complicit in the EPO's abuses, by refusing to do anything to stop them
Another example of UPC promotion from within the EPO (a committee dedicated to UPC promotion), in spite of everything we know about opposition to the UPC from small businesses (not the imaginary ones which Team UPC claims to speak 'on behalf' of)
Uploaded by SUEPO earlier today was the above video, which shows how last year's party (actually 2015) was spoiled for Battistelli by the French State Secretary for Digital Economy, Axelle Lemaire, echoing the French government's concern about union busting etc. at the EPO (only to be rudely censored by Battistelli's 'media partner')
In violation of international labour laws, Team Battistelli marches on and engages in a union-busting race against the clock, relying on immunity to keep this gravy train rolling before an inevitable crash
A new year's reminder that the EPO has only one legitimate union, the Staff Union of the EPO (SUEPO), whereas FFPE-EPO serves virtually no purpose other than to attack SUEPO, more so after signing a deal with the devil (Battistelli)
Orwellian misuse of terms by the EPO, which keeps using the term "social democracy" whilst actually pushing further and further towards a totalitarian regime led by 'King' Battistelli
The paradigm of totalitarian control, inability to admit mistakes and tendency to lie all the time is backfiring on the EPO rather than making it stronger
An outline of recent stories about patents, where patent quality is key, reflecting upon the population's interests rather than the interests of few very powerful corporations
The role played by Heiko Maas in the UPC, which would harm businesses and people all across Europe, is becoming clearer and hence his motivation/desire to keep Team Battistelli in tact, in spite of endless abuses on German soil
The latest facts and figures about software patents, compared to the spinmeisters' creed which they profit from (because they are in the litigation business)
The US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) is planning to weigh in on a case which will quite likely drive patent trolls out of the Eastern District of Texas, where all the courts that are notoriously friendly towards them reside
The scope of patents in the United States is rapidly tightening (meaning, fewer patents are deemed acceptable by the courts) and Fitbit’s patent case is the latest case to bite the dust
Pretending there is a violent, physical threat that is imminent, Paranoid in Chief Benoît Battistelli is alleged to have pursued weapons on EPO premises
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