11.26.11
Posted in News Roundup at 1:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Recent months have unearthed a wealth of computing and coding talent amongst Irish school kids with their hearts set on disrupting the technology world. The latest is a computing prodigy who at the age of six did his first Linux install.
Dublin schoolkid Shane Curran, age 11, admits his obsession with computers began when was six, when he did his first Linux install. When he was 7 he learned how to programme in Visual Basic and built a simple web browser that he made available on the web for download.
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Cars, hotels, healthcare, construction, financial and advertising services, data centres, systems integration and consultancy – even the dominant Linux enterprise operating system – bear the electronic giant’s pedigree.
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The process to introduce an official code of conduct for Linux Australia events is continuing, with the Linux Australia council today issuing a re-drafted code for the consideration of members, including a proposed new warning system for inappropriate speakers.
The new draft of the code once again sets out how attendees and presenters should conduct themselves at Linux Australia events, strongly emphasising appropriate, all-ages conduct at all times.
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Server
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Serviceguard for Linux: This is a big win for Linux users on HP, and removes a major operational and architectural hurdle for HP-UX migrations. ServiceGuard is a highly regarded clustering and HA facility on HP-UX, and includes many features for local and geographically distributed HA.
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Kernel Space
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Linus Torvalds has issued a Thanksgiving Linux kernel update for those not in a food-induced coma from this American holiday. The delicacy is the Linux 3.2-rc3 kernel.
The Linux 3.2-rc3 kernel consists of “One quarter arch updates, two quarters drivers, and one quarter random changes. Shake vigorously and serve cold..”
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Hey, since most of the US will be in a food-induced coma tomorrow, I just *know* that doing a new release candidate is a good idea.
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Graphics Stack
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Earlier this month I showed the Intel graphics performance hasn’t improved much in the Linux 3.2 kernel (but there might be a boost when RC6 is flipped on), but how is this new kernel shaping up for NVIDIA hardware owners wishing to use the open-source and reverse-engineered Nouveau driver? In this article are some benchmarks of the Nouveau DRM driver from recent Linux releases.
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Applications
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Linux and Windows. It’s like comparing Apples and Oranges. Software can be compared, but how do you do so fairly and honestly? And what sort of presumptions should I make concerning where the reader of this article stands? I presume you are among the “rare” Linux users.
Not easy at all. Let’s start of with where I come from. I use Linux because I really prefer the stability and security of the platform. My system’s performance is better.. Hands down Linux is much better than any flavor of Windows in those three categories. But then there’s the software issue.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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Wine 1.3.33 is released. Wine makes it possible to run Windows applications on top of Linux. This release brings a new Gecko engine and various other improvements and bugfixes.
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Games
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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The search for a location for the KDE annual world summit Akademy 2012 is over. Tallinn, Estonia will be the venue for the event which will run from 30 June to 6 July 2012, according to the announcement by KDE e.V. The conference is jointly organised by the KDE e.V. and the host, the Estonian Information Technology College, which is located near to the Tehnopol Science and Business Park.
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Softpedia is once again the first to announce that the KDE team proudly released a few minutes ago, November 24th, the first Beta version of the upcoming and renewed KDE Software Compilation 4.8 environment.
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The KDE Community has released a first beta of version 4.8 of the KDE Software Compilation (KDE SC). Aimed at testers, the development preview of the next major update to the open source K Desktop Environment brings changes to the Plasma Workspaces, applications and underlying platform, as well as various performance and stability improvements.
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GNOME Desktop
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Dave Neary was at college in his native Ireland in the mid 1990s when he discovered free software. He had “managed to get through a maths degree doing very little programming”, and went on to do a research degree in image analysis where the ability to program became an essential part of his work. He remembers “turning to a friend and saying: ‘I understand that these things are variables but what’s the star thing in front of the variable name?’ When he stopped laughing he told me, and that’s how I discovered pointers.”
“The piece of software I was working on would only compile on UNIX so I ran an X-Server on my Windows desktop until somebody said ‘You’re not using Windows. Why don’t you just install Linux and be done with it?’, and I had to say ‘Linux, what’s that?’”
This was in 1996. By 1999 he had taken a job as a developer with Informix which left him in something of a rut “where I was wanting to learn more than I was learning through my job. So I began to work on The Gimp. I hadn’t worked on user interface software before,” he says, “and started looking at bugs that were annoying me, scratching my itch, and got heavily involved in Gimp development.”
“The great thing about the free software world in general and also my upbringing is that I haven’t been afraid to take things apart just to see how they work. I’m not afraid to get inside the hood and see what’s going on even if I don’t know what I am doing.”
He went on to become release manager for The Gimp and a member of the board of the GNOME Foundation, and later advised Nokia and Intel on community aspects of the Maemo and Meego projects.
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The GNOME Project announced a few minuntes ago, November 24th, the immediate availability for testing of the second development release of the upcoming GNOME 3.4 desktop environment, which brings assorted fixes and improvements.
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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Polaris Financial Technology Ltd. (POLS.BO), a leading global Financial Technology company, was awarded the Best Independent Software Vendor (ISV) title in the Middleware segment at the Red Hat APAC Fiscal Year 2012 Partner and Technical Conference held in Macau in October 2011. Polaris was the only winner in this category and one of two award winners from India.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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In April 2012 Canonical will release the latest version of Ubuntu, this time known as Precise Pangolin.
The new release will be a Long Term Support (LTS) release so will likely be more conservative than other releases and consolidate on the many changes over the past year. LTS releases are supported for five years.
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Linux Mint appears to be soaring in popularity at the expense of high-profile distros such as Ubuntu, figures from DistroWatch have suggested.
The site’s latest page hit numbers show a sharp decline in the last month for Ubuntu, which having occupied second spot throughout year has now dropped to fourth place, behind even Fedora, openSUSE and top performer, Mint.
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Flavours and Variants
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The Ubuntu Linux distribution appears to be suffering in popularity following the consumer-focused desktop OS switch to the new Unity desktop.
If the figures on DistroWatch.com are to be believed then Linux fans have been deserting Ubuntu in droves, following the adoption of the controversial new desktop scheme.
Mint has powered ahead in popularity, now over double the ‘average number of hits per day’ than Ubuntu and with traditionally lower ranged Fedora and OpenSUSE leapfrogging Ubuntu into second and third places respectively.
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Ubuntu, the Linux Distribution, is losing popularity rapidly with tremendous growth pace of Linux Mint.
On Monday, the Linux Distribution popularity tracker of Distrowatch updates showed that Canonical’s Ubuntu went down to fourth position and at the same time Linux Mint is increasing their lead at the topmost position.
According to records, for more than a couple of years Ubuntu secured the top position in the popularity list of Distrowatch but, over the last year its position slipped to second spot and now it is ranked in fourth position, reported Distrowatch.
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After awakening from a Thanksgiving-induced food coma — actually, it wasn’t that bad — most of the daily articles about Linux posted this morning by our friends in Mountain View known as Google revolved around the fact that Ubuntu is dropping like a lead zeppelin in the Distrowatch standings, while Linux Mint is surging.
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Couple of weeks ago I got an e-mail from author of UbuBox SalentOS project to review it. I am happy to present you the results.
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Softpedia is the first to announce that Clement Lefebvre, father of the Linux Mint project, unleashed a couple of minutes ago, November 23rd, the new and highly anticipated Linux Mint 12 operating system, dubbed Lisa.
There’s no official announcement on the Linux Mint website, yet the ISO images for Linux Mint 12 (Lisa) are aready available on the official Linux Mint mirrors.
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Phones
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Android
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Earlier this week I misplaced my beloved Samsung Nexus S. I only realized when arriving at home my Android device was missing. After a frantic backtracking of the places I had visited just before, the phone was nowhere to be found. Every time I tried to dial the phone I heard it ringing but no one picked it up. I suddenly found myself in great distress as I very much live by my Android phone.
There are several apps for locating a lost Android device. However, they require you to have had the foresight to install the app before the phone is lost which – to my regret – I had not done. So my chance of recovery was looking ever slimmer.
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Adobe is preparing mobile Flash Player to run on Google’s Android 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich” devices, such as the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, over the next few weeks.
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I am quite optimistic about the next 25 years of IT in New Zealand because, in recent months, I have got the sense that a number of auspicious trends are starting to converge.
The new digital-native generation is starting get socially and politically involved in meaningful ways. For these young folk the internet is inextricably woven into their day to day social fabric.
Their experience means they have some different priorities from earlier generations. Their influence seems to be quietly ushering in a new culture: one in which the opposite of open isn’t closed; this opposite of open is broken.
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Last night, as I tried (and failed) to duck around raindrops on my way down Manhattan’s West 34th Street, I noticed something I hadn’t before: on the curbside bus stop, in blazing orange LED bulbs, were the times for the next city buses to arrive.
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1. Headquarted in Columbia, Maryland, Sourcefire was founded in January 2001 by Martin Roesch, author of open-source intrusion detection system Snort.
2. Snort is the world’s most widely-deployed intrusion detection and prevention technology, with nearly 4 million downloads to date.
3. In addition to Snort, Sourcefire manages some of the industry’s most respected open source security projects, including ClamAV, the most commonly used open source anti-virus and anti-malware gateway product in the world, as well as Razorback.
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The recent arrest of Jose Pimentel, a 27-year-old convert to Islam who was allegedly planning to detonate an explosive device in New York, underscores the ongoing danger posed by so-called “lone wolf” terrorists. Pimentel, busy preparing a bomb at the time of his arrest according to prosecutors, is alleged to have wanted to kill American troops returning from Afghanistan and Iraq. The real significance of his plot, however, lies in the method he was using.
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People who enjoy open-source software often forget that most of the developers behind the code are working in their own time and at their own expense.
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In an attempt to raise the profile of worthwhile science education projects, Science magazine has started handing out the Science Prize for Online Resources in Education, or SPORE. This week’s award is going to a project called Open Source Physics. Started by a group of college professors, the site offers simulation software on a wide variety of topics in the physical sciences (including astronomy), accompanied by guides and lesson plans that help integrate it into the classroom.
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Events
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SaaS
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The storage is one of the favorite services offered by the Cloud: 76% of the sample interviewed is in favor of the storage of information in the Cloud, and consider the whole service a support in the work sphere (58%), in the education (38%), for social life (30%), for hobby sharing (21%) and to know new people (11%).
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I’m back again at my daily job after a week travelling between San Francisco and Silicon Valley. It’s clear that the hot topics there are cloud and flash storage; in fact the first meeting I had last week in Silicon Valley was with OpenStack.
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Hadoop gets plenty of attention from investors and the IT press, but it’s very possible we haven’t seen anything yet. All the action of the last year has just set the stage for what should be a big year full of new companies, new users and new techniques for analyzing big data. That’s not to say there isn’t room for alternative platforms, but with even Microsoft abandoning its competitive effort and pinning its big data hopes on Hadoop, it’s difficult to see the project’s growth slowing down.
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Databases
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So to recap, CouchDB doesn’t scale enough and it’s also too big for smaller devices. CouchBase, one of the leading commercial sponsors behind CouchDB should be plenty worried.
To be fair, Ubuntu leaving an upstream project for their own needs is nothing new. You need to look no further than Mark Shuttleworth’s split from GNOME 3 with the Unity interface. The difference this time around though, is it’s not just the community that Ubuntu is splitting from, but the commercial relationship too. It’s one thing to have dis-agreements within an open source community, it’s another not to be able to get a commercial vendor to help tailor a solution that will work.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The accessibility checker works by finding issues in documents that make it hard or, at times, impossible for people with disabilities to read. These issues include insufficient colour contrast between text and background, missing alternative text for images and other objects, missing language identification, and the incorrect use of heading styles.
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CMS
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Packt has today announced a new subscription on PacktLib for Joomla! developers. Housing 26 books, this library will enable Joomla! developers to get up and running quickly, as well as extend their skills and knowledge to become serious professionals. Recently announced as the winner of the best 2011 Open Source CMS, a resurgent Joomla!, now with a six month development cycle, has proved itself to be one of the leading open source content management systems on the market.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Copyright developed in the age of the printing press, and was designed to fit with the system of centralized copying imposed by the printing press. But the copyright system does not fit well with computer networks, and only draconian punishments can enforce it.
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Project Releases
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The MyPaint developers have announced the availability of version 1.0.0 of their open source graphics-tablet-oriented digital painting application. The raster graphics editing software, which runs on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X, began development in 2005 and has focused on being able to respond to pen pressure when drawing, while having a simple, minimalistic user interface that is hidden until the user needs it. It offers extensive brush creation and configuration options for the artist, basic layer support and an “unlimited canvas” which avoids the need for resizing.
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Google has now set specific dates for the shutdown of Google Wave, the collaboration service it launched in May 2009 and officially abandoned in August 2010. It has been informing users by email that from 31 January 2012, it will mark all waves, the equivalent of a conversation or thread on the service, as read only. On 30 April 2012, the service will be turned off entirely. Google is directing users who are interested in continuing to work with Wave or a similar collaborative tools to look at open source projects.
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Public Services/Government
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A group of organisations and interested persons from Romania are addressing an open letter to the Romanian Ministry for Culture and Patrimony about the Romanian cultural patrimony on the Internet, which can be published at Europeana.eu, where our country was to submit 789,000 works until 2015 and currently has managed to publish less than 36,000. We ask about the status of this project and propose the use of the images contributed in the recent Romanian Wikipedia photography contest. The full text can be read on the ProLinux website or in printable format (along with the signatures list) from the APTI blog.
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Openness/Sharing
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Scientists routinely use computer modeling and computation in innovative research, including predicting the nature of He4 at extremely low temperatures and the impact of human activity on climate. Why does computer-based modeling remain absent from many educational programs?
The Open Source Physics (OSP) project, www.compadre.org/osp/, seeks to enhance computational physics education by providing a central Web site containing computer modeling tools, simulations, curricular resources such as lesson plans, and a computational physics textbook that explains the pedagogic simulations’ algorithms (1). Our resources are based on small single-concept simulations packaged with source codes that can be examined, modified, recompiled, and freely redistributed to teach fundamental computational skills. Students at all levels will benefit from these interactive simulations by learning to question and assess the simulation’s assumptions and output.
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Open Hardware
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Programming
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Canadian dynamic language company ActiveState has said that that after its beta stage is completed, its Stackato Micro Cloud will continue to be free of charge for developers to use as their own private Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution on a single node. ActiveState’s products all leverage community-driven open source projects, so with Stackato access assured, developers can build, test, and deploy applications on a micro cloud for free.
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The R programming language, a software environment designed especially for statistical computations and graphing, will now be able to process 64-bit integer types. A patch to enable this capability, from French R developer Romain François, is available to download from the CRAN server network. His approach involves storing int64 vectors in R as pairs of 32-bit integers in S4 objects, with one holding the high order bits and the other the low order bits. Behind the scenes, the arithmetic operations are carried out in high performance C++ code; François has modified almost all of the standard arithmetic operations available in R to transparently work with the new class.
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ONLINE RETAILER Clove will start shipping a SIM-free Nokia Lumia 800 handset to people who want it at the start of December.
Thus far Nokia’s first Windows Phone 7.5 handset is available from only three firms on a SIM-free basis – Carphone Warehouse, Phones4u and Expansys – and this is the source of some disappointment, says Clove, because apparently there are people out there who want to pay the best part of £500 for the handset.
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US lawmakers have launched an investigation into the threat of cyber espionage from Chinese telecoms firms operating in the US, singling out Huawei and ZTE.
The House of Representatives committee on intelligence said yesterday that it was focused on the threat to America’s security and critical infrastructure coming from “the expansion of Chinese-owned telecommunications companies – including Huawei and ZTE – into our telecommunications infrastructure”.
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Security
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Finance
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Goldman Sachs, the most notorious investment bank on Wall Street, has two things in common with the legislators with significant investments in the company: wealth and power.
According to research by the Center for Responsive Politics, 19 current members of Congress reported holdings in Goldman Sachs during 2010. Whether by coincidence or not, most of these 19 Goldman Sachs investors in Congress are more powerful or more wealthy than their peers, or both.
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Goldman Sachs Inc., the global investment bank and financial services firm, announced this morning that it is running for president of the United States. The announcement was made at a farm near Waterloo, Iowa by the musician Ted Nugent, who was hired to speak for the candidate. “We love oil and God and gasoline!” shouted Mr. Nugent, as he held aloft two semi-automatic machine guns and a sleeve of red, white and blue painted grenades. “And we hate them people who don’t look American and drive those weird tiny cars and use big words!” Mr. Nugent kept his remarks brief and did not mention the candidate, Goldman Sachs, by name. At the end of his speech, the outspoken musician fired off several rounds of live ammunition, screamed “Let’s go eat a live bear!” and then charged into the woods with the frenzied crowd following behind.
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Censorship
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The European Court of Justice has ruled that ISPs do not have the right to filter out copyright-infringed content from the web, marking a massive win for privacy evangelists and a huge loss for the movie and record industry.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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11.24.11
Posted in News Roundup at 8:21 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Desktop
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I like new things. I really do. But, like most people, I don’t like to change the way I work. I have built an efficient flow to my day and to disrupt it by trudging around through some ill-conceived new interface that only serves to frustrate me and slow me down is not something I take lightly. The rule of thumb for any new interface should be efficiency not the lack thereof. For now, I’ll stick with the “classic” versions of my favorite operating systems.
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Server
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There are many ways to design a website. The most skilled among us are best-known for being able to code a website using nothing but a text editor. However, for those of us who are less skilled in this area, the right software tools can make all the difference.
In this article, I’ll explore the benefits of using a simple text editor,as well as look at the value of various website creation applications available for Linux. Remember, just because there are various web editors available for Linux, doesn’t mean that these applications are going to work as expected. I’ll shine some light on what’s working, what isn’t and why.
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Many of today’s top supercomputers are running on Linux operating system (OS) as their users prefer the open source software’s flexibility in customization as well as low costs compared with alternative proprietary OSes, observers said.
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Last week, Intel, Nvidia, and AMD announced major strides in high-performance computing (HPC) at SC11. Intel’s Knights Corner CPU is the first processor capable of handling 1 tflops performance, and Nvidia introduced several new supercomputers that would be using its Tesla GPUs as part of a hybrid computing approach.
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The changes to Atmos, launched by EMC on Monday, see the storage company broaden the ways people can access and manage the Cloud Delivery Platform layer of the infrastructure-as-a-service private cloud product.
“We’ve seen tremendous traction and interest from both service providers and enterprises looking to deploy public and private-cloud storage offerings, and both have benefited greatly from the new advancements built into the Atmos Cloud Delivery Platform,” Mike Feinberg, general manager of EMC’s cloud infrastructure group, said in a statement.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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In an effort to foil crackers attempts to cover their tracks by altering text-based syslogs, as well as improve the syslog process as a whole, two Red Hat developers are proposing a new binary-based tool called The Journal that could replace the syslog daemon in as early as the Fedora 17 release.
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Linus Torvalds has issued a Thanksgiving Linux kernel update for those not in a food-induced coma from this American holiday. The delicacy is the Linux 3.2-rc3 kernel.
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Samsung has committed a patch in the Linux kernel repository to add support for its quad-core Exynos 4412 SoC (System-on-Chip).
As seen on an October 4 post in the Linux Samsung kernel tree, author Changhwan Youn and committer Kukjin Kim, both employees of the electronics giant, posted information on a new Samsung chipset based on the ARM architecture.
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Graphics Stack
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For those wishing to follow the development of Wayland Display Server, there’s some new progress to report on. This time it’s about supporting screensavers under Wayland.
Pekka Paalanen has proposed a screensaver interface for Wayland, which includes adding the interface to the protocol file, compositor stubs, and other changes.
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One year after the Radeon and Intel drivers supported precise vblank timestamps, there’s a new patch for enabling this support in the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver.
Precise vblank timestamps and counting is needed for DRI2 sync and swap extensions and GLX_OML_sync_control, among other purposes. See this article for when the precise vblank timestamp support originally came to the Linux DRM drivers.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Two Indian brothers have written a program, called Whiz-Chat, which allows anyone to chat with their Gmail friend directly from the terminal. It is a very good alternative for those who are on a very slow Internet connection or just don’t want to get out of their terminals.
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Games
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Unigine has announced that flooded post-apocalyptic naval RTS, Oil Rush, will officially release on January 25, 2012 for PC, Mac OS X and Linux.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Today KDE released the first beta for its renewed Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team’s focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing new and old functionality.
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The KDE community is proud to announce that next year’s Akademy will be held in Tallinn, Estonia from the 30th of June to the 6th of July. Akademy is the annual world conference held by the KDE community to celebrate the Free Software desktop and work towards the future of KDE.
Akademy 2011 in Berlin ended a few months ago. It was part of the Desktop Summit, which was a great success. Next year’s Akademy awaits us in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia.
As always, major support from the local team will be the center of the organization for the conference. Claudia Rauch, the business manager of KDE e.V. in Berlin, is the overall project manager, and a small production team will assist. There’s a lot that needs to happen for Akademy to go smoothly.
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GNOME Desktop
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As you know, in GNOME, we’re committed to bringing you the easiest, most beautiful, and most advanced operating system in the world today. A major part of this effort, now, is to build a suite of amazing core applications that provide the operating system key or essential features. Today, I’d like to talk about our goals for one of these apps. It is just the earliest stages but here’s a taste of where we’d like to go.
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In this article is the first of several articles comparing the recently released Fedora 16 to Ubuntu 11.10. This first article is looking at the boot performance and power consumption from several different notebooks when performing clean installs of Fedora Verne and Ubuntu Oneiric Ocelot.
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The only issue I ran into was this one (initscripts update) which requires simple manual deletion of a file for the update to succeed. This is currently the second news item on the Arch Linux front page, so it pays to check and be prepared.
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We all know these arguments. An outsider comments on Linux distribution plurality and says that the lack of a unified platform is what hurts Linux adoption. This argument is not without its merits, but it isn’t exactly a valid argument anyway. The first main issue with it is an obvious one. If no one singularly owns and controls Linux, no one would be able to pull all variants off of the virtual shelves and standardize the community on a singular distribution. Beyond this, there exists an entirely practical reason for distribution plurality that people tend to overlook.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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One of the most anxiously-awaited Linux releases in quite some time is now available for download on the Linux Mint Mirrors worldwide. It has not yet been officially “announced”, either on the Linux Mint web page or on Distrowatch, but I assume that will happen in the very near future. A lot of people are hoping that this release will be the “Peacemaker” of the recent Linux desktop disputes, between Gnome 2, Gnome 3 and Ubuntu Unity. It is certainly a very interesting combination of an Ubuntu (11.10) base distribution minus the Unity desktop, and a Gnome 3 desktop with a large dose of Gnome-2-like user interface added to it. To me, the most impressive thing about it is that this “hybrid” was undertaken by such a small group, led by Clement Lefebvre and the Linux Mint development team.
The distribution is available in four ISO images, comprised of 32- and 64-bit versions, each in either a CD-sized image without most of the audio/video codecs and such or a DVD-sized image with pretty much everything included. All of the images are compatible with the existing Mint (and Ubuntu) Startup Disk Creator utility, so they can be easily converted to LiveUSB meida (or, of course, burned to a CD or DVD). One thing I haven’t mentioned in a while, when I boot the LiveUSB image on my systems it comes up to the boot: prompt and waits for input, then I type live and press Enter to start the live image. (I fully expect someone to post a comment that says “Jamie you twit, you’re doing wrong, if you fix that it will boot the live image just fine”, but honestly this has never bothered me enough to take the time to look into it.)
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat is offering partners and customers the chance to download a beta version of its upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 release, the next generation of the open-source software vendor’s virtualization system.
While Red Hat has been previewing the beta software to a limited number of partners since August, this marks the first time the company has offered a preview to the general public.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth holds a 1 hour Q&A session following each release of Ubuntu.
And today was the first chance many have had to ask Mark questions about upcoming changes, plans and more following the release of Ubuntu 11.10.
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The penguins are on the march: they are leaving Mark Shuttleworth’s Ubuntu and migrating towards other Linux distros, fresh data suggests.
Distrowatch’s annual web rankings claim Ubuntu’s top spot has been snatched by Mint during the last 12 months. In the past month alone Ubuntu’s been kicked to fourth place by Fedora and openSuSE, who slid in to take the second and third spots behind Mint.
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Like other NAS servers from Synology, the DS712+ runs a Linux-based operating system, called DiskStation Manager, and offers an incredible amount of features for both home and business use. Most, if not all, of its features are very well thought out and comprehensive.
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Phones
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Android
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With the recent European release of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, we wanted to write a roundup of all the reviews and information available on the net to help our readers cut through the hype and decide if the Galaxy Nexus is the right phone for them. While we always try to present both sides of the story, with the Galaxy Nexus we can’t. No matter who we asked, one fact shown through all the fluff: The Samsung Galaxy Nexus might just be the best smartphone ever.
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It would appear that aside from those here in the United States that dropped a mint on an internationally shipped Galaxy Nexus and those of you living in the UK where they’re already in stores, it’s just the publishers who were amongst the lucky to review the device and none other than Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak who now have Google’s next hero phone in hand. For today, just one day after the UK launch of the Ice Cream Sandwich device, Woz was invited to have a Galaxy Nexus bestowed upon him along with a lovely Android 4.0 t-shirt. And there was much rejoicing.
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The concept of a bootable USB drive running Linux is nothing new. But what if you had a bootable USB drive that was literally an entire mobile device, simply lacking a screen? That’s what FXI has imagined with its “Cotton Candy” device. Details follow …
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Kindle Fire users may have to damp their enthusiasm for rooting their devices: unless they’re prepared to chase up some other fixes and put up with some inconvenience, rooting the device kills video access.
The mini-fondleslab was rooted pretty much simultaneously with its launch, with a combination of the Amazon SDK, a suitable USB connection, and SuperOneClick 2.2.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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By now, we are all used to the Firefox Mach 9 release cycle. We may like it or not, but it is here to stay, it seems. Therefore, I’m trying to transcend past my dissatisfaction with the Chrome copycat strategy and look into the actual changes, fixes, improvements, and new features added to the latest Firefox release, marked as number eight.
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The world of Internet browsers may be largely dominated by the “big three”–Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer–but there are a number of attractive alternatives out there that many users don’t even know about.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Richard Stallman, President of the Free Software Foundation, came to the University of Maryland to speak about GNU and the Free Software movement, hosted by the Information Policy & Access Center (iPAC).
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Public Services/Government
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The city council of Valmiera in Latvia is saving both energy and money by migrating its physical servers to virtual servers using open source virtualisation tools, says Kaspars Urbāns, head of the city’s IT department. “You will be pleasantly surprised by the electricity bill. With the amount Valmiera saves this way, it could buy a new server for the cluster every six months.”
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Seattle’s chief technology officer, Bill Schrier, is bracing for a 6 percent budget cut in 2012, bigger than this year’s, a sign of tighter spending that indicates slower sales gains for Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) and Intel Corp. (INTC)
“Spending is going to be down, and in some places it’s going to be down considerably,” Schrier said of technology spending by governments generally.
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When you look at it methodically, it’s easy to see how all Microsoft’s parts are interconnected. If one part breaks, particularly if that part is Windows or Office, then the whole house could come down.
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Censorship
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While the US is still pondering SOPA, we just got some absolutely fantastic news out of Europe. The European Court of Justice, the highest court in the European Union, has just ruled that P2P filters installed by ISPs violate the European Directive on electronic commerce as well as fundamental rights [full ruling]. This is a hugely important ruling that effectively protects all member states of the European Union from ever being subjected to ISP filtering and spying.
The origins of this ruling lie in Belgium. The Belgian version of the RIAA, SABAM, had sued Belgian internet provider Scarlet because the ISP’s users were downloading copyrighted content without paying royalties. The President of the Tribunal de première instance de Bruxelles (Brussels Court of First Instance) then ordered Scarlet to install a filtering system to monitor the internet traffic of its subscribers.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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The Horowhenua Library Trust, the birthplace of the Koha integrated library system, the first such open source project, finds itself in a peculiar position today, that of having to fight to regain rights to its own name.
This follows the successful application by the American defence contractor, Progressive Technology Federal Systems/Liblime, for a trademark on the name Koha in New Zealand. Koha is a Maori term that means reciprocity in giving.
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Open source Integrated Library System (ILS), Koha, came under a trademark threat when the US based PTFS/Liblime managed to get their application for a Trademark on Koha accepted in New Zealand.
A Koha community blog says, “For the library that invented Koha to now have to have a legal battle to prevent a US company trademarking the word in NZ seems bizarre, but it is at this point that we find ourselves.”
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Copyrights
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Members of the French Parliament are using a bill on private copying levy as an occasion to kill the copyright exception for private copying. Under the pretense of saving royalties collection, MPs have redefined fair use in the process. Giving in once more to pressure from the recording and movie industry, the French Parliament carries on Nicolas Sarkozy’s repressive policy against the Internet and new cultural practices.
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The European Court of Justice just rendered a historic decision in the Scarlet Extended case, which is crucial for the future of rights and freedoms on the Internet. The Court ruled that forcing Internet service providers to monitor and censor their users’ communications violated EU law, and in particular the right to freedom of communication. At a time of all-out offensive in the war against culture sharing online, this decision suggests that censorship measures requested by the entertainment industry are disproportionate means to enforce an outdated copyright regime. Policy-makers across Europe must take this decision into account by refusing new repressive schemes, such as the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), and engage in a much needed reform of copyright.
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11.23.11
Posted in News Roundup at 7:16 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Is there a Linux lover in your life? Someone who loves to debate the advantage of Debian Linux over Ubuntu? Someone who wears a Tux the penguin t-shirt out to lunch? Then, these gifts might just be what they-or you-need to be happy this holiday season.
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Server
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EMC today unveiled upgrades to its Atmos Cloud Delivery Platform that add new metering services and additional administrative reporting and controls.
In addition, the Atmos GeoDrive, a piece of software that presents cloud storage as a drive letter on client systems, can now be deployed on Linxux servers. Previously, it could only be used on Windows systems.
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Kernel Space
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Linux users working on laptops and other portable devices may soon have cause to rejoice thanks to a new kernel patch that finally promises to fix power regression problems associated with recent versions of the software.
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Applications
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Many long-term Ubuntu users(including me) overlook at the fact that, there are plenty of good quality applications available free of cost in Ubuntu Software Center already. If you look at our reviews of applications here, a good number of them require adding and updating third party repositories. Not that those apps are somehow inferior, but we will, for a change, list the most highly rated applications which are available for free installation from Ubuntu Software Center.
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With holidays approaching for many of us, people will be breaking out their cameras and taking photos. Over the years on OStatic, we’ve covered a huge number of open source applications that can make editing, organizing and adding effects to digital photos much easier. The applications range from well-known ones to titles that you probably haven’t heard of. Here is an updated collection of great tools for the digital photographer–and all of them are free.
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On a good week, I consider myself an avid runner. Right now I’m training to run a 5k in the spring. Ideally, I’ll be able to get it under 20 minutes. Now, two of the keys to exercise are to set goals and to track your progress. Clearly I’ve got the first half under control, but the second half? Well, it turns out that’s where a lot of people falter, lose motivation, and ultimately fail. I’m no exception – I’ve tried running without really tracking my progress and I found that eventually I just gave up. Manually drawing routes, estimating distances, and keeping time take effort, and frankly I didn’t have the wherewithal to do it. Thankfully, modern technology has come to save the day. I use a Google Nexus S, which comes with a GPS and dozens of apps on the Android Market for tracking exercise.
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Proprietary
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Adobe, which decided to kill off mobile-based Flash a few days back, will be delivering one last update to its soon-to-be-dead technology. The update, which comes out later this year, will bring support for the recently open sourced Ice Cream Sandwich. Despite being buggy, many ICS users are griping about the lack of Flash on their device, and many, in fact, are impatiently waiting to get their hands on the update. And even though it is very thoughtful of Adobe to cater to the needs of its loyal Android users, it’s still something the company shouldn’t be doing in the first place.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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There has been some news regarding new Linux games and other alpha funding projects last week. Check them out below.
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A new Linux based gaming handheld GameGadget has been announced today by Blaze Europe that will allow you to install your favorite games from iTunes style app store called GameGadgetGames.
Developers will be able to publish games easily via this service and they will be distributed using proprietary DRM .
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The Doom 3 source-code — based upon the id Tech 4 engine — is now available as open-source software to the gaming community under the GNU GPL license.
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Unigine OilRush is now set for release on the 25th of January, 2012. This comes after Unigine Corp originally planned to release the game this spring, then the summer, and then this fall. Today the Russian company has officially announced the 25 January release date. It’s coming later than expected, but lately they had delayed the game to enhance the game-play and then last I heard privately from Unigine Corp that they were working on the release date due to discussing matters with their distribution partners.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Yesterday in Darmstadt, Germany I met up with Martin Gräßlin, the developer known for leading KDE’s KWin compositing window manager advancements, and a few other Linux developers. A few words about KDE on Wayland were said.
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Yesterday, the MyPaint team released version 1.0.0! Warm hugs and congratulations to their entire team! Read all about it on the MyPaint website. MyPaint is a digital painting application with some unique features, like its brush engine (well, we’re still working on making that usable in Krita) and its infinite canvas. Our projects are connected through frequent meetings between the developers on IRC and in real life, the OpenRaster file format, and our users!
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We want to make Plasma Workspaces 4.8 a great release, and one way to reach that goal is to take care of the defects that creep in. To do that, we need your help to groom the bug database. We also realize that to do that, many of you would appreciate some help and teamwork.
It’s been a while since we’ve held Plasma bug days. They worked very well in the past so we’re resurrecting them.
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GNOME Desktop
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A couple of weeks ago, the harddisk in my small frontend, the one I’ve been using since last January after Yamato started acting up too much to be usable as a desktop as well, decided to give up. It wasn’t much of a bother as I was planning to replace it anyway: the small frontend was supposed to become an HTPC in short time, but for the moment it’s not of importance either since, as I noted previously I recently got a Sky subscription so that I can have most of the content I care about in my bedroom without having to spend time “finding” it.
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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For me, it is my dream job and it is also the best job in the world. My personal passion for making free software easier to use is encouraged & celebrated, and I’m always in the company of folks much smarter than I with a never-ending supply of interesting and challenging projects to work on together. The position also comes with the satisfaction that it is, even if only in a small way at times, making the world a better place. Not only does Red Hat work to make more free software available and to make its power more accessible, saving time, money, and pain for businesses: with Red Hat’s support, for example, I’ve been involved in initiatives to teach kids how to use free software and to develop openly-licensed course materials for teachers interested in their own free software programs. It’s a position that has never been boring and through which I’ve been able to travel internationally and constantly learn and grow as a person.
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I’m really excited by Ceylon and what it might mean for other things we’re doing in Cloud and JBossEverywhere. So expect to hear more about this effort in the coming months, because just like Java, it’s going to continue to evolve. And can we please stop these “my language is better than your language” arguments? There’s room in this evolving polyglot world for a few more, even if just to allow people to stretch their mental legs and see what works and what doesn’t. Everyone is entitled to their opinions and reasoned arguments are always allowed; but flamewars, especially if they’re subjectively based, don’t help anyone.
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Fedora
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The more I figure out how GNOME 3/Shell works in Fedora 16, the more I like it.
I’m not at the point where I can say, “Oh, it’s totally better than GNOME 2,” but I’m increasingly able to do things the way I’m accustomed to doing in the GNOME Shell environment.
I will refrain from comparing how things work in Fedora 16/GNOME Shell vs. Ubuntu 11.10/Unity until I spend more time in the latter. But this comparison is at the forefront of my thinking about which direction my Linux desktop use will go in during the year ahead.
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Debian Family
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It’s been one year since the first People behind Debian interview. For this special occasion, I wanted a special guest… and I’m happy that our Debian Project Leader (DPL)—Stefano Zacchiroli—accepted my invitation.
He has a difficult role in the community, but he’s doing a really great job of it. He’s a great mediator in difficult situations, but he’s also opinionated and can push a discussion towards a conclusion.
Read on to learn how he became a Debian developer and later DPL, what he’s excited about in the next Debian release, and much more.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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One of the most wonderful things about Open Source and collaborative community is that every community member participates in a commons; a shared area of community real-estate in which we can all contribute.
As an example, with most small Open Source software projects, the commons is the code-base, the website, documentation, IRC channel, mailing list etc. Within that project’s commons people can contribute in different ways, such as writing code, fixing bugs, updating the website, creating documentation, providing support etc.
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The look has not changed much in Ubuntu 11.10, but the features sure have. For those unable to use Unity 3D, Unity 2D is now available as well. The login manager is now LiteDM which is fast and efficient. A new window switcher has also been added and there have also been improvements to the lenses feature. Ubuntu as always, is free to try, and remains one of the top choices for Linux newcomers. For a long time Ubuntu was the most popular choice among Linux users, but for the time being the position may have been respectively passed on to Linux Mint. At least temporarily…
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I’ve been spending time each day working in Ubuntu 11.10′s GNOME 3/Unity and Fedora 16′s GNOME 3/GNOME Shell desktops.
They’re more alike than you think. Rather than do things the GNOME way, Ubuntu/Canonical decided to take its own direction with Unity, which is now, like GNOME Shell, built on top of GNOME 3.
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Flavours and Variants
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Linux Mint has always been known as the great alternative to Ubuntu. In fact, after Ubuntu implemented the Unity desktop, many people switched ship and flocked to Linux Mint as their next “easy-to-use and user-friendly” distro. According to DistroWatch, Linux Mint has even overtaken Ubuntu as the most popular distro. Well, that was Linux Mint 11, which is still based on Gnome 2, the desktop that most people are familiar with. What about Linux Mint 12?
In the latest release of Linux Mint (version 12, codenamed Lisa, Release Candidate), the developers of Linux Mint decided to embrace the new technology and use Gnome 3 in place of Gnome 2. As we all know, Gnome 3 comes with a brand new user-interface (aka Gnome Shell) that is confusing to many. It is interesting to see how the developers of Linux Mint intend to tame this beast, without failing the expectation of its users.
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Clement Lefebvre, the founder, project leader, developer and maintainer of the Linux Mint project, is working very hard
these days to release an operating system that will enchant many Linux users.
Long story short, the upcoming Linux Mint 12, dubbed Lisa, is an operating system based on the Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) distribution and powered by Linux kernel 3.0, featuring a new user interface based on the GNOME 3 desktop environment.
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Right or wrong, plenty of Linux users — such as this guy — have been less than happy with the interface changes wrought by the advent of Unity and GNOME 3. Lucky for these people, there’s hope in the form of MATE, a fork of GNOME 2 that bills itself as “a non-intuitive and unattractive desktop for users.” Curious what MATE was all about — and pretty fed up myself with Unity — I recently gave it a spin. Here’s what I found.
It’s true: Try as I have, I just can’t learn to love Unity. The concept itself is fine and I can even live with its biting lack of customizability, but I just can’t take the bugginess anymore. Random things happen when I try to switch between applications — trying to open recently used files via the dash launches Nautilus instead, and the whole thing just generally doesn’t work the way I need it to on a production machine.
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Like it or not, GNOME 3 is the new direction for the Linux OS. But that doesn’t mean you have to learn a lot of new OS habits overnight. Two varieties of Linux Mint may be especially attractive for those making the transition. Mint 11 will allow you to maintain your current habits for the time being. Mint 12 gives you a steady and easy path to transitioning to GNOME 3.
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Phones
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Android
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KOREAN ELECTRONICS GIANT Samsung might be behind a video that pokes fun at Apple and its Iphone users.
A video posted to Youtube looks like an advert from the firm, but has not been posted to a company account. It’s a professional looking number however, and is rather good. We’ve asked Samsung to confirm whether it is the company’s work but so far have not had a response.
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Adlink announced a ruggedized Android handheld computer with IP65 protection and and optional 1D scanning and 2D bar code imaging. The TIOT 2000 runs Android 2.3 on an ARM11-based 800MHz Qualcomm processor, and is further equipped with a 3.5-inch, 320 x 240-pixel resistive touchscreen, a five-megapixel camera, plus a full slate of wireless features including 3G and optional RFID.
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A startup called Romotive is readying a small, tank-tread “Romo” robot controlled by Android and iPhone smartphones that communicate to the robot via audio signals. Meanwhile, a prototype bartending robot called the iZac — based on a Motorola Xoom tablet and Arduino Mega controller board — has been created by developer Nick Johnson via the Android Open Accessory Development Kit.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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The Barnes & Noble NOOK Tablet ships with a couple of great apps pre-loaded including Pandora, Netflix, a decent email app, and an excellent eBook reader. There’s also an app section of the B&N Shop where you can browse for additional apps for the tablet — but the selection is pretty limited.
Fortunately it’s pretty easy to install third party apps on the NOOK Tablet. You don’t even need to root the tablet or install any custom firmware to do it. You might need a microSD card though.
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Kyobo Book Centre and Qualcomm MEMS Technologies (QMT) announced an Android 2.3-based e-reader, said to be the first device to use QMT’s sunlight-readable Mirasol color display technology. Equipped with a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, the Kyobo E-Reader provides a 5.7-inch, 1024 x 768-pixel display and offers “weeks of reading” on a single charge, the companies say.
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Open source middleware is delivering reliable messaging and routing for the UK’s largest and newest network for roadside assistance. The Automotive Network Services, developed and managed by Apex Networks, is using FuseSource distributions of Apache projects to link 90% of the UK’s 32 million drivers with tow trucks, garages and emergency first responders.
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Organizations like the Apache Software Foundation, the Linux Foundation, and the Free Software Foundation have long been a part of the open source and free software ecosystem. But some in the FLOSS community are beginning to wonder if these venerable organizations need to change in order to keep up with the changing demands of FLOSS.
Yesterday, I read what could be the most articulate presentation of this line of reasoning from Yammer Developer Advocate Mikeal Rogers. Rogers also happened to be Employee Number One at CouchOne from 2010-2011–a tenure that certainly pertinent to his arguments.
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Add to it the pets underfoot and your children complaining that they want to play on the Wii when grandpa wants to watch the Law and Order marathon on USA, and you have potential for a grumpy household.
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Apache was founded about 12 years ago, a time when companies were still very afraid of open source and many people in the open source community were very afraid of companies. The world hasn’t changed that tremendously, big companies still use an open source stamp as a marketing tool, commonly referred to as “open washing”, and some in the enterprise are still wary about open source, particularly when it comes to certain kinds of licensing.
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When Chris and I first started working on GitHub in late 2007, we split the work into two parts. Chris worked on the Rails app and I worked on Grit, the first ever Git bindings for Ruby. After six months of development, Grit had become complete enough to power GitHub during our public launch of the site and we were faced with an interesting question:
Should we open source Grit or keep it proprietary?
Keeping it private would provide a higher hurdle for competing Ruby-based Git hosting sites, giving us an advantage. Open sourcing it would mean thousands of people worldwide could use it to build interesting Git tools, creating an even more vibrant Git ecosystem.
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Mozilla
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The SeaMonkey Project has announced the release of version 2.5 of its “all-in-one internet application suite”. Based on the same Mozilla Gecko platform as Firefox 8, the update includes several under-the-hood performance and stability improvements, while also improving on the way in which add-ons are controlled.
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SaaS
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These days, everybody is talking about cloud computing, and many people use it in one form or the other. But popular cloud computing services are provided by a third party, which means that you store you data on a server somewhere, so that you can access it any time, from anywhere. But there are cloud applications that any person can use to host their own private cloud, from their home.
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Databases
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Until now, Heroku’s Postgres database service – originally launched in 2007 – has only been available to Heroku customers for use with Heroku platform apps. Today we’re excited to announce the launch of Heroku Postgres as a standalone service.
With measured service uptime of four nines (99.99%), and designed data durability of eleven nines (99.999999999%), the service is trustworthy for mission-critical data. As of today, these production-quality Heroku Postgres databases are independently available for use from any cloud platform, provisioned instantly, metered by the second, and without contract.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Judge Alsup has now invited the parties to jointly submit a list of the four motions in limine that are most deserving of oral argument. (629 [PDF; Text]) Presumably, each party will name the two of its own motions it most wants to argue before the judge. How the remainder will be disposed of, given that neither party has filed a response to the motions in limine of the other, is unclear. The list is due to Judge Alsup by December 7.
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CMS
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Google has announced that it will kill Knol, its Wikipedia competitor. Interestingly, Google co-founder Sergey Bring donated half a million dollars to Wikipedia foundation, last week.
Google launched Knol in 2007 to help improve web content by enabling experts to collaborate on in-depth articles. In order to continue this work, Google has been working with Solvitor and Crowd Favorite to create Annotum, an open-source scholarly authoring and publishing platform based on WordPress.
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Funding
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I have heard it said that companies don’t want open source because they want the security of a relationship with a big business. But this outlook reflects misunderstandings of the real values of open source. I believe it to be yet another consequence of the “price frame”.
There is an overall price-related message-frame that proprietary software companies like to use around open source. In each instance, an idea completes the phrase “open source may come with free licenses but…” in creatively manipulative ways. In many cases, the resulting statement conceals a weakness of proprietary software by casting it as a weakness of open source.
In the case of software investment protection, the phrase gets completed “… but you need a proprietary vendor for long-term investment protection”. That’s a deceptive statement and I suggest that actually the open source model – done well – offers more security than the proprietary model.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Project Releases
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Because of the large ecosystem that has developed around GWT, App Engine, and Google’s Cloud services, and because our primary mission is to help users (as opposed to creating proprietary development tools), it makes a lot of sense for us to open source GPE and make it easier for the community to enhance and extend the tools.
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I’ll present a short overview of the release in this post, more details are available in my recent talk on Apache Hadoop 0.23 at Hadoop World, 2011.
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Public Services/Government
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The European Space Agency (ESA) wants to publish more of its software using open source licences. It is considering to use a source code tracking system to help untangle code that can be made available as open source and programs that, for whatever reason, can not.
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FOSS icon The French government has published a request for tenders to provide ICT support. The authorities are looking for a three-year support contract, worth two million euros and covering two-thirds of the country’s twenty-two ministries as well as the Court of Audit. According to Le Monde InformatiqueFrench language link this will include departments ranging from the Office of the Prime Minister and the Ministry of Justice and Freedom to the Ministry of Sports and Ministry of Culture and Communication.
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The European Space Agency (ESA) hopes to promote more collaboration by open sourcing more of its software where possible. The effort is one of the facets of a recent case study of ESA by the Open Source Observatory and Repository (OSOR.eu). ESA produces software for its own use to, for example, evaluate and analyse data from its missions. Software it has already released under open source licenses includes POLSARPRO, a tool package for manipulating polarmetric data, BEAM, a platform for analysing remote sensing raster data, and NEST, used for analysing mission data archives.
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Openness/Sharing
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Soft Cities is a San Francisco-based company that sells blankets and napkins. Sounds pretty standard.
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Programming
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How exactly should you gain visibility into the performance levels your customers are seeing when they use your Web applications? One method that’s still in wide use is compelling users to install plug-ins and background processes. But for many users, that’s not just performance monitoring, that’s behavior monitoring. You don’t want your analytics tool straying too far into the realm of potential privacy violations.
Until HTML5 can fully implement its standard methodology for capturing browser performance specs, Web developers need alternatives. One candidate, provided by a company RWW spoke with called New Relic, is to have Web apps servers supply performance measurement agents to clients while the apps themselves are being served. These agents communicate not with your server, but with New Relic instead, and the results are made visible as analytics charts through your browser.
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In November 2001, IBM made its Java tools IDE and platform, developed for WebSphere Application Studio, available under an open source licence. It was the beginning of Eclipse, which now claims 65 per cent of the Java IDE market. But why was Eclipse founded and what has been its impact over a decade?
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The “phone” bit of the new iPhone 4S has stopped working properly for some users who are experiencing repeated SIM card failures, according to customer help forums on the Apple website.
The SIM stutter appears to be affecting customers running the new iOS 5.01 on the iPhone 4S: those affected report frequent error messages detailing “invalid SIM”, even while using SIM cards they know have worked with other phones.
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Thanks to the hard work and vision of Steve Jobs, Apple has managed to evolve from a mere cult to a mainstream phenomenon. Fanboys, celebrities, politicians and geeks who adore their products have exalted the billion-dollar company to a technological pseudoreligion. A silent witness to Apple’s magnificent ascent from failure to stardom has been Microsoft.
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Health/Nutrition
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One of the reasons why Congress has been largely unable to make the American health care system more efficient and equitable is because of the stranglehold lobbyists for special interests have on the institution.
Whenever lawmakers consider any kind of meaningful reform, the proposed remedies inevitably create winners and losers. Physicians’ incomes most likely will be affected in some way, as will the profits of all the other major players: the hospitals, the drug companies, the medical device manufacturers, and the insurers, just to name a few. The list is long, and the platoons of highly paid and well-connected lobbyists who represent their interests comprise a large private army that conquered Capitol Hill years ago.
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Security
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Google’s hackerishly hirsute Open Source Programs Manager, Chris DiBona, stormed the IT headlines this week when he stuck his paddle into the computer security world and stirred.
In a blog posting which was at least as far above the line in gung-hovity as it was below the line in orthography, DiBona openly referred to vendors of Android anti-virus software as “charlatans and scammers.”
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While many of us do simultaneous facepalms and giggle at a decade-late decision, others question the legality of doing so. A multi-billion dollar industry has grown, based on the absolute porous operating system that is Microsoft Windows.
I’m sure Windows fans will protest, saying such things as:
“Well, I’ve run Windows for years and NEVER had a virus”.
Of course, when he says that, he should also hold up a sign to identify himself as belonging to the 1%.
Personally, I cannot suss where this will land legally. It’s hard to argue with the fact that MS is finally going to at least try to address the issue of virus/trojan/malware security. But then again, we all know most anti virus “protection” is a reaction to something that’s already happened on the system….
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Finance
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Of course, simply bandying names about isn’t the point. The point is that the activists fueling social movements like Occupy need to be able to understand exactly how oppression works and which individuals are controlling the process. Where would our nation be if, in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s, activists had spoken only of the systemic issue of segregation and didn’t have George Wallace and Bull Connor to single out as perpetrators? We at Brave New Foundation are helping build a narrative so that citizens can draw a straight line between the cheats and bullies misusing their wealth and the economic predicament in which our country is now ensnared.
We aren’t alone in this effort. Our partners include progressive media truth tellers like AlterNet, TruthOut, the Nation, PoliticusUSA, CARE2, the Center for Media and Democracy, the Young Turks, Campaign for America’s Future, Free Speech TV, Thom Hartmann, and MichaelMoore.com.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Responding to Rob Reed’s Google+ post on the dark side of huge corporate entities — read: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube — controlling what we see and don’t see on the Internet, I wrote a couple of responses (instead of one because you can’t edit an existing post or comment on Google+’s Android client), which I will repeat here because, a) they’re not bad and b) I’m against “giving away” content to social networks and c) the irony of us having this discussion about Facebook on the newest, shiniest corporate-created social network, Google+ is particularly rich (and I acknowledge my part in it).
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Crisis averted, so far. Last week’s hearing on the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was stacked in favor of the Internet blacklist bill but we seem to have come out unscathed.
Public outcry against the bill rallied enough opposition to keep it from sailing through. Google testified against the bill, MasterCard voiced some objections, and tens of thousands of users lit up their representatives’ phone lines thanks to Tumblr. But it’s not over.
Following the proceedings, I spoke with Electronic Frontier Foundation activist Parker Higgins. “Considering the makeup of the meetings, and how expectations were, it went really well” says Higgins. “It remains to be seen what happens next, but given positive experience [at the hearing] and outpouring through the EFF and other groups, things look better today than they did earlier this week.”
Permalink
Send this to a friend
11.22.11
Posted in News Roundup at 7:48 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Movie fans are rejoicing over the opening of Quickflix in Australia and the possibility of streaming movies to their PCs without having to look over their shoulders.
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That’s still not close to what I normally expect from GNU/Linux but, what the heck, they are newbies.
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Desktop
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When Google announced Chrome OS in 2009, it got a tremendous amount of hype, primarily because it presented a new cloud-centric model for working with applications and unusual approaches to operating system security. Google has had problems, though, translating the hype into a realistic strategy for proliferating Chrome OS-based systems, dubbed Chromebooks. Although Samsung and Acer have steadily backed Chromebooks, they have not made a big splash, and now some analysts are questioning whether Google’s OS will ever become a dominant force.
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Kernel Space
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While in the weeks since the launch of the AMD FX “Bulldozer” processors we have looked at many areas of computing performance for the FX-8150 CPU, from the compiler tuning to multi-core scaling, one area that hasn’t yet been covered under Linux is the AMD FX-8150 overclocking. But this article changes that.
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Lennart Poettering and Kay Sievers have developed a new Linux logging system with the aim of replacing syslog. The two Red Hat developers hope that their Journal daemon will resolve a number of perceived problems with syslog, the current industry standard for logging on Unix systems.
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The patches for real-time support are now based on a much more recent kernel version. Torvalds has revoked a change merged into 3.2 which had come under widespread criticism from developers. AMD and Intel have released new graphics drivers.
With the release of real-time (RT) kernel 3.0.9-rt25, Thomas Gleixner has declared that the Linux 3.0-based RT tree is now ready for use in live systems. He noted that this new version series represents a major leap forward and that development has run pretty smoothly, despite major revisions to many of the core techniques.
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Graphics Stack
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NVIDIA announced yesterday the 290.10 Linux graphics driver with numerous changes.
Aaron Plattner announced the 290.10 Linux binary driver release with fixing numerous bugs, improving the performance of FBO bind operations under Xinerama (~30%), and support for pre-VBO DrawArrays command in the server-side GLX driver module. Bug/regression fixes make up a majority of the changes.
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Over the weekend there was the first X.Org Server 1.12 development snapshot released by Keith Packard. This isn’t an official alpha or beta development build yet, but rather just a snapshot to indicate the current development progress of this next major release. Going forward the plan is to tag such development releases at around the same time there are new stable point releases for the previous series.
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Applications
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The email client, along with the word processor, is probably one of the most recognisable pieces of software on the desktop. They come in all shapes and sizes, from standalone lightweight command-line clients, to massive personal information managers (PIMs), that do a lot more than just check email.
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Proprietary
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Regunath Balasubramanian, principal architect of the UIDAI (Unique Identification Authority of India) said during an event, “The main reason to use OSS (open source software) in the Aadhaar project was not to save cost but to avoid vendor lock-in. And it was important that we have an ability to replace hardware, software or storage.”
Interestingly according to the UIDAI web site there is no metion of any open source technologies used for the project. The only layer which seems to be using some kind of low-level open source is UID Biometric Middleware layer. Rest of the infrastructure is supposedly using proprietary technologies.
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Instructionals/Technical
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In the previous article in this series, we reviewed the different methods of importing footage into Kdenlive, best practises in organizing project files, and the layout and tools provided by Kdenlive. In this article, we will discuss advanced editing techniques and review most of the tools you’ll be using on a day to day basis as a video editor.
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Wine
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The Wine project developers have released version 1.3.33 of Wine, the latest fortnightly development build. The update improves support for HTTP proxies and introduces support for text output in the DIB engine, part of the display subsystem. Aimed at developers, testers and early adopters, Wine 1.3.33 also includes a new version of the Gecko rendering engine and fixes for bidirectional text layout, as well as various other bugs.
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Games
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Calligra will be replacing Koffice as the official office application for the Chakra KDE SC. It is being to testing for Chakra and all the tests that are being performed are moving it to the forefront of Koffice. Yet, Calligra has not reached a ‘stable’ status.
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GNOME Desktop
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat’s OpenShift is their new Platform as a Service (PaaS) cloud offering. OpenShift makes some big promises: power, speed, openness, and portability, the ultimate fast friendly PaaS. Will it deliver on these promises? Time will tell, and you can start testing it now for free.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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This time it runs Bodhi Linux 1.2.0
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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So, you like the idea of deploying an Ubuntu desktop to all or some of your users. You like the way Ubuntu’s light-client model can give your older desktop machines a new lease of life. You like the fact that Ubuntu is secure, portable, and easy to manage. Best of all, you like that it costs nothing to license, and comes with a host of enterprise-grade apps that cost nothing to license either.
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The Ubuntu Developer Summit – UDS – is a major event in the Canonical calendar. Taking place every six months, it is the Ubuntu event which defines the focus and plans for our up-coming version of Ubuntu. In the first week of November, over 800 people, from Canonical engineers and employees, Ubuntu community members, partners, ISVs, upstreams and many more gathered to discuss and plan for the upcoming Ubuntu 12.04, code-named Precise Pangolin.
UDS covered 420 sessions, under nine tacks, from desktop to design, community to server and cloud. Attendees worked in the usual collaborative and open environment and spent the week pooling their experience and expertise and sharing best practise resulting, as always, in the very best ideas. Right now, those ideas are are represented in hundreds of blueprint documents and are being put into action by developers, community and Canonical, who are already driving forward for April’s launch. As a practical demonstration of that openness you can track our progress here (note, it’s early days!): http://status.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-precise/.
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Canonical is discontinuing its use of CouchDB as part of its Ubuntu One data synchronisation service. The announcement was made by John Lenton, Senior Engineering Manager at Canonical. CouchDB has been used in Ubuntu One to provide a synchronisable way of storing and distributing arbitrary structured data which included contacts, notes and playlists.
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Canonical is set to release Ubuntu 11.10, codenamed the Oneiric Ocelot this week, with a key focus on the cloud.
Among the cloud-focused technology components that are set to debut in the new Linux distribution is something that Canonical is branding as Juju. With Juju, Ubuntu is aiming to deliver a cloud orchestration technology for server admins.
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In recent weeks Canonical has announced major initiatives to sell Ubuntu PCs in Asia and Europe, just like it tried — and mostly failed — to do five years ago in the United States. But will things be different this time? Here are some thoughts.
Five years ago, when Dell began shipping laptops and desktops in the United States with Ubuntu pre-installed, there were lots of reasons to believe Linux just might take off among the masses. Dell not only offered Ubuntu but actually promoted it for a while. The introduction of Windows Vista around the same time left many consumers eager to consider alternatives to the Microsoft universe.
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Recently I ‘upgraded’ to Ubuntu 11.10 and was faced with being, as I thought, ‘forced’ to use Unity if I wanted to stay with Ubuntu in its latest version. Having stuck with Unity for a few weeks I can say that I still dislike it.
I started to look for a solution and fairly quickly found that I had made the same mistake as many other commentators — even in Ubuntu 11.10, Unity is only the default UI. When Ubuntu 11.04 shipped it had the easy fall-back at logon of ‘Ubuntu classic’, which gave users a choice of selecting the GNOME 2 UI at startup. Mark Shuttleworth had said, in the run-up to 11.10, that in Oneiric Ocelot this choice would no longer be available.
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It’s official: Canonical’s foray into the world of phones, tablets and even TVs has begun. Or at least, that’s what the introduction of formal development channels for these categories suggests. Here’s the latest, and what it says about Ubuntu’s future.
It’s been pretty clear for a while that Canonical was steering Ubuntu in the direction of portable devices; hence, its focus on the uTouch library for improving touchscreen support on Linux beginning back in 2010 and the introduction of the Unity interface, which aims to cater to screens of all sizes and touchabilities.
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Flavours and Variants
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I have been playing with couple of distros in the past week. I tried Linux Mint, Fedora 16 and openSUSE (Gnome as well as KDE). I found each distro to be the leader in its own class. For disclosure, I am a long time Ubuntu user and have been switching between Fedora 16 and openSUSE 12.1 ever since they are out. Apart from a few issues there is no major hurdle that keeps me away from any of these distros.
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It’s a really good month for Linux distributions. First we got Fedora 16, then openSUSE 12.1, and now we have the preview release of Linux Mint 12. This release has the answer to the question: Just what is the Mint team going to do with the desktop?
With GNOME moving from the 2.x series to 3.x, the big question was whether Linux Mint would find a way to stick with the old school GNOME or move to 3.x. The answer appears to be “yes.” Let me explain.
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We are getting close to “perfection” with thin clients and all-in-one computers but this gadget must be “it”. Using only USB power, the thing can run a modern distro like Ubuntu/Linux or Android/Linux and can be used with any PC that can boot a USB drive. It’s still pricey for the material in it. I expect eventually such gadgets will sell for a bit more than a USB drive costs. The HDMI port, card reader, electronics and ARM CPU do cost something but the price should be ~$100 to really hit the market hard. Still, this thing will sell and widely.
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Intel released an update to its Linux-based, Intel Atom-focused Intel Embedded Software Development Tool Suite, adding support for the Yocto 1.1 embedded tookit. Version 2.3 supports the latest Intel Atom models and optimizations, and updates components including the compiler, performance libraries, and analysis and debug tools, says the company.
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Phones
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HP is still quietly shopping webOS around among with other Palm assets, according to sources, but insisting that potential buyers of the platform agree to license it back for use in future HP printers. Intel has just entered discussions with HP, a source close to the negotiations spilled to VentureBeat, while Qualcomm – despite sidestepping any suggestions of interest in webOS – is also said to be still in the running.
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Android
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After years of considering how to best get into the phone business, Facebook has tapped Taiwanese cellphone maker HTC to build a smartphone that has the social network integrated at the core of its being.
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Steve Wozniak is the genius, the mad engineer who created what we call today Personal Computers or PCs. He co-founded Apple with the other Steve whose skill were around creating business model around anything.
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A couple of years ago, there was much debate about whether Android would inspire the kind of inspiration among app developers that developers have for Apple’s iOS. There were even those who said that no app ecosystem would come close to Apple’s App Store. Today, though, Android apps are flourishing, and you may very well run them already on a phone, a tablet or both. Did you know, though, that you can run them on a computer as well? While it only works on Windows at this point (it is coming soon in a Mac version), BlueStacks App Player lets you do so.
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The Galaxy Nexus is almost here, but even if you’re not in the market for a new phone you can sate your Ice Cream Sandwich appetite a little thanks to an XDA developers user, who extracted the keyboard application from Android 4.0 and made it available as a free download for Android 2.2 and 2.3. It’s not the full 4.0 experience — voice input isn’t working, and not all languages were ported over — but the keyboard’s improved autocorrection, new look and feel, and a few other features came over in the transfer. We installed the keyboard on a Droid X2 running Gingerbread, and it activated and worked seamlessly.
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Ask him where he sees Android headed, and he’s confident that the open source mobile operating system will be ubiquitous, powering digital devices across the board – from fridges and heaters to every kind of mobile device there is.
“We’ll see it power everything … even cars, maybe,” says the 24-year-old Android developer from Portugal. In Bangalore to attend and deliver the keynote address at Droidcon India, the first-ever international Android conference in the country, Diogo Ferreira is convinced that Android has the potential to transform the digital world as we know it. For instance, he talks about a CISCO gadget presentation where he saw a smartphone with a tablet built into it (that’s made on Android), so when you’re going for a meeting you can simply pick up the tablet from the phone and proceed. Being open sourced, Android, he believes, has the potential to go places. “The exciting thing is that it’s so open that if someone wants to, they can simply take the code and take it in any direction.”
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Researchers from German security firm Recurity Labs have released a JavaScript implementation of the OpenPGP specification that allows users to encrypt and decrypt webmail messages.
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Automotive electronics are becoming more sophisticated each year, and it’s reaching the point at which some cars may soon need built-in operating systems in order for people to use them properly. Not too far in the future, if you buy a new car, you may find that Android or a Linux-based OS is riding shotgun.
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Events
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The eighth edition of Open Source India, a technology event that is focussed on the open source technology space, will be held from November 20 to 22 at the NIMHANS Convention Centre, Bangalore. Started in 2004 as Linux Asia, this is among the largest open source conferences in Asia.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Google is working on an alternative technique aimed at tangibly speeding up response times for interactive JavaScript applications in Chrome. Although Google’s V8 JavaScript Engine has made steady progress in the way it processes the scripting language in the past, interactive applications such as Google Maps, games like Angry Birds and WebGL experiments place additional demands on the engine. A new incremental garbage collector is aimed at improving “interactive performance”.
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has released the first maintenance update to version 8 of its open source Firefox web browser. According to the release notes, Firefox 8.0.1 is a minor release that addresses two crashing bugs though there are 13 bugs listed as known issues that are “to be fixed in future versions”.
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Databases
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Please, tell us something about you and your activities? And how you became involved with Open Source Software and LibreOffice?
I started to get involved with Open Source when I was still a student. I got involved quite a bit with Gentoo (the Linux distribution) in its early days, somewhere around Gentoo 1.2. I even wrote some tools for it, only to scratch my personal itch, but it seems that for example ‘etc-proposals’ is still quite popular. I kept being involved in Open Source, although my first job after graduating from the university was not Open Source related. In 2008 I joined Sun’s OpenOffice Writer team, motivated by the opportunity to work on one of the biggest – and most important – Open Source projects in the world. I learned quite a lot about the codebase and the product there and in turn could bring in some experience from the sometimes chaotic, but always dynamic ways of Open Source projects. As of February 2011 I am employed by Canonical and take care of LibreOffice releases on Ubuntu. Since that date I am contributing code changes directly to LibreOffice. Later I also joined the Engineering Steering Committee of LibreOffice.
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As was noted in Google’s filing last Friday with respect to the proposed trial plan [PDF; Text] the reexaminations of the six asserted Oracle patents are currently running largely in Google’s favor. [Note: a seventh patent, the '447 patent which remains in reexamination is no longer being asserted by Oracle.] Google argues that this should sway the court in favor of staying at least the patent infringement action until final determinations on each of these reexaminations by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
The most recent action by the USPTO has been the issuance of an Action Closing Prosecution on the ’720 patent. ACP Dated 11-18-2011 [PDF]. In that action the USPTO maintains its rejection of all of the contested claims of the ’720 patent, including the six claims asserted in the litigation. Oracle has 30 days in which to respond to the ACP and attempt to convince the examiner that the decision is misplaced.
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CMS
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XOOPS is one of the most successful Open Source CMS solutions, constantly winning top places in various competitions, and receiving various awards.
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Education
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Flinders University is in the final stages of a multi-year effort to replace its 13-year-old WebCT learning management system (LMS) next year.
The project began in mid-2009, as Blackboard phased out support for WebCT Vista – on which Flinders Learning Online (FLO) was based – after acquiring WebCT in 2005.
Staff saw Blackboard Version 9, launched that year, as a “new product anyway”, so the university decided to consider other LMS vendors.
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Funding
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The co-founder of Google Sergey Brin has donated $500,000 to Wikipedia Foundation. Sergey made the donation via his The Brin Wojcicki Foundation. The foundation was started by Google co-founder Sergey Brin and 23andMe co-founder Anne Wojcicki.
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BSD
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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What Stallman wrote was “Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died … we all deserve the end of Jobs’ malign influence on people’s computing. / Unfortunately, that influence continues despite his absence. We can only hope his successors, as they attempt to carry on his legacy, will be less effective.”
In a follow-up, Stallman expanded his argument: “The important thing about Jobs is what he directed Apple to do to those who are still living: to make general-purpose computers with digital handcuffs more controlling and unjust than ever before … Jobs saw how to make these computers stylish and smooth. That would normally be positive, but not in this case, since it has the paradoxical effect of making their controlling nature seem acceptable.”
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Project Releases
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Public Services/Government
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In this age of austerity, public sector IT leaders are constantly looking for alternative solutions to deliver more with less.
In this context, it is perhaps surprising that the government’s overall approach to open-source solutions has been lukewarm to say the least, especially by comparison with other European countries including the Netherlands and France, which have embraced open source to deliver greater value through collaboration and efficiency to the taxpayer.
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Fox-IT was contracted by the Netherlands National Communications Security Agency to make security modifications to OpenVPN, a leading open-source VPN product, which make the software suitable for government employee use. This development ensures that Dutch government employees can securely access work files outside their office.
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Licensing
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Since the source code is usually available, software under a free or open open source license can be re-used within another software project rather easily. That is, after all, the whole point of FLOSS. But the potential for FLOSS license violations within software projects is, like any other license, always there.
Critics of FLOSS licenses are usually quick to point out that the very openness of FLOSS source code actually promotes more license violations. Protect yourself, these critics urge, and avoid FLOSS altogether–or at the very least purchase commercial compliance services and products.
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Open Hardware
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During my interview with Cousins at the Compass Summit he speculated that an open-source software base could provide a boost to the robotics industry, similar to how Apple’s App Store creates more utility for iPhones and how video game attachments support particular games.
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Programming
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A new open source JavaScript library claims to offer 90 per cent of the popular jQuery library’s functionality at only 13 per cent of the size. jQuip – JQuery-in-parts – is small enough that it can be included as source to avoid external references in web pages, according to the developers. It offers the $() selector syntax and methods including each, attr, bind, unbind, append, prepend, before, after and many more. It also supports a wide range of events and static methods. Plugins allow jQuip to expand its capability to detect documentReady and perform CSS manipulation and Ajax calls. Any call not implemented currently throws a “not implemented” exception. The animation methods hide, show, fadeIn and fadeOut work, but do not animate.
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The PyPy development team has released version 1.7 of its “very compliant” Python interpreter with integrated tracing just-in-time (JIT) compiler. The developers say that the focus of the new update was widening the range of code that PyPy can speed up, which the developers refer to as the “sweet spot”. In their benchmarks, PyPy 1.7 performs approximately 30 per cent faster than 1.6 and “up to 20 times faster on some benchmarks”.
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Open source tools
Developer tools have benefited more from the free and open source software revolution than any other category of software. When I was learning C programming in the early 1990s, Borland’s offer of an integrated MS-DOS C compiler, editor, debugger, and linker for $150 came as a revelation. Developer tools for commercial Unix systems cost thousands.
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Standards/Consortia
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HTML5 development tool provider appMobi is putting together a Black Friday deal for programmers as it open-sources many key HTML5 technologies that it hopes should help spur on the building of more mobile web apps. AppMobi is trying to help accelerate the market for HTML5 mobile apps and at the same time position itself to be a sort of Heroku or Red Hat for mobile HTML5.
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One of the things I’m most passionate about in my current role is the social benefits of the Digital Agenda. Because new technology isn’t just about boosting our growth and productivity: it also offers significant opportunities to protect and include everyone in our society.
In particular, technology can help the elderly: because by innovating we can address the challenges of ageing. In an initiative led by the EU, we’ve just agreed some very clear actions so we can do this. Actions with a positive impact for older people, and those who live with and care for them.
For example, did you know that falls are the leading cause of injuries among the elderly? By preventing falls through early diagnosis and screening, technology can lead to an amazing decrease in the number of elderly people who need to be treated after an accident. This means more elderly people can keep their independence longer – and also reduces the burden on our stretched health and social care systems. Most of all, it could have a lasting impact on how we value and interact with the older generation.
New technologies can promise these kinds of changes – and many others besides. But it takes a whole range of people to deliver them. After all, innovation in this area could come from anywhere – doctors, carers, governments, the ICT industry, entrepreneurs, or the elderly themselves. To make progress, and to deliver the kind of changes that really help those in the care frontline, we need cooperation and mutual understanding between all those groups.
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Security
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Google’s open source supremo Chris DiBona has lashed out at companies flogging antivirus software for Google’s Android operating system, calling them “charlatans and scammers”.
He apparently became incadescant with rage after he saw a press report about “inherent” insecurity of open source software, which is used not just in Android but also Apple’s iOS, he said.
DiBona said that Android, iOS, and Research in Motion’s BlackBerry OS don’t need antivirus software.
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“Virus companies are playing on your fears to try to sell you bs protection software for Android, RIM, and iOS,” DiBona charged. “They are charlatans and scammers. If you work for a company selling virus protection for Android, RIM, or iOS you should be ashamed of yourself.”
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Finance
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Democratic Florida Congressional Rep. Ted Deutch has proposed an amendment to the Constitution of the United States outlawing corporate money in politics and ending so-called “corporate personhood”, according to Talking Points Memo.
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Civil Rights
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The Internet Blacklist Legislation – known as PROTECT IP Act in the Senate and Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House – is a threatening sequel to last year’s COICA Internet censorship bill. Like its predecessor, this legislation invites Internet security risks, threatens online speech, and hampers Internet innovation. Urge your members of Congress to reject this Internet blacklist campaign in both its forms!
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Paris, 18th of November 2011 – Nicolas Sarkozy is attempting a sleight of hand at today’s G8/G20 Forum d’Avignon on culture, economy and the media: posing as the defender of digital culture and the Internet. La Quadrature du Net reminds of his disastrous record, and calls on citizens to judge by themselves with the upcoming votes in the Council of the EU and the European Parliament, in particular on the anti-counterfeiting ACTA agreement.
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Last week, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission released its much-anticipated usage based billing decision. While the ruling only focused on the use of data caps (or UBB) as between Internet providers, the issue garnered national attention with over 500,000 Canadians signing a petition against Internet data caps and the government providing clear signals that it would overrule the Commission if it maintained its support for the practice.
My weekly technology law column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) notes the resulting decision seemed to cause considerable confusion as some headlines trumpeted a “Canadian compromise,” while others insisted that the CRTC had renewed support for UBB. Those headlines were wrong. The decision does not support UBB at the wholesale level (the retail market is another story) and the CRTC did not strike a compromise. Rather, it sided with the independent Internet providers by developing the framework the independents had long claimed was absent – one based on the freedom to compete.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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Koha is a free library management system created by the Horowhenua Library Trust in New Zealand. This software has been the subject of an ongoing fight with a US company called LibLime, which seems to want to take the software proprietary; LWN reported on this dispute in 2010.
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Copyrights
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People have come to see copyright as a tool of punishment, Europe’s technology chief has said in her strongest-yet attack on the current copyright system.
Digital agenda commissioner Neelie Kroes said on Saturday that the creative industries had to embrace rather than resist new technological ways of distributing artistic works. She added that the existing copyright system was not rewarding the vast majority of artists.
“Is the current copyright system the right and only tool to achieve our objectives? Not really,” Kroes said in a speech to the Forum D’Avignon thinktank. “Citizens increasingly hear the word copyright and hate what is behind it.”
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The EU’s Digital Agenda Commissioner, Neelie Kroes, has criticised the current system for the protection of intellectual property rights. In her traditional speech at a cultural and media forum in Avignon on Saturday, the Dutch politician said that the millions of dollars invested trying to enforce copyright have not stemmed piracy. Speaking with unusual frankness, Kroes said that citizens increasingly hear the word copyright and hate what is behind it. “Sadly, many see the current system as a tool to punish and withhold, not a tool to recognise and reward [creative work]“, she added.
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What do you think of, when you think of copyright? A tool to recognise and reward artists? Or a tool to punish and withhold material?
For me the answer should clearly be the first. But all too often, in the digital age, it is seen as the second.
Our current copyright system is not succeeding in its objectives. I agree we should fight against piracy. But it’s becoming increasingly hard to legally enforce copyright rules, a battle that costs millions of dollars with little signs of victory.
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The UK government had ‘no evidence’ to support the Digital Economy Act, the UK’s anti-piracy and censorship law, it has emerged in a parliamentary select committee.
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Posted in News Roundup at 7:11 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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During TechRepublic’s Live Event, I said that I could hand a Linux machine to new users and give them the information necessary to make sure their transition to Linux was successful–and they wouldn’t be hounding me constantly on how X is done or asking, “What is Y?”
I could tell by the faces of the audience members that some of them wanted to know how I could make such a bold statement. With that in mind, here are 10 pieces of information to pass on to new Linux users that will ensure a successful transition.
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You’ll frequently hear references to a “software ecosystem” on various platforms, but it’s relatively rare to see someone take that sort of terminology seriously. A group of evolutionary biologists, however, has now used the tools of ecosystem analysis to look at the evolution of Debian releases, examining things like package dependencies and software incompatibility.
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The run-up to the holidays got many in the Linux blogosphere thinking about some of the things their thankful for, and a community of technology lovers sharing free and open software was near the top of many lists. “In the end, it’s the people you end up interacting with who are more important than the actual technology,” blogger Barbara Hudson told LinuxInsider.
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Desktop
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Google announced that the Wi-Fi only version of the Samsung and Acer Chromebooks, including a newly announced black version of the Samsung Chromebook, will drop $50 in price to $300. Google also released updated firmware for the Chromebooks’ Chrome operating system, featuring a new login page and a revamped New Tab page that offers new shortcuts.
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Kernel Space
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Many people think Ubuntu codenames are funny, weird, strange and what not. Do you know that all Kernel releases have their names too.
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If you happen to be running a Linux system with Xen support enabled, beware there may be odd behavior with the Linux kernel’s power management — it can easily move in either direction.
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Applications
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Elmer is an open-source multiphysics simulation software that has been around since 1995. It is developed by the CSC — IT Center for Science Ltd. This group is administered by the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture in Finland. With Elmer, you can model physical systems, such as fluid dynamics, electromagnetism, heat transfer and acoustics. All of those problem areas have one thing in common—they are all described by partial differential equations (PDEs).
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The PS3 Media Server developers announced yesterday, November 20th, the immediate availability for download of the PS3 Media Server 1.50.0 application for Linux, OSX and Windows platforms.
The PS3 Media Server is a DLNA compliant UPnP Media Server for the PlayStation 3 gaming console. PS3 Media Server is written in Java, therefore it can be used on Linux, Windows and Macintosh platforms.
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Proprietary
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As HTML5 is creating circumstances for the death of Flash, a group of creative developers have launched a special project known as Occupy Flash. The goal of this project is to abandon the Adobe Flash Player.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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Games
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Desktop Environments
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If you are into such things, and you place your faith on those distro popularity numbers over on DistroWatch, you’ll see that Ubuntu has dropped from its number one position, a position now held by Linux Mint. Heavens, no! Surely the universe is about to implode! And isn’t even 2012 yet!
Sorry about that. The reason for Ubuntu’s decline from that venerated number one position has been speculated on by tea leaf readers everywhere (i.e. my fellow tech journalists). Much has been made about the Canonical’s embrace of Unity over traditional GNOME and I am among the guilty when it comes to that. I happen to dislike Unity but I do like GNOME 3. This, oddly enough, puts me at odds with the majority of people who runs GNOME in one way or another though more people seem to hate Unity than GNOME 3 — I could be wrong. The question, however, is this . . .
Has Canonical shot itself in the foot, giving up its number one position, by adopting and sticking by Unity? Does the choice of desktop environment matter that much? Are Linux users, who traditionally just install and run whatever they want, regardless of what it presented to them, really that irked about Unity that they are abandoning Ubuntu? Okay, that’s at least three questions.
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GNOME Desktop
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I’ve been using GNOME 3 full time for over 9 months, and I find it quite usable. I’ve had to learn some new usage patterns, but I don’t see that as a negative. It’s a new piece of software, so I’m doing my best to use it the way it’s designed to be used.
Sure, it’s different than GNOME 2. It’s vastly different. But it is a new UI paradigm. The GNOME 2 experience was over 9 years old, and largely based on the experience inherited from the old Windows 95 muxed with a bit of CDE. There were so many things that the GNOME hackers wanted to do — and lots of things all the UI studies said needed changing — that the old pattern simply couldn’t support.
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Aside from the window decorations I don’t see any connection between this project and BeOS. One could get the same effect by taking a distro like SimplyMEPIS and changing the desktop theme. It’s tempting to write off ZevenOS as just another Debian derivative with a different collection of artwork, but I’m not sure that’s a fair evaluation. ZevenOS 2.0 “Neptune” doesn’t just have nice artwork, but a good collection of programs and easy-to-access documentation. It does a good job of being user-friendly while staying out of the way — desktop effects, for example, were not in evidence. ZevenOS may not be in the same class as some other Debian-based distros, such as Linux Mint “Debian” edition or SimplyMEPIS, but it’s not doing badly for such a young project. Hopefully the developers will expand on the installer and add a dedicated update utility for future releases. If you’re already happily using a Debian-based distro I don’t think there is anything here to win over hearts and minds. On the other hand, new users, especially those seeking a distribution with a German-focused forum, may find what they’re looking for in ZevenOS.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Back in the nineties, one of the top Linux distributions was, without a doubt, Mandrake Linux. Well, that eventually turned into Mandriva which wound up caught in the midst of an identity crisis. It was becoming clear which distributions were for the new users and which distributions where for the hard-core, well-versed users. All other distributions did nothing but struggle to remain afloat. Some went away and some simply continued to fluctuate.
Mandriva was one of the latter. Unsure of which route to take, Mandriva at any given moment was a distribution that wanted to make new users happy, while at the same time, make experienced users proud to proclaim they were among the legions of Mandriva users.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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First, the good stuff. Fedora 16 did not have a single application crash or a SELinux alert, which is a great thing. There was the Samba problem, but it was not a crash per se. And thus endeth the good stuff. Now, the bad stuff. Where should I begin?
Wireless takes ages to switch access points, Samba sharing is buggy, network gets slow, you must click three times just to get to your applications, and only then start sorting out what you might want or need. The interface is jerky and not very responsive. You can’t tell if you have open applications in any way, you get big, ugly prompts interfering with your work, the whole layout is annoying and counter-productive. Few of these elements should be blamed on Fedora, but Fedora’s developers chose it and they must bear the price of that decision. As a product, Verne suffers from bad integration and zero excitement.
I have just decided I will not be testing another Gnome 3 release for at least one year, or maybe ever. In the upcoming SUSE review, it’s going to be KDE only. Well, maybe Linux Mint. I was never a great Fedora fan, but some of the releases actually made sense. You always had beta quality, little to no support, no fun software, and things changed rapidly, but the operating system could be made usable, it was fast and it was elegant in its own special way. What we have here is a Panda bear tripping a claymore wire.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Shuttleworth, don’t be stupid. Admit that diversity is a good thing and live with it or you will soon be obsolete like that other OS.
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Jason Warner, Ubuntu Desktop Manager at Canonical, decided to make Rhythmbox the default music player in the upcoming Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system.
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Flavours and Variants
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The popular Linux distribution, Mint, will be giving its users three different distinct flavors of the GNOME for their desktop in its next release, Linux Mint 12, Lisa.
Like any Linux you can, of course, switch it to your own choice of desktop. Many, indeed, offer users a choice of desktops. Mint, for example, while primarily a GNOME-based distribution, also offers its users a version that uses the LXDE desktop for its interface.
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Anyone who wants to game on the go has a number of choices. There’s the Nintendo DS and 3DS, the PSP or the upcoming PS Vita, and then the growing competition from App Store and Android Market games running on smartphones or media players. Is there room for yet another platform? GameGadget hopes there is.
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Phones
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Amazon is preparing a Kindle Phone for 4Q 2012, expected to sell for as low as $150 to $170, says Citigroup. Meanwhile, Foxconn, which is rumored to be building the smartphone, will help build an upcoming 8.9-inch version of the Kindle Fire, says a report, and Piper Jaffray has upgraded its Kindle Fire 4Q sales estimates from 2.5 million to four million units.
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Android
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Google’s open-source program manager has launched an entertaining rant against firms offering mobile security software, accusing them of selling worthless software and of being “charlatans and scammers”.
Chris DiBona, Google’s open-source programs manager, argues that neither smartphones based on Google’s Android nor Apple’s iOS need anti-virus protection. Anyone telling you different is a snake-oil salesman, he said.
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The Padfone is a smartphone-tablet hybrid. It includes a fully functional Android smartphone, along with a tablet docking station. Just slap the phone into the docking station and you can use a higher resolution 10 inch display instead of a 4 inch phone screen. The dock also has its own battery.
[...]
Right now it also appears to have a top clock speed of 918 MHz, but that could change by release.
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Wozniak, who has previously expressed his admiration for the Google Android operating system, was given a Samsung Galaxy Nexus device when he visited the search giant’s campus. He had previously said on Twitter that he was thinking about getting one, which is the first phone to run Google’s Ice Cream Sandwich operating system.
Wozniak was, however, also first in line the for the Apple iPhone 4S when it was released earlier this year. He has previously said that he bought Google’s first phone, the Nexus One, on the day it was released and that he tries to keep up with all the latest mobile developments.
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HTC will focus on the production of quad-core tablet PCs and smartphones in the first half of 2012 competing with comparable devices to be released by rivals including Asustek Computer, Acer, Samsung Electronics and Lenovo, according to industry sources.
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Wozniak, who has previously expressed his admiration for the Google Android operating system, was given a Samsung Galaxy Nexus device when he visited the search giant’s campus. He had previously said on Twitter that he was thinking about getting one, which is the first phone to run Google’s Ice Cream Sandwich operating system.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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They say the beauty of UbiSlate, an Android-based tablet, is that users will be able to obtain quality internet access using existing low-speed cellphone networks.
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Before it was announced, the Kindle Fire was rumored to be Amazon’s entry into the Android tablet market. To get a serious tablet, even a small one, at the Kindle Fire’s price of $199 would have been a holiday miracle.
But in our time with the Kindle Fire, it fell far short of what tablets should be able to accomplish. As a vector for Amazon’s video and music stores and huge e-book selection, it’s great. As an e-reader, it’s merely OK. As an Internet and app portal, it falls short of Amazon’s promises.
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The Android-based device, only unveiled by Barnes & Nobles in the US last week, was pwned by the same group of developers who previously rooted the Amazon Kindle Fire. In both cases rooting the devices gives users the ability to install apps themselves, rather than been restricted to those offered by the manufacturer.
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In an attempt to help developers create more modular enterprise Java programs, the Apache Software Foundation has reconfigured its Geronimo application server to a set of standards established by the OSGi (Open Services Gateway initiative) Alliance.
An application server based on the OSGi standard “is a lot more dynamic and provides a lot more structure to the developers,” said Kevan Miller, chairman of the Geronimo Project management committee.
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DigitalPersona has open sourced its new MINEX-certified FingerJetFX fingerprint feature extraction technology.
FingerJetFX, Open Source Edition (OSE), is free, portable software that device manufacturers and application developers can use to convert bulky fingerprint images into small, mathematical representations called fingerprint “templates” for efficient storage or comparison.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Now that almost all of the motions have been disposed of (the remaining motion open being Oracle’s motion to exclude portions of the damage reports from Drs. Leonard and Cox on behalf of Google), the focus turns to how to conduct the trial, and once again we see the sides at odds. This is not really surprising. How issues are dealt with at trial and the instructions given to the jury will be huge factors in the outcome of this dispute, especially on the copyright side of the ledger.
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Steve Jobs has created a consumer society that makes many of us sad because we don’t have the latest iPhone, said the UK’s Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. Speaking at an interfaith gathering attended by the Queen, Sacks compared the iPad to the tablets of the Ten Commandments that Moses brought down from the mountains.
“The consumer society was laid down by the late Steve Jobs coming down the mountain with two tablets, iPad one and iPad two, and the result is that we now have a culture of iPod, iPhone, iTunes, i, I, I,” he said.
“When you’re an individualist, egocentric culture and you only care about ‘I’, you don’t do terribly well.”
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Security
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Even I, who have been called an amateur/incompetent etc. by the trolls here knew a decade ago to use huge keys for encryption/signatures since 2005. How incompetent is M$ for using/accepting 512-bit keys six years later to verify software to run on the world’s PCs?
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Cutting out the middleman, M$ intends to cash in on the lucrative anti-virus market by cutting out the industry M$ created by shipping an OS with no inherent security for decades. “8″ will include anti-virus.
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Finance
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Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) announces an unusually high number of partner retirements internally in recent weeks. Kevin Kennedy and Jeff Resnick are among the top well-known Wall Street names leaving. Kennedy was running Latin American operations, and Resnick was head of commodity trading.
[...]
Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) and JPMorgan (NYSE:JPM)have sold CDS protection on more than $5T of debt around the globe. However, don’t expect to get detail on which it was that sold. The banks have hedged themselves perfectly, and are not likely to divulge how they did so, unless they suffer a run similar to what has occurred to Jefferies (NYSE:JEF).
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Shares in Thomas Cook Group fell by more than 70 per cent after a further deterioration in trading forced the troubled tour operator to renegotiate the terms of its £1bn net debt burden for the second time in a month.
[...]
Paul Hollingworth, finance director, said: “We are confident that we will get the full support of our lenders. The rational and right thing for them to do is to support Thomas Cook over this period until we can trade robustly in the peak season.”
The announcement prompted Thomas Cook to delay the release of its full-year results, which were originally scheduled for November 24.
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As the struggle in the streets intensifies, and Occupy Wall Street refuses to remain silent, it’s good to know there are champions in Congress who have stepped up to the challenge of amending the US Constitution. It’s called OCCUPIED: Outlawing Corporate Cash Undermining the Public Interest in our Elections and Democracy, here.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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An epic new book examines the crucial role press and media have played over time in perpetuating racist views in American culture. “News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the U.S. Media,” by Juan Gonzalez and Joe Torres, examines Americans’ chronic discontent with the media. The book reveals how racial segregation in the media has historically distorted the news and gives numerous examples of how publishers and broadcasters have actually encouraged violence towards minorities and ethnic groups through their coverage.
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DRM
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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In 2009, Amelia Andersdotter, a member of the Swedish Pirate Party (Piratpartiet), won a seat at the European Parliament in Brussels, but her official appointment was delayed until this year. Despite the delay in taking her seat, Andersdotter will still be the youngest member to hold a seat in the current parliament.
The Pirate Party and open source software are intertwined. Back in December 2009, the group released a Tor server for anonymous communication and an Etherpad service, PiratePad, for real-time collaboration on texts.
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Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 7:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Lets face it. Modern day Linux installations are nowhere near as fast as they were a few years ago. It seems that they have been adding in everything, including the kitchen sink. To be fair, the kitchen sink will be used somewhere down the line. Actually, the standard desktop Linux installation generally has everything already installed to do ninety five percent of all needed tasks. Without having to install anything else.
This means that you have a fully capable word processor, spreadsheet program, presentation program, graphics program, music player, cd burner, chat, mail, web browser and kitchen sink. Right out of the box so to speak. This is so much more than proprietary offerings can give. Even if those proprietary systems do supply some functionality out of the box. It is nowhere near the functionality of the add ons which you absolutely must have to be able to do any work.
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If you’ve ever owned a Windows computer chances are your computer was at one point infected with a virus. The solution to this problem is not purchasing antivirus software.
The answer to this problem is abandoning Windows as your main operating system, however to some this might seem an impossible thing to do. Apple computers are rather expensive and while they can run Windows as a secondary operating system most people would prefer to be able to run Windows applications on their primary operating system without a noticeable slowdown.
This is where Linuxcomes in as an all around great performer. Linux has very few viruses written for it and due to the many different versions and “flavors” of Linux it is hard to write a virus for this platform. Linux is still not perfect and does have security features implemented to protect you from the few threats that are present or any threats that may arise in the future.
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Kernel Space
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“Technologies that lock things down tend to lose in the end,” said Torvalds when asked about Microsoft’s secure boot feature, which he likened to Apple’s use of DRM technology. “People want freedom and markets want freedom,” he added.
Secure boot is a feature in Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system designed to protect against low-level hacker attacks, but it could also end up preventing users from installing Linux on a PC shipped with a pre-loaded copy of Windows 8.
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Applications
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Some people are what is labeled a power user. I am one of these people. No matter how fast I get my system, or how quick of programs I have, it is never good enough. There is always at least one program that I could swap out for a more advanced, text-based counterpart that increases performance just a bit. Luckily, you don’t have to use text-based programs without graphical user interfaces to get blazing fast speeds on Linux. There are tons of open source alternatives to the mainstream programs that cost loads of money.
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Although Gedit is the default desktop text editor for Ubuntu and Gnome systems, many users are still unaware of some features Gedit has to offer. Gedit offers many of the same options found in common text editors but is expandable with the use of plugins. And many users never bother to learn the shortcut keys or experiment with the preferences. So if you want a user-friendly text editor that has lots of options and is easy to use give Gedit a try. If you don’t have Gedit on your system you can install it from the command line using these commands.
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Chat from the command line. Whether you use Google Talk, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo Chat, AIM, Jabber or some combination of the above, CenterIM lets you talk with your buddies in your Linux terminal. We’ve previously highlighted a few instant messaging programs, but nothing quite like CenterIM. That’s because this Linux chat program runs entirely from the command line, but still gives you access to the features you expect.
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Some people are what is labeled a power user. I am one of these people. No matter how fast I get my system, or how quick of programs I have, it is never good enough. There is always at least one program that I could swap out for a more advanced, text-based counterpart that increases performance just a bit. Luckily, you don’t have to use text-based programs without graphical user interfaces to get blazing fast speeds on Linux. There are tons of open source alternatives to the mainstream programs that cost loads of money.
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Since we last looked at open source backup software in 2009, clear trends have emerged in enterprise IT that have affected backup. In particular, server virtualisation has become ubiquitous in production environments while the cloud has become firmly established on most organisations’ IT radars.
The key enterprise backup players have responded to these developments with support for virtual server backup and the addition of the cloud as a backup target. The response from the open source backup software community and commercial supporters has been relatively uneven, however.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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For those of you who like the Steel Storm series of games you may or may not have noticed that the official website has changed to give a teaser of Steel Storm 2!
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It is always a delight to see native Linux games running on different types of machines/ hardware. Last week I stumbled on this article by Pat Regan showing native Linux games from latest Humble Indie Bundle running on a self made Arcade Cabinet.
He has kept a log of how he built this fabulous machine in a series of blog posts and they are quite interesting read. The machine sports a 24 inch LCD Monitor, an Athlon X2 3800+ with 1 GB of RAM, a 320 GB SATA disk, an I-PAC 4 board and a 64MB NVIDIA 6200 LE PCIe video card. The system runs 32 bit Ubuntu 10.10.
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There’s going to be a successor to Steel Storm, an indie action shooter game. Steel Storm 2, however, will be a first person shooter.
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Desura a digital game distribution similar to Valve’s Steam has now officially launched a public Linux client after a period of closed beta testing.
Like Steam Desura is a client software Desura’s online store that users need to install in order to download, install and play games. Like Steam it also manages game updates and has integrated community features. Desura is however unique in its community features that try to integrate game developers and players into the same network. It has brilliant modding support, using which one can even download and install mods for games not installed / purchased through Desura.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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We still haven’t released, and at the Calligra sprint we decided to have at least one more beta, but that hasn’t prevented Linux Format to give Krita as their “hottest pick” award in their Christmas issue, issue 152, which you can get from good news agents everywhere!
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Today I’d like to introduce Klipper, easy, small and very useful tool included in KDE Workspace since…well, always. That’s the scissors icon sitting in the systray area. Basically it is a history of your clipboard but it can do much more. Very important thing is that the contents persist between sessions, so if you have something in your clipboard, you log off/reboot/shutdown and then you log back in, you still have your whole clipboard history ready and the most recent entry already in clipboard, so you can paste it immediately.
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Have you ever wondered what that bright object in the pre-dawn morning was that you couldn’t help notice? Or is that reddish star Mars? Is that fuzzy mass of white a wispy cloud or a galaxy?
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With the KDE 4.8 releases drawing near, it’s time to change the look of the default desktop. Every two major releases, the main wallpaper of the Plasma Workspaces changes to maintain a fresh style.
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GNOME Desktop
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As part of the GNOME Outreach Program for Women, the Foundation has announced the twelve women who will be sponsored and mentored to work on open source projects. The internships will run from 12 December 2011 to 12 March 2012. The programme builds on previous successful internships which have seen participants work on on-screen keyboards for the GNOME Shell, Empathy avatars, educational Braille software and many other applications.
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Last night i was searching for a new Linux OS to install on my laptop and when i was looking on distrowatch i found the Commodore OS Vision. Commodore OS Vision is based on Linux Mint 10 (Ubuntu 10.10) and is still under development. It comes with GNOME 2 so all the desktop effects are there and installed by default… just watch the video!!
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New Releases
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Summary:
· Announced Distro: Linux Mint 12 Release Candidate
· Announced Distro: openSUSE 12.1
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Continued upgrades to the base system including pcmciautils, sudo, freetype, imlib,libpng, and busybox. New boot codes of “cde” and “pretce”. cde for easy remastering. pretce for raid and lvm support. Improved support for Microcore which includes Ondemand, and icon options when used with the X extensions. Several bug fixes and enhancements as requested by the community. See change log for all the details.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Mandriva has released Powerpack 2011, a commercially enhanced version of the company’s Mandriva Linux distribution. The system comes with the Linux kernel 2.6.39 and uses KDE 4.6.5 as the default desktop.
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Red Hat Family
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Two weeks ago, The Linux Foundation announced a new Labs project — OpenMama. This project was the result of a relationship forged with NYSE Technologies years ago at our Enterprise End User Summit held in New York every year.
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Open source solutions provider, Red Hat, has now opened its 2012 Fedora Scholarship program for submissions. The program recognises college students across the globe for their contributions to free software and the Fedora Project, a Red Hat-sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration.
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Debian Family
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Being an advocate of Linux Mint, which is a derivative based on Ubuntu, which is a derivative of Debian; I noticed a nasty bug back in July of 2011. Ubuntu 11.04 was released in April of that year and I waited for the bugs to be shaken out of the rug and finally installed it.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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As the latest version of Ubuntu was released, the team of developers have been hard at work adding some convenient features. However, some are more known than others, while others will surprise you when they pop up. Some aren’t even installed by default but can be very useful. So what are these features that can make a major difference?
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The PackageKit DBus Interface is coming to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, but it’s not full PackageKit support and integration.
Back during the Ubuntu 12.04 Developer Summit in Orlando, PackageKit integration was talked about. However, it’s not bringing PackageKit to Ubuntu Linux, but rather just their interfaces and they will interact with Canonical’s own design.
Sebastian Heinlein yesterday wrote to PackageKit DBus Interface in Ubuntu – It is the API that matters! to the Ubuntu development mailing list. He’s the developer working on bringing the PackageKit system D-Bus interface to the Ubuntu desktop by adding a compatibility layer that in turn will make it poke AptDaemon, which is Canonical’s preferred software management service for Ubuntu.
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It’s amazing to me what features drive decisions when choosing a technology. In my case, it’s a clock applet, but let me set a little bit of a context first.
I stopped configuring my UI environment several years ago, opting instead to use the experience that had been designed for me by the fine folks at Ubuntu. This wasn’t entirely just blind trust or pleasure – but rather that the defaults were sensible enough, and I wanted to be in the business of doing things, not spending an hour deciding what font I wanted my desktop to display. I believe I’ve been doing this since dapper, if not earlier.
Until now.
I tried. I mean, I’ve bitched at Jorge some in person, but I ran Unity starting with Natty up until last week. I ran it as provided, as intended, and I tried to learn to think about things in the way it was asking me to.
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I have been using Fedora 16 for a week now and since its quite stable I have been using it instead of my trusted and much loved Ubuntu. One of the reason behind using Fedora over Ubuntu is Unity. I love Unity, but at the moment there is very little customization possible, which makes it a bit hard to reshuffle things around according to one’s needs. Gnome 3, on the contrary, offers much more customizations, thanks to Gnome-Shell Extensions. Before trying Fedora I was using Gnome 3 Shell in Ubuntu, instead of Unity.
I must also add that I love Ubuntu. No other distro can match the work Ubuntu team has done to make GNU/Linux useful for an average user. Even if I am using Fedora, there is no denying the fact that Ubuntu has a very important place in the consumer desktop space — which presumably is not the market of Fedora.
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FXI Technologies announced a USB stick-sized computer that can run Android or Ubuntu on a 1.2GHz ARM Cortex-A9 processor. The “Cotton Candy” will include 1GB of RAM, a microSD slot, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and an HDMI port, the company says.
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Google has made no secret about its plans for Android. Smartphones and tablets are just the beginning — the company wants Android everywhere. And thanks to FXI Technologies’ Cotton Candy USB device, we may not have to wait long to see Android on more than just our mobile devices.
FXI essentially built an ultra-lean computer inside a small USB stick. Stick it into any device that supports USB storage, and Cotton Candy will register as a USB drive. From there, you can run the Android OS in a secure environment inside your desktop, courtesy of a Windows/OSX/Linux-compatible virtualization client embedded in the device.
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Phones
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A few months ago, when the Trojan Horse from Microsoft made the decision to switch Nokia to Windows Phone, I swore that I would never buy another Nokia product. Yesterday was the first time that I put that promise into action.
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Android
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Motorola Mobility shareholders have approved the sale of the company to Google. However, it will be federal regulators who have the final word on whether the deal will go through, and they have yet to make their decisions.
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Samsung’s Galaxy Nexus, the first phone with Google’s Ice Cream Sandwich version of Android, has gone on sale in the United Kingdom.
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Amazon looks like it’s not content with just having a shot at the e-reader and tablet market, with reports emanating from Asia that it wants a smartphone too.
According to CitiGroup, Amazon is looking to launch a smartphone in Q4 2012 in association with Foxconn International Holdings, and will aim it at the cheaper end of the market.
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Unlike iOS, Android doesn’t come with a dedicated Audiobook player. However, that shouldn’t stop you from listening to your favorite books. The Android Marketplace offers some great apps that can play and manage audiobooks really well. Not only will these apps let you play audiobooks in MP3, OGG and M4B formats, they’ll also allow you to manage, tag and organize your favorite books easily. So, if you’re itching to listen to that nail-biting bestseller you just downloaded, here’s a list of five of the best audiobook players and managers for Android.
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Google had pledged to release the source code for Honeycomb, also known as Android 3.0, but then delayed its release indefinitely. It provided Honeycomb only to bigger manufacturers, such as Acer and Motorola, while smaller companies had to stick with earlier versions of the software.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Archos announced an Android 2.3 tablet with an iPad-like display: 9.7 inches, 1024 x 768 pixels, and IPS (in-plane switching). The Arnova 9 G2 is equipped with a single-core 1GHz processor, 8GB of storage, a front-facing videocam, plus micro-USB, USB, and microSD connections — but so far, no price tag.
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Barnes & Noble has begun shipping their latest product, the Nook Tablet, one day ahead of schedule. While it might not seem like much of a deal on the surface, it puts the tablet in stores and, more importantly, in hands earlier than expected. The sooner these are in a retail environment, the better as the next few weeks will be heated to say the least.
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Earlier today I was griping about how Amazon had quietly made it difficult to install competing reading apps; today I get to dance for joy because I’ve learned how to install third party apps on the Nook Tablet.
A reader tipped me to the secret (Thanks, Geert). There’s a thread over on the XDA-Forums where someone discovered a loophole in the Nook Tablet firmware.
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Unlike some vendors which shall remain unnamed (*cough*, HTC, *cough*), Amazon didn’t make us wait for the mandatory open source bits of the Android Fire’s kernel and released them over at their Source Code page the same day the tablets themselves started arriving in consumers’ hands. The download, which comes as a compressed tar.gz, weighs in at a whopping 809MB.
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Google’s IDE integration for GWT, Speed Tracer and App Engine, which is known as Google Plugin for Eclipse (GPE), has been open sourced under the Eclipse Public Licence. The tools had previously been proprietary, but Google said in a blog posting that the size of the ecosystem around GWT, App Engine and the company’s cloud services meant the idea of open sourcing the tools made “a lot of sense for us” as it was easier for the community to improve the tools.
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After a “year of refinements” the jQuery Mobile developers have finalised version 1.0 of the HTML5-based user interface libraries and framework for mobile platforms. Based on jQuery core and jQuery’s UI library, the platform has been developed to work with Apple iOS, Android 2.1-2.3 and Honeycomb, Windows Phone 7 and 7.5, Blackberry 6.0, 7 and Playbook, Palm WebOS, Firefox Mobile, Opera Mobile, MeeGo 1.2, Kindle 3 and Fire, and the desktop versions of Chrome 11-15, Firefox 4-8, Internet Explorer 7-9 and Opera 10-11.
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“Microsoft Office doesn’t dominate the way it used to,” said Doug Heintzman, strategy director for IBM collaboration solutions, including the company’s free Lotus Symphony personal productivity application suite. “This is a very dynamic and changing landscape.”
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The open source Java/Scala web framework Play 2.0, recently released as a beta, will be integrated into Typesafe’s Scala based application stack. Typesafe, which launched in May, has built its Typesafe Stack, aimed at providing all the tools needed for Scala developers to create applications which address multi-core and cloud-scale computing workloads. The announcement by Typesafe notes that the addition of Play will make the stack “a complete web platform”.
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With his usual rigour, Stephen O’Grady considers whether open source is innovative over on his blog. As ever, his view – that “innovation is a function of incentive, not the software development model” – is worth understanding and accepting, but I think there’s more to consider here. While it provides no guarantees, I believe an open source environment potentially makes software innovation cheaper and easier.
As a proprietary developer, you are responsible for the eternal care of every line of code you add to your software. In the early days, you can be very productive, creating clean, fresh software that is compelling and doing so fast because you’re in complete control of the process. But the code you create is your sole responsibility, and as it gets more and more substantial – and as you have more and more paying customers depending on it – the burden of sustaining it grows.
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Events
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Gear yourself up for three consecutive days of learning and exciting time with 3,000+ open source innovators, enthusiasts, and gurus at Bengaluru’s NIMHANS Convention Centre. The technology world is looking at open source technology for future innovations. Thus, the 8th edition of OSI Days, which will run through 22 November 2011, becomes even more important. It aims to commemorate and celebrate the true spirit of open source, and aims to strengthen and consolidate the Indian open source community.
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Linux Users Victoria is holding a second, free information session for people keen to learn more about the original computer operating system, similar to Windows and Android, but with one major exception ? there is no cost.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla’s Firefox automatically blocks Google Adsense from such sites and shows blank box instead. Most medium sized websites depend on display ads and blocking ads in mobile devices means major revenue loss for such websites.
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SaaS
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Cloud computing is the buzz word, even if most users don’t even fully understand what it is. One thing is for sure, putting all your eggs in one basket is always a bad idea, especially when someone else is holding the basket. So, the best cloud is the one that you own. We are aware of ownCloud, which you can easily run on your local server. But your ISP doesn’t let you assign an IP to your network, so you can’t access your ownCloud from outside your network. That’s the problem that PageKite solves. We interviewed the CEO and founder of PageKit,e Bjarni R. Einarsson, and discussed various aspects of the Cloud computing and how a user can take control of his/her own cloud.
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CMS
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Dr Dries Buytaer, the Dr Dre of the Internet and founder of Drupal, the world’s most used open source Content Management System (CMS), was in the city on a visit to ISB and IIIT-Hyderabad.
While the passion of developers came as a pleasant surprise, what made his “eyes pop” was, all of India.
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Business
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Semi-Open Source
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Like so many open source software companies, SugarCRM seems to be talking more about business growth and partner momentum, and less about open source technologies. The latest example: SugarCRM’s Q3 billings rose 69 percent vs. Q3 2010. Moreover, SugarCRM recruited 38 new partners during Q3, raising its worldwide partner engagements to 343 companies. Impressive. Here’s how SugarCRM has been evolving to deliver that type of growth.
First, The VAR Guy needs to be clear: SguarCRM certainly isn’t abandoning open source. The company continues to promote its open source community and open source values. And CEO Larry Augustin has carefully described his views on open source.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Let’s talk debug. So you wrote a piece of code and you want to compile it and run it. Or you have a binary and you just run it. The only problem is, the execution fails with a segmentation fault. For all practical purposes, you call it a day.
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Project Releases
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Developer Richard Hughes has announced the development of ColorHug, an open source colorimeter for measuring the colours displayed on a screen and creating a colour profile. Hughes began working on colour management in Linux two years ago and decided to create the device after finding that existing hardware was closed and proprietary. He wanted to make colour management accessible to end users and, with a background in electronics, set about designing the hardware.
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Public Services/Government
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OMB Watch and the Sunlight Foundation today [November 16, 2011] released an open letter to the U.S. Senate supporting continued funding for the Electronic Government Fund’s important transparency projects. The letter echoes the Obama administration’s policy statement issued Nov. 10.
The letter calls for full funding for the E-Gov Fund, which pays for flagship projects such as USAspending.gov and Data.gov. In April, Congress short-sightedly slashed the E-Gov Fund by 75 percent, from $34 million to $8 million, drastically reducing the fund’s ability to maintain current transparency tools or develop new ones. The House Appropriations Committee has proposed a slight increase for the fund next year, but Senate appropriators proposed an additional cut.
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Licensing
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LinuxFr.org : Do you still hack on MINIX today or do you only supervise your PhD students?
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Openness/Sharing
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A new federal resource will help groups share learning materials and policy recommendations as they strive to improve the quality and availability of learning resources in education.
Launched by the U.S. Departments of Education and Defense, the new “Learning Registry” is an open-source community that takes advantage of technology tools to help users share information about learning resources more effectively among a broad set of education stakeholders.
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The Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) is being developed by the Open Source Ecology (OSE) group, and includes such basic tools as a well drill, steam engine, and brick making machine, along with more complicated devices such as a bulldozer, 3D printer, and 50kW wind turbine. These can be built from scrap or recycled materials at a fraction of the cost of commercial machinery.
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Open Access/Content
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Programming
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Eighteen open source organisations have been selected for this year’s Google Code-In contest for pre-university students. The contest starts on November 21st so it’s time for students to select the tasks they want to work on.
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Open source Java has a long and torrid history, rife with corporate rivalry, very public fallings-out, and ideological misgivings. But has all the effort and rumpus that went into creating an officially sanctioned open JDK been worth it?
Java co-creator James Gosling certainly thinks so – although he didn’t seem entirely open to the idea in the early days.
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The developers of the Open64 compilers have released version 5.0 of the tool, with improved performance, bug fixes and changes to the infrastructure of the compilation system. Open64 is an open source optimising compiler for x86-64, IA-32 and IA-64 platforms. Historically, Open64 is derived from SGI’s Pro64 compiler for MIPS architectures; versions of the compiler for MIPS and other architectures such as CUDA and PowerPC are available from other sources. The main release of Open64 concentrates on Intel and AMD architectures and offers pre-built C, C++ and Fortran 95 compilers.
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The OpenJDK project followed shortly after Sun’s open-sourcing of Java in November 2005; it’s both a free-and-open-source implementation of Java Standard Edition (Java SE).
The project has seen a fresh lease of life under Oracle, Sun’s buyer, who has tempted IBM away from the Apache Software Foundation’s Harmony Java SE project and who also recruited Apple to OpenJDK. OpenJDK also has a new set of governance rules, albeit rules that hand Oracle and IBM a duopoly over ultimate control of the project and, therefore, the roadmap.
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In the survey, Puppet Labs finds that 55 percent of respondents ranked the automation of configuration and management tasks as the top benefit expected from the devops movement. Another 13 percent ranked it in their top three expected benefits.
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Standards/Consortia
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Adobe reversed course on its Flash strategy after a recent round of layoffs and restructuring, concluding that HTML5 is the future of rich Internet content on mobile devices. Adobe now says it doesn’t intend to develop new mobile ports of its Flash player browser plugin, though existing implementations will continue to be maintained.
Adobe’s withdrawal from the mobile browser space means that HTML5 is now the path forward for developers who want to reach everyone and deliver an experience that works across all screens. The strengths and limitations of existing standards will now have significant implications for content creators who want to deliver video content on the post-flash Web.
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In the marketing wars over cloudy documents M$ has launched a campaign to get back the defectors from Office 365 to Google Docs. A sign of their desperation is a blog post in which they trot out US advertisements by Google requiring skills with Excel. They find 88 such ads. When I look I find Google has 1500 ads out there without any need for Excel, suggesting Google’s use of Excel is less than 10% of desktops… Ouch! Thank you, M$, for advertising Google Docs.
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Google has enhanced its open source image format WebP. The latest update adds a new lossless compression technology and supports transparency information for images. This, the developers say, allows the format to be an alternative to PNG; it was originally introduced as an alternative to JPEG, with its lossy compression of image files promising files up to 39 per cent smaller but retaining the same quality. PNG, a very popular image format for the web, is the target for the Google developers now, especially with the support for transparency.
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Security
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Finance
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Peter Grossman runs a ‘vulture fund’, which purchases the debt of poorer nations before suing for many times their original value. Although such funds are illegal in the UK, Mr Grossman’s fund is pursuing the debt through Jersey, which is not covered by the ban.
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Copyrights
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In a few weeks Amelia Andersdotter will be the second Pirate Party member to take a seat at the European Parliament in Brussels. The 24-year-old Swede was voted in more than two years ago, but due to bureaucratic quibbles her official appointment was delayed. TorrentFreak catches up with the soon-to-be youngest MEP to hear about her plans and expectations.
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11.20.11
Posted in News Roundup at 8:15 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Obviously, this protection is based on all the components of secure boot (ie, everything that runs before ExitBootServices() is called) being perfect. As I said, if any of them accept untrusted input and misinterpret it in such a way that they can be tricked into running arbitrary code, you’ll still have problems. But when discussing the pros and cons of secure boot, it’s important to make sure that we’re talking about reality rather than making provably false assertions.
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Desktop
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I just built an AMD A8-3850 APU on TA75M MB with 8GB PC3 Seagate Barracuda 1TB and LG DVD/CD/RW [suppose to be cd+- and DVD+- compatible]. I can download and burn 64bit Distros
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If your not working on Linux, maybe its a good time to give it a try.
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There was a bit of dithering, but Tamil Nadu has decided to use GNU/Linux on students’ computers and all computers run by the state, effective Nov. 14, 2011.
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Server
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Linux has dominated the list so long, it’s not even broken out in the statistics when TOP500 lists are announced. With the November 2011 list, Linux holds steady at 457 of the 500. That’s right – 91.4% of the top 500 supercomputers in the world are Linux-based.
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Kernel Space
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The new feature to systemd is the “journal”, which for providing new system logging functionality. From a quick glance, a replacement for syslog.
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I have been administrating Linux systems for a while now and were always strugling to „dig deeper“. Today I found myself wondering how does Linux detect, plug in my hardware and show that pop-up window asking me to choose what I want to do with my flash drive. So I launched my web browser and began to search for an answers in forums, tutorials and how-tos which almost ended in complete failure. I say „almost“ because I did find some of the answers but they all were scattered and incomplete or too old. So I had to use „heavy artillery“ and read through all those manuals… And I think I finally get it how it works 
This is what I will try to explain further. *I really hope I didn’t misunderstand something*
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Applications
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One thing that I cannot live without is a text editor, namely VIM. VIM was first released as free and extended version of the VI program found on all Unix machines. I first cut my teeth on VI when I started my sysadmin career, and switched to VIM a couple of years later. VIM by default works mostly like VI, but i’ts highly configurable, and has a lot of power, especially when you start working with your .vimrc. Since starting with the editor, I’ve carried my .vimrc from machine to machine, and company to company.
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If you are looking for a fast, effective, and powerful file manager that is loaded with features, Krusader might be the right choice for you. Krusader is a twin panel file manager that will work on most Linux desktops, Krusader will also help you perform many daily tasks. You can also create your own customized user menu for functions you use most often. Krusader can even function with an optional terminal emulator below the main window. You can connect to remote file systems, work with archives, and much more. To install Krusader on your system just use these commands in your terminal.
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If you’ve spent any time working with graphics–whether you favor open source software or not–you’re probably familiar with the power of GIMP, one of the very best open source graphics applications. And, if you know your way around GIMP, you’re probably also familiar with the many effects you can execute with it. This particular open source graphics program is so powerful that it can be daunting for new users, so we regularly update our collection of accessible, free resources for learning GIMP and making using it easier. Here is our latest roundup, including a great, free online GIMP book.
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Proprietary
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Last week a group of people came together to launch a website Occupy Flash and started a campaign against Adobe Flash plugin.
Identities of these people are not known and they have no corporate backing but they have said the Goal of this campaign is to see Flash plugin dead on desktop browsers and they want everyone to uninstall it.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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Games
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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KDE is honored to be chosen again this year to be part of Google Code-In. Pre-university students aged between 13 and 17 are offered a great chance to contribute to KDE by choosing from a large pool of tasks, depending on their skills—code, translation, videography, user interfaces, research and more. Spread the word about the contest to any students and parents you know.
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Colour Management has a long way to come to the Linux desktop. Like on other computing environments first came single applications like Scribus, CinePaint or Krita and proved colour management be useful and mature. Now the open source Desktop stacks are following. Most advanced and wide spread inside colour managed applications is colour correction for monitors.
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GNOME Desktop
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There are thousand and one ways to launch application in Linux. You can use the Application menu, via the dock, use a app launcher like Synapse or Gnome Do or simply press “Alt + F2″ and type the name of the application. Gnome Pie is yet another application launcher that allows you to quickly launch your applications, except that it is slick and highly configurable.
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A lot of bugs have been fixed in this new release along with some static analysis bugs. Some of the existing modules have new versions too. The “Forgotten Release” release is new to this new version which fixes a lot of memory leaks in the log viewer. In addition, this new release has updated translations as well.
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Now finally the Gnome Shell guide you have waited for. Surely some users are still broken-hearted about the loss of the Gnome panel and other components of Gnome 2. Gnome Shell is getting better every day, and there are certainly some features that are becoming quite popular. Gnome Shell is designed to be even more user-friendly than Gnome 2. Not only that, Gnome shell was created to look absolutely stylish and offer users a fun experience. New integrated instant messaging and advanced system notifications are reported to be some of the most popular upgrades. But more on that soon!
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The GNOME 2011 User Survey is still going on, so be sure to participate. For those wanting to know what other Linux desktop users are saying about the GNOME3 desktop environment, here’s one thousand more comments. (After publishing part 1 and part 2 previously.)
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A little over a year ago I fired up the then latest version of Fedora (13) and found much that I liked. Ultimately though, it just wasn’t the right tool for the job and I ended up going back to Ubuntu and Linux Mint.
Fast forward another year, a few more releases have come out from Fedora, and Canonical has been making some choices that, while likely great long-term for Ubuntu, are a bit awkward currently for some of its user base.
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Red Hat Family
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There’s Community Linux… and Enterprise Linux… which is one the best? I don’t know and I don’t care, for a tinkerer anything works out… For a long time that I wanted to move back to Enterprise Linux and there were two choices to contemplate, and I’ve picked the red one… My laptop count still does weight in favor of green (2 vs 1)…
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When you architect servers with virtualization, distributed computing and the ability to handle big data, so a single Web site or job can take power of the whole system when needed, that’s a cloud.
Salesforce.com (CRM) (whatever you may think of it) is not a cloud. It is Software as a Service (SaaS), something that can result from a cloud architecture but does not require a cloud. The same can be said for Apple’s (AAPL) iCloud. It too is SaaS, which could come from a cloud or from a standard enterprise set-up.
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Fedora
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After playing with Gnome 3 under Fedora 16 and openSUSE 12.1, which made me a happy GNU/Linux user. I tried to see the issues people have with Gnome 3, most issues are not about ‘status-quo’ these issues are genuine so I looked at the alternative and tried to see how suitable is the second most popular Desktop Environment, KDE, for a Gnome user. I am writing this review as an average user. Advanced users know what they need – they are like mountaineers, they don’t much care about such things. So, let’s see how good is Fedora 16 KDE for an average Gnome user.
Gnome 3 Is In The Same Boat As KDE
The beauty of Linux is ‘diversity’. You can have what you want as you are not stuck in the one-size-fits all model. There are couple of DEs (desktop environments) you can try if you are not happy with the one that comes with your OS. Fortunately, most leading distros, including Ubuntu, Fedora and openSUSE come with almost all the top DEs to choose from. Gnome and KDE are the most popular ones.
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Debian Family
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Here’s how to do it and here’s where to find the CD or USB drive image. These links point to the squeeze/stable branch of Debian GNU/Linux so there could be a few less bugs than you expect with Ubuntu.
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Derivatives
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Knoppix is pretty cool. It’s a linux live system on a USB stick, which by itself is not something too impressive anymore. This is something that’s been done for years now, with other systems like Damn Small Linux, Puppy Linux, based off the original Knoppix I believe.
But the Knoppix guys really have a good setup. You can encrypt local storage on the stick so that someone else can’t get to your data if you lose the drive. You can install applications that are persistent and available the next time you boot the stick. In essence, you have a portable computer that just borrows whatever hardware you boot it on.
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Tails, “The Amnesic Incognito Live System”, a live CD or USB distribution of Linux which is designed to preserve privacy and anonymity, has been updated to version 0.9. The developers also urge users of the previous version, 0.8.1, to upgrade due to “numerous security holes” in that release.
Tails is based on Debian GNU/Linux and comes with several built-in applications which have been configured with security in mind. For example, it relies on the Tor anonymity network to protect the user’s privacy online, and all outgoing connections are forced to make use of its ability to bounce internet traffic between multiple nodes. As a live CD or USB, Tails can be booted on a machine without being installed on the hard disk. It is configured to never use the hard disk even if, for example, there is some free swap space on it. It also attempts to wipe the RAM memory of the computer system as it is shutdown. Despite these capabilities, the developers do warn prospective users of the limitations of the technology.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Since I spent some time running Fedora 16 with GNOME 3/GNOME Shell via a live image, and I judged it as working well but not as polished in the design department as Ubuntu 11.04/11.10 with Unity, I figured I should give Ubuntu 11.10 a try with its live image and see what I thought.
So I grabbed a 64-bit Ubuntu 11.10 ISO. Since I was already in Debian Squeeze, and Debian and Ubuntu ISO images these days are “hybrid” images that can be burned to CD the usual way, or easily (very easily!) dropped onto a USB thumb drive, I found the 4 GB drive I used for my Ubuntu 11.04 test and put 11.10 on it. It’s this easy (use the filename of the ISO you downloaded and the filesystem location of your USB drive):
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Embest is shipping a single board computer based on the Texas Instruments Cortex-A8-based DM3730 or AM3715 system on chips. The DevKit8500D — also available from Premier Farnell’s Element14 engineering community as the DM3730-EVK Evaluation Kit — is equipped with DVI-D, Ethernet, USB 2.0, and serial expansion interfaces, plus options including touchscreens, wireless modules, and cameras.
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Phones
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Android
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The Mountain View, Calif.-based company’s new number doubles the 100 million devices it claimed to have activated in May. From May through June, the company has activated roughly 500,000 devices a day.
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Android apps are plentiful – no doubt about it. So owners of Android devices aren’t starved for choice when it comes to apps. Yet it is this sheer variety of apps that makes it difficult to select the best apps for your handheld. Hopefully this list of 50 good Android apps will help you find the most worthy apps – let the downloading begin.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Microsoft has been playing with the concept of touch-screen for ages without having developed any product that can be used by ordinary user or which targets a mass market.
The company is now working with Samsung (the leading Android phone maker who are wrongly paying Microsoft Android taxes) to release their 40 inch Surface tablet running on Windows 7 and Surface 2.0 software.
Ironically, within a week of the announcement an Android tablet has beaten Microsoft’s surface by creating a bigger — 65-inch — tablet running on Android.
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A market research firm has boosted its projection for Kindle Fire shipments in the current quarter, as the Amazon tablet is proving to be one of the hottest consumer devices this holiday season.
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The Kindle Fire tablet has only been available for a few days, but already Amazon could be looking to launch a smartphone, according to a new report.
According to a note from Citigroup analysts obtained by All Things Digital, Amazon is believed to be currently working with well-known manufacturer Foxconn to develop a smartphone slated to be released in the fourth quarter of 2012.
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Richard Hughes, the author of colord, developed in the recent months new hardware for measuring monitor colours. The ColorHug called device shall come at a relatively low price. It shall be useable for LCD/LED monitors providing input to calibration and profiling software. The most wide spread open source colour management system, which can create ICC profiles from colour measurements, is Argyll.
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Maqetta is an open source project that provides WYSIWYG visual authoring of HTML5 user interfaces. The Maqetta application itself is authored in HTML, and therefore runs in the browser without requiring additional plugins or downloads.
Maqetta allows User Experience Designers (UXD) to perform drag/drop assembly of live UI mockups. One of Maqetta’s key design goals is to create developer-ready UI mockups that promote efficient hand-off from designers to developers. The user interfaces created by Maqetta are real-life web applications that can be handed off to developers, who can then transform the application incrementally from UI mockup into final shipping application.
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In a move that appears to be another step away from its Flash platform, Adobe has submitted the code for its Flash-based Flex framework to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) to be managed as an independent project.
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Events
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OpenICC can next year use a DevRoom at FOSDEM on Sunday together with Xorg people. The goal is to provide a meeting space for colour management topics.
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Just sent out the ack/nack emails for the developer rooms at FOSDEM 2012, the latter part always being pretty tough, but we have to make choices.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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In the last couple of months I’ve be involved in a surprising number of conversations about how to make communication through Mozilla bugs and
discussion threads more productive. This ranges from how to keep the discussion on point, how to keep the discussions about the substance and not the people, and what to do if one feels uncomfortable. The topic is raised by both long time contributors and new participants, and ranges from asking for help in how to deal with the topic, to noting how much poor communications makes it difficult to work effectively.
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SaaS
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More than $350 million has been invested in Hadoop and NoSQL technology to date. A top VC tells us why.
The move towards Big Data and NoSQL is being fuelled by big money, as investors bet on the next big thing in technology.
One of those venture capitalists is Frank Artale, a partner with Ignition Partners and an investor in Apache Hadoop startup Cloudera and NoSQL vendor Couchbase. In an exclusive interview with InternetNews.com, Artale explained that Ignition wanted to have a footprint in cloud and Big Data for a variety of reasons.
In his view, there is the potential for several large multi-billion dollar companies to exist in the Big Data space, which is one of the reasons the firm invested in Cloudera.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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It has been a long time since I last time blogged about the LibreOffice Visio import filter. My silence did not prevent a pretty cool code from falling gradually into our git repository. To the point where now we are working on the last 5% of features that normally take the 95% of development time. But, let us see what happened since my July blog:
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The caveats. As to my motivation (please remember to play the man not the ball): I do not intend to make anyone afraid, uncertain or doubtful. If graphs scare you – please look away at this point. These graphs are built from estimates, hopefully they are fairly un-controversial ones, I detail them at the bottom. This is probably misleading in all sorts ways I didn’t discover yet. My hope is that it provides a more helpful picture of the world today than this history graph that gets a frequent airing. By rendering only the last two years, we de-clutter lots of lapsed projects, and by not rendering version numbers we can use perceptual area for showing something more useful: an estimate of user-base. As/when I discover major bugs I’ll update this, it is a work in progress:
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CMS
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Semi-Open Source
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Internally, Z-Admin is based on Yaffas with a customised ZCP theme and several Zarafa-specific modules. The modules are developed on the Zarafa Community Hub, while Yaffas is hosted on SourceForge.
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BSD
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I tend to use VirtualBox a lot at home for experimenting with different operating systems or trying out scenarios that are too dangerous to “do it live”. While I could just give these virtual machines a bridged connection, I like to try to keep things as close as possible to the original environment, especially for “forensic” inspections.
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The good news: FreeBSD 9.0 RC2 is now available. The bad news with that announcement: FreeBSD 9.0 RC2 is late, which also means the third (and last) release candidate has been pushed back along with the final release. Hopefully FreeBSD 9.0 will arrive in time for Christmas.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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But the commentary was by no means all negative. Several readers wrote in to express their own appreciation of Stallman. Chris Hanson, a research scientist at MIT who says he has known Stallman for 20 years, contributed the most telling appraisal.
“Most people that I know are seriously alienated by Richard’s politics and by his uncompromising attitude; I’m often uncomfortable around him as well,” wrote Hanson. “But he has a knack for getting to the heart of things, and once you understand where he’s coming from, the things he does make perfect sense. In fact, it’s hard to understand how else they could be done. It’s sad that so many people reject him out of hand, often while mouthing some empty boilerplate phrase about how they admire him for his programming skill or something. As if one part of him could be separated from the other.”
“I don’t always agree with him,” added Hanson, “but I always listen carefully to what he has to say. Richard is a genius, a man with a clear and unusual vision, and like others before him, he comes in a quirky and difficult package. Mozart wasn’t too well-liked among the cultured people of his day, either; perhaps someday someone will make a movie about RMS, his dry humor, temper tantrums, and beautiful vision of people working together.”
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Programming
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Standards/Consortia
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The Khronos Group has announced the ratification of version 1.2 of the OpenCL (Open Computing Language) standard. Developed under the industry panel’s leadership, the standard defines parallel programming interfaces for applications that run on different OpenCL-compatible processors. The OpenCL standard is designed to enable other general applications to harness the computing power of graphics processors by allowing computations to be distributed across multiple graphics processors and CPUs. OpenCL uses a subset of the ISO-certified C99 C dialect with added parallel programming extensions.
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Health/Nutrition
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Opponents of the Affordable Care Act who believe the Supreme Court will declare the law unconstitutional are going to be disappointed next year when a majority of the nine justices vote to uphold it. It will likely be a 5-4 decision, but moderate conservative Anthony Kennedy will, I’m confident, recognize that without the law, the free-market system of health insurance, so highly valued by conservatives, will implode, sooner rather than later.
The high court announced earlier this week that it will hear oral arguments on the constitutionality of the law next March. A decision is expected in June, just a few weeks before the parties hold their conventions. Regardless of which way the justices go, the decision will ensure that health care reform will be as contentious a campaign issue as it was in 2008.
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The Center for Media and Democracy is asking Congress to reject a bill that could “open up everyone’s cell phones, land lines, and business phone numbers, without their consent, to a flood of commercial, marketing and debt collection calls,” according to a letter signed by the Center and a number of public interest groups. The Mobile International Call Act of 2011 amends the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), a statute that regulates telemarketing and limits telephone solicitations and robo-calls. The bill purportedly makes sensible updates to the TCPA to allow consumers to be notified about fraud, appointment cancellations, drug recalls, late payments, and the like. However, other provisions of the bill would allow businesses to make pre-recorded robo-calls “for any commercial purpose that is not a solicitation.” This applies to any consumer’s cell phone, even for those that have placed themselves on the Do-Not-Call list. The bill also exempts modern automated predictive dialers from the TCPA, “permitting repetitive ‘phantom’ calls to cell phones doctor’s offices, hospital rooms and pagers.”
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Security
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Finance
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The ascension of Mario Monti to the Italian prime ministership is remarkable for more reasons than it is possible to count. By replacing the scandal-surfing Silvio Berlusconi, Italy has dislodged the undislodgeable. By imposing rule by unelected technocrats, it has suspended the normal rules of democracy, and maybe democracy itself. And by putting a senior adviser at Goldman Sachs in charge of a Western nation, it has taken to new heights the political power of an investment bank that you might have thought was prohibitively politically toxic.
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JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. units were sued by two pension funds over claims they made misleading statements about the exposure of MF Global Holdings Ltd. securities to European sovereign debt.
As a result of the misstatements, MF Global’s stock traded at “artificially inflated prices,” the funds said in the complaint filed yesterday in federal court in Manhattan. “While the extent of MF Global’s exposure to European sovereign debt was concealed, the defendants were able to raise some $900 million in the offerings.”
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Intellectual Monopolies
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