07.08.11
Posted in News Roundup at 4:09 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Hosts: Randal Schwartz and Aaron Newcomb
Randal’s presentation at FISL 12
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Kernel Space
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According to a Google+ post (what are we going to call those? Geeps?) Cyanogen himself is working on porting the Linux 3.0 kernel to Android-powered devices running on the msm7x30 chipset.
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Linux-KVM mentions QED, the new QEMU Enhanced Disk format. This new disk format for QEMU/KVM is designed to be much faster than QCOW2 and other existing disk formats available to virtualization users.
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We are putting together a historical gallery celebrating Linux’s last 20 years for LinuxCon in Vancouver. This gallery will be a walk down memory lane that should be fun for everyone, but we need your help! A few samples of what we already have collected: the original books Linus used to learn programming, a video booth where you can leave your story of Linux, pictures and videos from the history of Linux, a timeline of major Linux accomplishments, CDs and boxes of early Linux distributions, computers used to do early hacking, memorabilia from IBM’s Peace/Love/Linux campaign and much more.
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Six years later than originally expected, the kernel now contains all the essential components for Xen Dom0 operation. In Linux 3.0, the developers are tackling various problems in the ARM code, reboot code and UEFI code; however, Torvalds has slightly disappointedly given up on the code size optimisations.
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Applications
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A good solid scan of the open source newswires this week left me jumping around the web ultimately landing on the website for Juice. An open source ‘Media Aggregator’ program, Juice allows the user to download audio files from anywhere on the Internet to your desktop.
If you are vehemently cross-platform and open source focused, then you’ll be pleased to know that Juice is
platform-independent, so you can use it from virtually any computer and play the files on any MP3 device.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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For many years, some “Tech pundits” and “critics” have claimed “Desktop Linux is dead”, of course that statement is incorrect as we have companies like Canonical thrusting their Linux flavour into the mainstream with more people experiencing Linux on their desktop. As indi development moves forward in leaps and bounds too (which many hugely successful titles) we see in most cases a Linux flavour is catered for within their releases.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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You’ll need both kdepim and kdepim-runtime, and please make sure to have the most recent Akonadi, Soprano, kdelibs4, kdepimlibs4.6 and friends.
Also shared-desktop-ontologies (SDO) 0.6.x is required — kdepim 4.6.1 will not build against newer versions of SDO.
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Today KDE released updates for its Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. These updates are the fourth in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.6 series. 4.6.5 updates bring many bugfixes and translation updates on top of the latest edition in the 4.6 series and are recommended updates for everyone running 4.6.4 or earlier versions. As the release only contains bugfixes and translation updates, it will be a safe and pleasant update for everyone. KDE’s software is already translated into more than 55 languages, with more to come. To download source code or packages to install go to the 4.6.5 Info Page. The changelog lists more, but not all improvements since 4.6.4. Note that the changelog is incomplete. For a complete list of changes that went into 4.6.5, you can browse the Subversion and Git logs. 4.6.5 also ships a more complete set of translations for many of the 55+ supported languages. To find out more about the KDE Workspace and Applications 4.6, please refer to the 4.6.0 release notes and its earlier versions.
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Back in March we looked at KDE’s new Plasma project for portable devices. At the time it offered some interesting effects and a new work flow philosophy. But as far as new interfaces might go, it wasn’t totally alien. However, as developers sometimes do, they want to take it even further.
Martin Graesslin blogged today of some of the new ideas on which he and his fellow hackers have been working. Primarily, many features of KWin can be eliminated in order to reduced size and increase performance. One of the new functions was to add build option that allowed developers to remove undesirable bloat such as XRender compositing support. Another is the removal of window decorations.
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GNOME Desktop
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Mailnag is an application that notifies you about new emails you receive via the new GNOME 3 notifications system. It works with both POP3 and IMAP servers (and yes, it works with Gmail too) and looks pretty much like Popper (it’s actually a Popper fork).
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Pardus developers delayed the release of Pardus 2011.1 for a week. Now it will be released on July 10, 2011 if everything goes well. All the way, Pardus!
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BackTrack is a well-known specialized Linux distribution focusing on security tools for penetration testers and security professionals, but it now offers a lot in terms of forensics…
[...]
BackTrack is filled with a collection of more than 300 open source security tools, which you can find organized in different submenus of the “Backtrack” menu: “Information Gathering”, “Vulnerability Assessment”, “Exploitation Tools”, “Privilege Escalation”, “Maintaining Access”, “Reverse Engineering”, “RFID Tools”, “Stress Testing”, “Forensics”, “Reporting Tools”, “Services”, and “Miscellaneous”. Each submenu is further subdivided into subcategories. The developers have added a nice touch to menu items of commandline utilities: when you click on such a menu item, it opens a terminal window with the tool showing its usage, e.g. with the –help option.
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You see, Sabayon 6.0 comes almost fully packed with software. It is kind of different from what I have seen in Sabayon 5.5 XFCE.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the July 2011 issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editors Meemaw and Andrew Strick. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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Setting up my Canon MP250 multifunctional in Fusion Linux was the easiest of all other distros I’ve tried since I bought it. It fetched the driver automatically and also what I think to be a custom PPD, because I now have a bunch of options that are not available in Canon’s official Linux driver. Well done, Fusion, very well done! My multimedia USB keyboard works flawlessly as well. My camera, my Galaxy Mini, USB sticks, USB card readers, all were quickly and correctly recognized.
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Debian Family
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With Debian Squeeze out, it is time for me to install the latest that the Debian community has to offer. I find that the installation is very straightforward so I will just post screen captures where the user would need to interact with the installation for bare bones configuration. So here we go….
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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This is the Unity weekly report for 6 July. The last week the team spent some time hacking on Unity in Dublin, Ireland, which included a quick meet and greet with the local team. The main things that happened this week were mostly plumbing and GTK3 porting, which is now complete. Other than compiz modal dialogs there’s no new crazy bling this week, just boring foundationy bling and a bunch of hacking:
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Firstly, here’s a video demoing Unity, Unity 2D and GNOME Shell (GNOME Shell is not installed by default!) in Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot alpha 2:
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The Ubiquity installer is getting much smarter and understandable with every incremental release. People new to Linux (who fear messing up their existing OS while doing a dual-boot installation), and those who don’t understand what swap space is, or how much they need of it, will like Ubiquity. This installer is quite impressive; it guides you at every step, letting you know what’s happening, what you might want to do, and how it can be done. It detects whether you’re installing on a system with an existing Windows installation, or upgrading from an earlier Ubuntu install, etc. It also has an expert partitioning option for experienced Linux users. Once you enter the required choices, the installer begins copying files in the background, while you fill in additional information like the time zone, user details and more. The migration assistant, too, works flawlessly, and migrates your documents, pictures, user settings and so on without any hassle. You can also choose to install third-party software like Flash, MP3 codecs, Java, etc. Installation is not much speedier. Boot time from a live USB was less than a minute on a Core2Duo laptop, and two minutes on my netbook.
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McCain says it will supply San Francisco with a new Linux-based traffic controller computer that meets the latest Advanced Transportation Controller (ATC) standards. Built around a Freescale PowerQUICC II Pro processor, the “2070LXN2 NEMA” offers several keypads, an 8×40 display, plus Ethernet, USB, serial, and SDLC connections, says the company.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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WebOS is, of course, based on Linux, and its official launch on HP’s new TouchPad this week marks its official debut in the tablet space.
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Android/Linux shipped on 1/3 as many tablets shipped as iPads in Q2 of 2011 but it is expected that Android/Linux will ship on 1/2 as many devices as iPad in Q3. At this rate, the iPad will be overtaken in the Christmas rush or at the latest, in Q1 of 2012.
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Harmony
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The Harmony agreements reached a significant milestone this week, as they were tagged 1.0 and left the “beta” stage. As someone who has previously taken position regarding contributor licensing agreements, I was asked this week what my thoughts on Harmony are.
First off, let me say that I have not followed the Harmony process closely. Indeed, the process, which was semi-open, but operated under Chatham House Rules (any participant can quote what was said in a meeting, but cannot name the person who said it), is one of the major issues I have seen people take with Harmony. The lack of a clearly identified team taking responsibility for the contents and standing behind the agreement texts is unfortunate, but I think it’s an issue completely independent of their content and the project’s goals.
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Harmony, the Canonical-led effort to provide a comprehensive suite of contributor agreements for open source projects, has quietly released its version 1.0, a year after Canonical general counsel Amanda Brock announced the initiative on opensource.com. During most of that year, Harmony’s construction took place out of the public view, in deliberations that were cloaked by the Chatham House Rule.
Despite my admiration, respect and affection for those who have been driving Harmony, I cannot endorse the product of their work. I believe Harmony is unnecessary, confusing, and potentially hazardous to open source and free software development.
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Much advertising is designed to convince us to buy or use of something that we don’t need. When I hear someone droning on about some new, wonderful thing, I have to worry that these folks are actually trying to market something to me.
Very soon, you’re likely to see a marketing blitz for this thing called Project Harmony (which just released its 1.0 version of document templates). Even the name itself is marketing: it’s not actually descriptive, but is so named to market a “good feeling” about the project before even knowing what it is. (It’s also got serious namespace collision, including with a project already in the software freedom community.
Project Harmony markets itself as fixing something that our community doesn’t really consider broken. Project Harmony is a set of document templates, primarily promulgated and mostly drafted by corporate lawyers, that entice developers to give control of their software work over to companies.
My analysis below is primarily about how these agreements are problematic for individual developers. An analysis of the agreements in light of companies or organizations using them between each other may have the same or different conclusions; I just haven’t done that analysis in detail so I don’t know what the outcome is.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Telemetry makes its debut in the Aurora channel this week and we’re encouraging all of our Aurora people to send the anonymous performance and resources data to Mozilla so that we can work on the problems out on the real Web rather than just the things that synthetic tests can identify.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Healthcare
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One of my favorite bumper stickers reads, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.”
That’s sort of how I feel about the health care debate. If more Americans paid attention to the fate of neighbors and loved ones who have fallen victim to the cruel dysfunction of our health care system, they would see through the onslaught of lies and propaganda perpetrated by special interests profiting from the status quo.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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I’m a programmer, a developer, a hacker. I’m mostly involved with the Open Source community and I try to promote open source development as much as I can. Unfortunately, most of the time when I tell someone that I’m a “developer”, they don’t understand the concept, and when I start talking about open source, they understand me even less.
The world is full of people with different background, with deferent references and we don’t always understand each other. As most of you who read my blog would probably know, I’m involved in the PS3 hacking scene, and I see a lot of misinformed people, and I read a lot of things that don’t make any sense to me. This is because most people don’t understand the world that we (developers/hackers) come from and things tend to be misinterpreted.
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Project Releases
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Remember the days of DOS gaming, piles of floppy disks, messing around to get your 14.4k modem working?
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Public Services/Government
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The Brazilian government has signed a letter of intent to work with both The Document Foundation and the Apache OpenOffice.org community to develop the Office Suite platforms maintained by both communities. The letter asserts that the ODF standard is already a guarantee of interoperability within the government. As Brazil is one of the biggest users of both LibreOffice and OpenOffice with an estimated million public computers running the free/open source office suites, the govenment aims to make the national contribution to the projects more effective.
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Security
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Well, another “Patch Tuesday” approaches with 22 serious fixes since the last batch, one month ago. If they are fixing 2/3 of a bug per day, how many are the bad guys finding per day? It could be dozens. “7″ has been around for about two years, 24 months. Hundreds of serious bugs have been fixed and many of them were around on Day One just waiting to be found. We could have years more of this bug-fixing and many hundred more exploits to go before “7″ is given a decent burial.
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Cablegate
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By the time WikiLeaks arrived in Tunisia, several incidents had already taken place, such as the death of Mohamad Bouazi, the vegetable-seller who set himself on fire in Sidi Bouzi. There had been opposition to the regime for a long time, but now people took to the streets.
It was a Tunisian group that created a web page called “Tunileaks” where they published all the reports on Tunisia from WikiLeaks, which point to the corruption of the former authorities.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Coming on the heels of a neighboring state fracking ban in New Jersey, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, will make a momentous announcement at a press conference this morning: the moratorium on drilling for methane gas in New York’s Marcellus Shale play is over, according to the New York Times.
Fracking, more formally known as hydraulic fracturing, is the ecologically lethal process through which methane gas is procured (the industry term being “natural” gas), and during which numerous cases of groundwater contamination have been documented. Though hyped by the methane gas industry and President Barack Obama as “America’s Clean Energy Future,” other than mere water contamination, it has been scientifically documented by researchers at Cornell University that the entire emissions process for methane gas is dirtier than that of coal.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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At the end of May, as the Wisconsin Joint Finance Committee (JFC) worked day after day and late into the night voting on changes and amendments to the state budget bill, Joint Finance Co-Chair Alberta Darling (R-River Falls) quietly slipped a small provision into the massive budget bill that has received little attention.
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British government officials approached nuclear companies to draw up a co-ordinated public relations strategy to play down the Fukushima nuclear accident just two days after the earthquake and tsunami in Japan and before the extent of the radiation leak was known.
Internal emails seen by the Guardian show how the business and energy departments worked closely behind the scenes with the multinational companies EDF Energy, Areva and Westinghouse to try to ensure the accident did not derail their plans for a new generation of nuclear stations in the UK.
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Now-former Fox News personality Glenn Beck closed “The Glenn Beck Program” Thursday night with what amounted to an hour-long monologue — technically 42 minutes, minus commercials, by his own estimate. (There were clips, and he exchanged a few words with his crew, but none of them were miked, and his was essentially the only voice heard.) To the extent that I can make it out, I don’t hold with Beck’s brand of what looks like politics, but which is actually something more amorphously free-ranging, a vision, a view, a knitting of not always connected facts, faux facts and buzzwords into a worried, world-entangling web. But as a television personality there is no denying him, even as he cuts loose, or has been cut loose, or both, from his high-profile, cable-TV pulpit-playground.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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Apple’s claim that it owns the trademark “app store” has been dismissed by a US court.
The computer giant was seeking a preliminary injunction to stop Amazon calling its “app store” the “Appstore”.
Apple claimed that “App Store” was a distinctive mark, even though the words app and store are well-known and well-understood.
Farewell to Novell
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07.07.11
Posted in News Roundup at 5:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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The bill often comes due with the same inflated price tag. Computer repair shops more and more choose scorched earth methods to fix an infected or broken system. Being a person who partially makes their living from the same pain, it is much, much cheaper to recover data and reinstall than it is to untangle the tentacles of a rootkit or sophisticated virus from the registry.
Even when things are running smoothly, the Windows user pays for the “convenience” by updating virus software, tolerating Windows updates and suffering sluggish behavior from a system that is six months or longer installed.
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Kernel Space
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And quite frankly, Christoph Hellwig has now _twice_ said good things about that driver, which is pretty unusual. It might mean that the driver is great. Of course, it’s way more likely that space aliens are secretly testing their happy drugs on Christoph. Or maybe he’s just naturally mellowing.
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At $500 US through July 8th and $600 thereafter, that’s a nice discount. Student Registration is $100. Student attendees will be required to show a valid student id at registration. LinuxCon will be held in Vancouver, B.C. on August 17-19, 2011 It will celebrate the 20th Anniversary of Linux. Besides a host of far more important Linux and open-source movers and shakers, I’ll be speaking at the conference as well.
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Graphics Stack
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Following last week’s completion of the Radeon driver power management tests against the AMD Catalyst driver, now it is time to turn the tables on NVIDIA. In this article are some power consumption and thermal tests when comparing the latest open-source “Nouveau” driver code against NVIDIA’s closed-source proprietary driver.
Testing went nearly the same as last week’s Radeon driver power management test. The Watts Up Pro USB power meter was monitoring the system’s power consumption, which was being automatically logged by the Phoronix Test Suite. Also monitored at the same time by the Phoronix Test Suite was the CPU usage and GPU temperature.
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Applications
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You wouldn’t use a word processing program to carry on an IM chat, and you shouldn’t rely on an image viewer to handle graphic-intense image editing, collection management and photo album maintenance. That is why you need a quick and handy image viewing app like Geeqie to supplement the image manipulation toolboxes found in full-fledged image editor programs.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Childsplay is a collection of educational activities for young children and runs on Windows, OSX, and Linux.
Childsplay can be used at home, kindergartens and pre-schools. Childsplay is a fun and save way to let young children use the computer and at the same time teach them a little math, letters of the alphabets, spelling, eye-hand coordination etc.
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Except for some really casual games for Linux and the best of paid games for Linux collection, games for Linux and Ubuntu is a category we haven’t yet really covered here at all. That is going to change from now on. Here is a quick list of 10 real time strategy(RTS) games for Linux(mostly open-source) in no particular order. Please keep in mind that, I haven’t tried them all by myself and many of the games are in the list because of the good reviews they received from users elsewhere. So here they are, read on.
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New Indie platformer No Time To Explain will come soon to Linux. Developed by Tiny Build Games, No Time To explain has received great response on their their Kickstarter funding initiative with more than 2,000 backers for the game. As much as $26K has been raised for the game though the initial target was 7K only.
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One of the things we really want to witness is Linux making a significant penetration in the desktop market share. Whilst most supercomputers use the Linux platform, it is lamentable that the vast majority of desktops continue to run Microsoft Windows. Current surveys put Linux’s desktop share at a miniscule 1-2%. Yet modern Linux distributions offer so much for the typical computer user with an unparalleled range of open source software, combined with shining desktop environments that make the operating system extremely user friendly.
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Desktop Environments
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GNOME Desktop
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Since Fedora released GNOME 3, there has been lots of bickering, like when everybody released KDE 4. (Ubuntu gave up on GNOME and went for “Unity,” which is, in short, built on GNOME 3 but with a different user interface).
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New Releases
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This release fixes a few obscure typos and bugs in some of our scripts. Pburn and Pfilesearch have been added for testing. There are no menu entires yet, so run “pburn” from the command line. If there are any Puppy fans out there that can help us getting these to work as well as they do on Puppy, that would be awesome. If they work okay, then we can add them to the menu in 6.4.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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There is a community. Hackers hack and take flak. Artists create beauty. Managers manage. Bloggers write and commenters comment. Names become familiar. Personalities began to emerge. Friendships form, rivalries rear, and animosities appear.
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Red Hat Family
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According to Centos’ QAweb Blog, since July 2nd the ISO images of Centos 6.0 Final had been composed and built to be pushed to the staging machine which would then start syncing out to the internal centos.org mirror.
Yesterday the os/ and isos/ tree had been finally synced out to the internal mirror servers. The updates/ tree were also signed. Since a few things have been fixed, the update should be on the way to the QA machines and synced out to the internal mirrors. So it is ready to be opened to public mirrors in a few hours.
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Red Hat’s JBoss middleware division is now previewing the next generation of its Java middleware. JBoss AS 7 (Application Server) is currently in beta, providing developers and enterprise with an opportunity to see the future of Red Hat’s middleware server technology.
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Debian Family
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If you work with Debian-based systems, you probably know the basics of working with dpkg and APT’s tools. But there’s much more available. To find out which packages have release-critical bugs, hog the most disk space or still use older versions of files that have been upgraded, you want Debian Goodies.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Flavours and Variants
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A great fan of Xfce-flavored desktops, I am not. Xubuntu, specifically? Well, it has never really struck me as good as its brethren, the Gnome- and KDE-based desktops. However, once in a while, a refresh of bias and opinion is necessary. My last encounter with Xubuntu was back in 2009, almost two years back, a century-worth of time in the Linux frame of reference. So let’s perform another Dedoimedo transformation.
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Bodhi Linux is still a fairly young project. We gained a good bit of recognition for providing a usable Enlightenment desktop while many others still do not (if they offer one at all). We started back in just November of last year, but the project has matured a good deal in just this short bit of time. The following are screen shots (and some history) from the nine developmental and two stable releases we have had during the last seven months.
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If you cycled the clock back a few years, you would find that most people who were enthusiastic about Linux tended to debate its prospects as a desktop operating system. Fast-forward to today, and it’s clear that Linux is finding many of its biggest opportunities at the server level, in embedded Linux deployments, and in other scenarios that lie outside the desktop computing arena. There are more and more signs that the next frontier for Linux may be in cars, as evidenced by Toyota’s decision to join the Linux Foundation as a Gold member.
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Phones
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Android
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Why has Java/Linux become so popular? Quite simply because it is being marketed under a single common name. Android. It is not seen as a hobbyist operating system. It is not seen as something done by rebels without a cause. It is recognised as a commercially viable operating system to add value to manufacturers products. In short it has the respect and recognition which GNU/Linux has never been able to achieve. It has become a household name. You ask anyone what Android is and they will be able to tell you. It is being mentioned specifically in television adverts. It is being describe as a feature in manufactured products. That has never been done for GNU/Linux to the extent is being done for Android.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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As part of the deal, business travelers can try out a ChromeBook on select flights from San Francisco, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Boston and Chicago at no cost. Interested flyers can access a ChromeBook at departing gates at those airport’s Chrome Kiosks and test it out — as well as Virgin’s free WiFi — on their flights free of charge.
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Web Browsers
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Is there anything that JavaScript can’t do?
The new Mozilla sponsored pdf.js effort is all about using JavaScript as a the mechanism by which a PDF file is rendered and displayed in the browser.
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Mozilla
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SaaS
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Databases
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Not because MongoDB is a replacement, as Joseph Ritchey argues in his piece “MongoDB is the New MySQL.”
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The splits and controversies around LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org have highlighted a number of issues concerning the licensing and corporate governance of open source projects and communities.
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CMS
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From the ‘Freshly Pressed Open Source Goodness’ Files:
WordPress 3.2 is now out (officially announced on July 4th), a little it more than four months after 3.1 came out.
The big deal this time around is the new zen approach to a minimalist user interface when writing content. It’s a great idea.
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Semi-Open Source
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In both cases, there are reasons and incentives for ‘going closed,’ so to speak, but it is the true open source efforts that elicit true community benefits: collaboration, transparency, speed, flexibility, security and more. So while open source as a term or identifier may not be what matters most to vendors or customers, there is no question open source is key to the business and future of many, if not most vendors in cloud and mobile computing. Ask Puppet Labs or Chef sponsor Opscode whether open source matters to their customers and their business.
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I’ve written before about the genuine renaissance open source software represents and the vast implications that openness provides. I admitted that computer science, based on its relative unwillingness to share great ideas, has lagged behind other hard sciences in its understanding of how and where value is created.
I’ve also written about the principles of open source software and how the mere gifting of source code, while important, does not actually generate the majority of value for the community. Instead, the real value comes from adhering to the principles of open source — transparency, participation and collaboration — and I’ve tried to evangelize this is the real method upon which open source companies help create success.
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Public Services/Government
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I was contacted earlier today by “Stephen from CeBIT”. Stephen ultimately was asking whether I would like to pay CeBIT for the privilege of presenting on open source related issues at an upcoming Gov 2.0 conference. Stephen’s line was that there would be many potential customers at the conference so it would be a good investment. In effect, Stephen was asking to be paid for marketing to Government.
Selling to Government, at least in Australia, is universally acknowledged to be difficult for SMEs. Ultimately the reasons for this are that the Executive is particularly averse to failure and are subject to fairness tests in the award of contracts. As a result, the Executive establishes a bureaucracy to ensure that each potential supplier is treated the same, and any engagement is subject to particularly extensive terms and conditions. All of this carries with it a cost of engaging with Government. In other words, marketing to Government is particularly expensive.
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Programming
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Security
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Finance
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Goldman Took Biggest Loan in Fed Program was reported today in Bloomberg both on Bloomberg TV and here on the internet…click here…to read story. While this was a secret loan program at the time – dating back to 2008 and other banks participated – Bloomberg TV reported that Goldman received the lowest interest rates of any of the participants, from near zero to 2.6% as well as the single biggest loan.
Goldman Sachs & Co., a unit of the most profitable bank in Wall Street history, took $15 billion from the U.S. Federal Reserve on Dec. 9, 2008, the biggest single loan from a lending program whose details have been secret until today.
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President Obama recruited the former Goldman Sachs CEO Jon Corzine to help him fundraise for his re-election campaign, according to the NYPost.
The main news is that Corzine has been working on Obama’s 2012 campaign for months. IE: He hosted a fund-raiser at his Fifth Avenue home for Obama. He’s attended secret meetings with Obama, and he organized a meet-and-greet at the Four Seasons for key finance-industry execs and Obama’s new chief of staff, former banker Bill Daley.
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Civil Rights
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The UK’s Security Service wrongly gathered information about innocent telephone users during criminal surveillance, a report into the interception of communications has said.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/Telecom
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Melanie Aitken has taken on the Canadian Real Estate Association over its multiple listing service. She’s blasted Rogers/Chatr Wireless ads for misleading ads (“fewer dropped calls”). And she’s tried to stop Visa and MasterCard from handcuffing merchants.
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As the United Nations has said, access to the Internet is a human right. A report by the U.N.’s special rapporteur presented last month to the Human Rights Council in Geneva warns that this right is being threatened by governments around the world — democracies included.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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he Civil Guard today raided the headquarters of the General Society of Authors and Publishers (SGAE) in Madrid as part of an investigation into embezzlement and misappropriation in an operation ordered by the anti-corruption prosecutor, who has announced that it has spent the last two years investigating a series of alleged crimes at the powerful artists recording rights organisation.
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This shortfall translates into operational opportunities missed and lives lost. … several Representatives on July 19 2010, who then asked the US Army to consider switching to another, proven system that the FBI and CIA use: Palantir. The Army refused, and instead rolled out a software update that was meant to fix any issues. Unfortunately, according to the former intelligence officers, the system is still unusable. “You couldn’t share the data,” says one of the former officers, and they both agree that the system is “prone to crashes and frequently going off-line.”
DCGS-A made the fatal move from java to .NET back in 2008.
With DCGS-A version 3.0 fielded throughout this year, V-3.1 should be fielded toward the end of 2008. A major addition to V-3.1 is the MFWS framework format. The newest DCGS-A iteration will change from a Java-based MFWS to a Microsoft net-based one, code named “Viper.” “This change will provide the ability to rapidly add analyst tools because there are so many Microsoft developers and applications already available that are potentially useful to the analyst,”
The alternative, Plantir, seems to be run on gnu/linux and other Unix. A recent job advertisement describes the people they are looking for,
You tend to pry off useless windows-centric keys on your keyboard and find GUI-based pointing devices superfluous.
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Hardware
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Health/Nutrition
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Local police departments are being supplied with military uniforms, weaponry, vehicles, and training. … the most common use of SWAT teams today is to serve narcotics warrants, usually with forced, unannounced entry into the home. … 40,000 of these raids take place every year, and are needlessly subjecting nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders, and wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while they’re sleeping
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The highest reading in the city of 290,000 people far exceeded the level that triggered compulsory resettlement ordered by Soviet authorities following the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine, they said.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Finance
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Billions of dollars are being given out to the most ardent promoters of water privatization. … We’re also seeing the IMF forcing indebted nations to sell off public assets, including water systems, as a condition of receiving financial support. The whole system is rigged for these corporations, and they still are losing contracts, not meeting their obligations
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Anti-Trust
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Microsoft did this in hopes that the University would not make the transition over to Google Apps
Office 360 is so bad that the company has to pay people for lock in and violate their privacy. The unreliable service won’t work with gnu/linux or OSX
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I’m told these are poor quality smart phones, though they look great. Microsoft probably limited features beyond the scope of Microsoft’s patents like they tried to do to the Barnes and Noble Nook.
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Though it was not free software and should not be trusted, Skype worked well for gnu/linux users until Microsoft bought it.
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Microsoft shills cheer and hope for the worst
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Censorship
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Privacy
YouTube Copyright School
Credit: TinyOgg
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07.06.11
Posted in News Roundup at 3:14 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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This is one of the advantages of having an open device running an open OS. ASUS Eee Transformer Pad is already among the fastest selling Android tablets out there and it is powered by latest Android 3.0 Honeycomb OS. YouTube user lilstevie89 have managed to install and run Ubuntu 11.04′s classic GNOME desktop in his ASUS transformer TF101.
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Kernel Space
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There’s still a few more weeks left until the Linux 3.0 kernel will be officially released, but there are already some changes worth looking forward to with the Linux 3.1 kernel as it pertains to the Direct Rendering Manager drivers.
In going over the drm-next Git tree of David Airlie’s, for what will ultimately go in as the pull request when the Linux 3.1 kernel merge window is opened, there’s a few items to mention at this time:
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Applications
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The open-source Lightspark Flash Player is now at version 0.5 release candidate one. This new release is set to bring a number of significant improvements to this free software alternative to using Adobe’s proprietary Flash Player on Linux operating systems.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Developers of action game Garshasp : The Monster Slayer are working on a Linux port. The game is inspired by Prince of Persia series and is based on Ogre3D engine.
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Desktop Environments
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GNOME Desktop
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Sometimes your plans for the day are altered greatly because of external circumstances. Nomachine released the latest NX 4 preview last night. We have been very anxious for this technology in order to deploy iPad/tablets, so this was my primary project for today. Prior releases inched closer to our goals, but were *far* too slow to do any beta testing. VNC testing over EVDO was painful as well. At this time no native client is offered for the iPad, instead it works by just using the Safari browser and then connecting to a web server. X is started inside the browser and your desktop appears. Performance on Firefox/Linux/Wired is very snappy and fast. Safari/iPad/WiFi works fairly well as does Safari/iPad/EVDO. So for the first time ever, I was able to take an iPad to lunch with me and log into our new GNOME server. I present, lunch with a side of GNOME:
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Unity Mail is a Unity-specific application to display the email unread count on the Unity launcher.
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When we introduced the new overlay scrollbars we knew it was a bold decision and we were expecting some critics because of the use cases we didn’t support.
As hoped, we had a lot of very useful feedback. Most of the people very liked this innovation and understood our need to be consistent to our design principles. But because we were hoping for the minimal impact, it was important for us to understand when this wasn’t the case.
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Linux and open-source software fans can now keep up with Windows and Mac users with the release of the latest flavor of popular Linux distribution Ubuntu.
Aside from being free, the open-source Ubuntu release 11.04 —codenamed “Natty Narwhal”— touts the improved graphical user interface (GUI) dubbed “Unity.”
“Over other Linux desktop [distributions], Ubuntu has the advantage of being easy-to-use, as well as having a solid infrastructure underneath. Ubuntu also has a broader coverage of language support, with the widely used Unicode as the default character encoding,” Zak Elep, head of Ubuntu Philippine Team Local Community (LoCoTeam) said in a statement.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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No, the HP TouchPad is not a pure-breed Linux up-front tablet. The HP TouchPad, which was released this past week, runs on HP’s webOS, formerly the operating system used by Palm, which HP acquired in 2010 for $1.2 billion.
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It is even less often that a person who has the integrity of Rusty Russell does so. His comments about social misfits in the community – whom he refers to as arseholes (he used the American spelling, assholes) – has not received much attention, understandably, given the insular nature of most commentary about FOSS.
Russell is a senior kernel programmer, a good guy, very funny and a genuinely impulsive person. He is well-known as a prankster; one of the pranks he pulled in 2010 resulted in the well-known Debian developer Bdale Garbee having to sacrifice his beard at the hands of Linux creator Linus Torvalds.
[...]
And senior FOSS people need to speak out more often about the problems within. Drawing a ring around things will not make problems disappear – when they do see the light of day, they will be akin to Murray Cummings’ blast in 2007.
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I was recently able to attend the 2011 Libre Graphics Meeting in Montreal, and there i had a blast meeting lots of people and founding out about so many great projects. One of these, is Libre Graphics Magazine and the fantastic people behind it: ginger “all lowercase” coons along with Ana Carvalho and Ricardo Lafuente of Manufactura Independente.
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Openness/Sharing
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Anybody who has even a passing familiarity with IT — and even most who don’t — encounters open source software on a daily basis. Whether it’s Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser, the Apache HTTP Server, which powers most of the world’s Web sites, or Google’s Android mobile platform, open source software has gone from being solely the domain of geeks to part of many people’s everyday life — and it’s become big business.
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Programming
Minecraft- Redwall Abbey (Survival)
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:17 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Every year, near this day (July 4), I do a blog post on the independence Linux has brought me and the community at large. But this time around, I want to take a bit of a different approach. This approach was inspired by an outpouring, of late, by other media types, about how Ubuntu is slipping in the ranks at Distrowatch. Their assumptions are all centered around Unity and how Canonical has doomed the perennial user-friendly distribution in one fell swoop. Although not really related to this column today, I have also been watching the rank and file at Distrowatch, and Ubuntu still remains at the top. Possible premature speculation? Maybe — but, on a side note, I will say that the over all opinion about Unity is still very strongly against this desktop remaining as the default Ubuntu desktop. We’ll see if Ubuntu can’t gain some independence from that awkward, buggy desktop.
What I want to bring up today is how the Linux operating system, and the community around it, is now enjoying an independence from its past. Thinking about the outpouring of speculation about Ubuntu’s ranking on Distrowatch, I wondered about the true relevancy of sites like it. Does a site that ranks the popularity (in downloads only) of a distribution really have any bearing on how much Linux is used today? To that I would answer, “Not in the slightest”.
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Desktop
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Microsoft Windows lost a big chunk of the global browsing market, according to the first report from Google on web trends.
The survey, based on data from “hundreds of thousands” of websites that use Google’s free Analytics (web tracking) service, shows Windows dropping by a whopping 5.1 percentage points in its share of browsing computers.
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Kernel Space
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The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that Toyota is its newest member.
A major shift is underway in the automotive industry. Carmakers are using new technologies to deliver on consumer expectations for the same connectivity in their cars as they’ve come to expect in their homes and offices. From dashboard computing to In-Vehicle-Infotainment (IVI), automobiles are becoming the latest wireless devices – on wheels.
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I’ve knocked the sand out of my keyboard, applied aloe to my sunburned skin, and am trying to apply my refreshed and relaxed brain to the following conundrum:
Is Android Linux?
[...]
Like most classifications of this nature, the decision on where to define the differences between Linux and Android really makes argument go one way or the other. If you point to the kernel, then yes, Linux and Android are very much related to each other. If you look at the application layer, then things get much harder to pin down.
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Torvalds thus chose to release Linux under the Gnu General Public License or GPL created by Richard Stallman, the visionary behind free software movement. The license gave end-users and developers four important freedoms:
•The freedom to use the software for any purpose;
•The freedom to change the software to suit their needs;
•The freedom to share the software with friends and neighbors; and
• The freedom to share the changes they make.
The decision to go with GPL was crucial because it fueled Linux’s development and use worldwide, eventually transforming it from a hacker’s experiment to the foundation of a large, thriving, commercial eco-system.
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Joining John Bridgman and Alex Deucher in working on the open-source driver stack at AMD are two new, but familiar, names: Michel Dänzer and Christian König. These two Linux graphics driver developers are now officially AMD employees.
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Graphics Stack
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First there was WebGL to bring OpenGL to the web-browser, and now there’s WebCL to do the same for bringing OpenCL to the web. The Khronos Group is getting ready WebCL, to bring OpenCL to modern web browsers with JavaScript support. Early WebCL support is already available for the WebKit rendering engine.
WebCL is expected to work in a similar way to WebGL, but to instead harness the compute power of modern graphics processors. There are currently a few basic WebCL demos for those running Mac OS X with a modern NVIDIA GPU that supports the OpenCL 1.0+ specification. Samsung is largely behind the work on bringing WebCL to WebKit while Nokia has been working on a WebCL extension for Mozilla Firefox. Those interested in learning more about WebCL can visit the Khronos Group Wiki page.
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Applications
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Burn CD, DVD and Blu-Ray in Ubuntu Linux using Silicon EmpireSilicon Empire is an application for GNU / Linux that lets you record and manage optical discs such as CD, DVD and Blu-Ray. It is written in Qt, a widely used multi-platform library for developing applications with graphical user interface as well as for developing non-GUI programs as tools for the command line and console server.
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When it comes to screenwriting applications, there aren’t that many choices for Linuxiens as there are for Windows and Mac users. However, that doesn’t mean that you’ll have to ditch your beloved penguin to write your next big screenplay. There are a few Linux-based as well as web-based screenwriting tools you can try out that are almost as good as industry-standard softwares like Final Draft and Magic Screenwriter. So, without much ado, here are the best screenwriting tools available for this awesome platform.
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1- LibreOffice: Some might point out that Oracle’s own Open Office is still very much an option, but the fact is that Linux distributions are or have already migrated to LibreOffice in its stead. Unlike the proprietary-friendly Microsoft Office, LibreOffice offers the end-user much of the same functionality without the added cost of proprietary licensing. However, the biggest downside to LibreOffice has to be the lack of proper formatting support when opening a Microsoft docx document. While the document may be supported, chances are fantastic that the previous formatting won’t hold.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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There are many games for Windows that aren’t produced by the big well-known game companies. These smaller games, often called “indie games”, can be every bit as fun and exciting as a box game you spend $50 or $60 on in the store. Some are free, while others range in price from $5 to $40. In this post, I’ll look at some of the best of the free games for Windows. This won’t be a comprehensive discussion, just a quick peek into the possibilities of which well-known free indie games from the last 4 years will run well on Linux. All games mentioned below are definitely recommended!
(I am using vanilla Wine in this discussion – while some games will also run with Crossover Games, or Play On Linux, I wanted to ensure that you could run any game using only the Wine version from the winehq repository).
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Jimmy Thomsen from Linos a company which specializes on customizing Ubuntu to suite costumers needs has released a GNU/Linux distribution based on Ubuntu for gamers called Game Drift Linux !
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First public Alpha of Linux game The Platform Shooter has been released. The game is based on Ogre3D engine and is developed by FRACTiLE Games.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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I’d like to see if I could downgrade, but Sabayon has removed the older PIM from repositories. So, I guess I’m moving to a new distro tomorrow and risk losing everything else trying to use an older version. Yeah, I have a back-up from right before the upgrade, but that’s a week or two’s worth of mail – some of it important.
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What the person is really saying is, they don’t like the distribution, or maybe just Ubuntu and its popularity, and want to be vocal about it. Know what I do when I don’t like something? I don’t use it. There’s a whole pile of stuff in our community that I don’t like, and I rarely, if ever, talk about it. I don’t believe in using Adobe’s Flash, I could go on and on about it when people bring it up, I don’t. I do my thing and move on. Not so with the type of person I mentioned, they’ll bring it up about each and every new derivative of almost every distribution.
Here’s the funny part too, if they like some derivative of a specific distribution that they already like then it’s perfectly fine.
Let’s speak about the other group, the smaller group that feels we really do have too many distributions and actually makes an attempt at explaining why they believe having fewer would be better. They will tell you a number of reasons, all fairly sound from the onset, until you start to discuss them.
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Gentoo Family
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After the release of Sabayon Linux 6, Fabio Erculiani is proud to announced the immediate availability for download of four Core editions of the Sabayon Linux operating system.
Sabayon Linux 6 Core editions are designed for Linux experts and advanced users that want to set up a home server or create their very own operating system, based on Sabayon.
The four newly updated editions of Sabayon Linux 6 are: SpinBase, CoreCDX, ServerBase and OpenVZ. While the SpinBase and ServerBase editions allow users to make Sabayon spins or set up a home server, the CoreCDX edition allows users to easily obtain a minimal graphical environment of Sabayon.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that George DeBono has been appointed as general manager for Red Hat in the Middle East and Africa region. DeBono, who previously held a senior global operations role within Red Hat, will now lead the company’s business in the region.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Modal dialogs in Ubuntu 11.10 made their first appearance last week for Unity 2D users. Today they make their appearance in Unity proper.
The effect is provided by the ‘unity dialog handler’ plugin.
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Surprising revelation: for the last month or so, I’ve been using a Linux-powered laptop as my primary work machine.
Linux, of course, is the free, open-source alternative to Windows and Mac operating systems. I’ve fiddled with it from time to time, but never considered it a viable replacement for either one.
Mind you, I can’t abandon Windows altogether. Not only do I write about it for a living, I also rely heavily on certain features and programs not currently available in Linux.
But this much I’ve learned: If you want to breathe new life into an old and/or slow PC, or you’re just tired of paying for operating systems, Linux rocks.
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Flavours and Variants
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AriOS is a really interesting Ubuntu remaster that comes with a clean design and a large default application selection, especially useful for those with poor or no Internet connectivity.
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One of the strong points of Linux Mint Debian is the fact that it’s a rolling distribution. Users enjoy a continuous flow of updates coming from the repositories, which keeps their system up to date without the need to upgrade to newer releases or to go through the hassle of reinstalling the operating system. When the updates are significant and affect large or sensitive parts of the system, some experience is needed from the user. The new updates might ask you something you’re not familiar with, some post-configuration might be required for things to work as they did, and if you make a mistake and you don’t have the knowledge to fix things up, you might very well end up with a partly or completely broken system.
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Eccentric indie game developer Robert Pelloni (“Bob’s Game”) announced he is developing a gaming handheld prototype based on Linux that will sell for $10-20 by year’s end. The 400MHz ARM-based “nD” device will offer a 2.4-inch, 320 x 240 display, and Wi-Fi, and will be supported soon with a Linux SDK, claims Pelloni, although many are skeptical the device will see the light of day.
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Phones
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Android
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With demand for HTC’s Android-based smartphones still growing steadily and HTC set to begin selling its naked-eye 3D model, the HTC EVO 3D, in Europe in July, the company is expected to garner revenues of NT$135-140 billion (US$4.7-4.88 billion) in the third quarter with its smartphone shipments reaching 12.5-13 million units, estimated the sources.
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Google’s share of the U.S. smartphone market just keeps going up — while Microsoft’s continues to decline, according to comScore. In May, Android had a 38.1 percent slice of the pie, while Windows Mobile and Windows Phone eked out just 5.8 percent, the research firm says.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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“The netbook has been murdered,” read the article on ITworld that got tongues wagging. “The concept of an inexpensive computing device with high value for the third world has been sufficiently co-opted so as to make the category meaningless.
“Some called netbooks a sub-category of ‘ultra-light’ or ‘sub-notebooks,’ but netbooks became legitimized by the announcement of the (US)$100 OLPC laptop,” the article went on.
It wasn’t long before the news spread to Slashdot, where bloggers — as per their wont — expressed a healthy amount of skepticism.
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Intel’s research division Intel Labs recently released a pair of open source software packages, including a distributed scene graph package to increase the maximum number of participants in 3D Web applications, like virtual worlds, by more than 20 times, and an advanced offline ray tracing package to help speed up rendering of photorealistic images on Intel-based systems by 100 percent.
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All the same, such views seem deeply misguided. They present false dichotomies, often based on an unrealistic definition of quality. All they really do is support the existing state of affairs between manufacturers and end-users, and delay the innovations that free software and open source are in the process of delivering.
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Both have good reasons for their popularity. Apache is at the core of the LAMP technology stack upon which a lot of server architecture is based: Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Python/Perl. That’s not just the web server itself but other application servers that use LAMP as a foundation. Among them are popular content management systems (CMSs) as Drupal and blogging platforms such as WordPress. If you need more, many Apache modules enable you to easily incorporate additional functionality into the Web server.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Firefox 5 was all about bug stomping and the stillborn channel switcher, Firefox 6 will see the addition of lots of HTML5 and CSS3 features and more privacy controls, and Firefox 7 — at long last — will focus on memory management and performance increases.
Firefox 6, which moves to the Beta release channel today, introduced a significantly improved about:memory page with buttons that can manually trigger garbage collection (GC) and cycle collection (CC). Garbage collection frees up memory by clearing old and unused JavaScript objects; cycle collection does the same for DOM objects, including web pages. By hitting these buttons repeatedly — or by hitting “Minimize memory usage”, which triggers both processes three times in a row — you can reduce Firefox 6′s memory footprint significantly.
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SaaS
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RackSpace and Eucalyptus are definitely taking two very different paths: RackSpace is spending time and effort to set a new standard, yet involving as many actors as they can (read standardization efforts, community building, creating alliances, etc).
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Project Releases
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Public Services/Government
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Computer hardware and peripherals used by all new e-governance projects must work with Linux and other open source operating systems, says a draft policy. The rules for device drivers – software that make devices such as printers and servers talk to computers – have been put in the public domain by the department of information technology, which will take into account views of hardware makers and other stakeholders before finalising the policy. The proposed policy is expected to save government money as open source systems come cheap.
Many states are keen to adopt cheaper systems but shy away due to their non-compatibility with latest hardware. The draft effectively rules out use of closed systems such as Apple Macs and iPads. It is also silent on smartphones that run on proprietary software.
For instance, India’s showcase project, Nandan Nilekani-led Adhaar, makes extensive use of Blackberrys. In general, India has always supported use of open source operating systems but it is the first time a policy is being framed on the use of operating systems and device drivers in government projects. The policy is expected to open a Pandora’s box, as most companies, including makers of PCs, servers, chips, and operating systems, have arrangements to make their products talk to each other.
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Yeah, they’re locked-in seriously and now they want to swallow the sinker.
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Openness/Sharing
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Besides a V6 as your engine, your car is very likely to soon be running Linux under the hood. The Linux Foundation will be announcing today that Toyota is joining the Foundation.
Some of you may be wondering, “What the heck is a car company doing joining the Linux Foundation?” The answer is easy. As the Foundation puts it, “A major shift is underway in the automotive industry. Car-makers are using new technologies to deliver on consumer expectations for the same connectivity in their cars as they’ve come to expect in their homes and offices. From dashboard computing to In-Vehicle-Infotainment (IVI), automobiles are becoming the latest wireless devices – on wheels.”
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Programming
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Last week on Phoronix I wrote about Gccpy, which is an effort as part of Google’s Summer of Code to develop a Python front-end to GCC that would allow compiling Python into native system binaries using the GNU Compiler Collection. This was of interest to many readers and the developer behind Gccpy, had commented in more detail in the forums. Following that news article I received an email regarding another Python compiler effort.
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Finance
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Among my many other accomplishments: Helping a large number of financial institutions avoid the consequences of their actions. As many of the very large number of our mutual friends (hint, hint) will tell you, the quid pro quo on this — cutting executive salaries and perks while limiting dividends and corporate acquisitions — was strictly window dressing. Remember the bonuses AIG paid to executives in its Financial Services division after receiving $170 billion in bailout?
Prior to my current position I served as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. It was in that job, when I got Bear Stearns a $30 billion bailout, that I discovered my true vocation: Giving large amounts of other people’s money to down-on-their-luck wealthy institutions. This was very important to help the economy, no matter what Paul Krugman says. I mean really, what’s he ever done?
In closing I would just like to say how much I respect and admire your CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, whom everyone agrees is very spry for a man of his age.
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Goldman Sachs Group (GS) and $3.65 trillion asset manager BlackRock Inc. (BK) announced Thursday they have completed an index credit derivative trade along the lines of what was envisaged in the 2010 Dodd- Frank financial overhaul law.
It is Goldman’s first swap trade with a client to be electronically executed and centrally cleared in the spirit of that law. The firm has conducted several trades in a manner largely consistent with the aims of the act with other dealer banks for some time.
The trade, referencing the CDX North America Investment-Grade Index administered by Markit, was executed on a trading platform run by Tradeweb, and was cleared through Chicago’sCME Group. Other firms in the derivatives market, including Deutsche Bank, J.P. Morgan and Barclays Capital, have made similar announcements in recent months.
Goldman served as the clearing agent, routing the trade through to the CME clearinghouse for processing on its client’s behalf. It also served as the executing dealer on the trade.
Clearing is when a central counterparty stands between trading parties, guaranteeing their contractual obligations in case a member of the clearinghouse defaults.
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Facing the wrath of the public and the government after the global financial crisis that hit three years ago, Wall Street titan Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has opened a new front for its aggressive business tactics — the nation’s capital.
Increased federal oversight and the threat to its lucrative investment bank business from investigations and pending regulations have led Goldman to bolster its Washington presence significantly, turning a low-key lobbying operation into a sophisticated, high-powered enterprise.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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THE US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) wants to take down web sites that use the .com and .net top level domains (TLD) regardless of whether their servers are based in the US.
Erik Barnett, assistant deputy director of ICE said told the Guardian that the agency will actively target web sites that are breaking US copyright laws even if their servers are not based in the US. According to Barnett, all web sites that use the .com and .net TLDs are fair game and that, since the Domain Name Service (DNS) indexes for those web sites are routed through the US-based registry Versign, ICE believes it has enough to “seek a US prosecution”.
According to the Guardian, ICE is not focusing its efforts just on web sites that stream dodgy content but those that link to them, something the newspaper claims has “considerable doubt as to whether this is even illegal in Britain”. It points out that the only such case to have been heard by a judge in the UK was dismissed.
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Health/Nutrition
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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More than the eight states mentioned are under drought fire watch. Alabama and Mississippi, for example, have extreme drought conditions and fires but had fireworks displays anyway. Adding to the injury oil companies use billions of gallons of water for fracing in drought struck Texaso.
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Radium and other heavy metals discharged in waste end up in sea food. BP’s drilling disaster spiked concentrations.
The appeals court agreed that there was a preponderance of evidence that the oil-production wastewater is dangerous and that LDEQ failed to protect the public interest. It ordered the agency to take immediate action.
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This bill mandates the ability to withstand longer power outages, more use of dry cask storage for spent fuel and other reasonable steps for existing plants.
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when you control for own-vehicle weight, “being hit by a vehicle that is 1,000 pounds heavier results in a 47 percent increase” in the probability of dying and that it gets even worse with SUVs and pickups. … at a lower car size equilibrium, drivers would be both safer on average and less of a deadly threat to cyclists and pedestrians. It would also be easier for innovators to put tolerably safe electric cars (or autonomous robot cars) together if they didn’t need to share the road with as many giant vehicles.
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New Scientist, Nathan Myrhvold, Bill Gates and SuperFreakanomics are named and shamed for pushing global heating propaganda.
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Finance
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Anti-Trust
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Amazon claims that its opposition to collecting sales tax is not driven by a desire to gain a price advantage over its competitors. Instead, the company insists that collecting sales tax in every state would be excessively burdensome. … Amazon has put ownership of its physical facilities in the hands of subsidiaries and then claimed there was no basis for the parent company to collect taxes. When that has not worked, the company has sought special exemptions by what amounts to bribing the state with promises of job creation.
State laws taxing all business on the web, with or without physical presence is a cure worse than the disease.
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The current, poorly regulated insurers put their profits above efficiency and patient care and are unaffordable. Here’s an example of abuse by private insurance companies.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Censorship
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[Alaska] plaintiffs pointed out that Arizona, Michigan, New Mexico, South Carolina, Vermont and Virginia have all enacted similar online indecency laws—and every one of them has been struck down as unconstitutional by the courts. Indecency legislation in Utah is currently on hold while the courts decides whether to strike it down, too.
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Civil Rights
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Intellectual Monopolies
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In this article, an Apple booster tells us reporting on Imaginary Property is hard.
The term “IP” is a sure sign of confusion or an attempt to confuse.
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High unemployment creates a downward pressure on wages, allowing employers to work the remaining employees harder and thus to increase profits. This dynamic, combined with the above commodity speculation, has been the entire basis for the corporate recovery, while working people have literally seen nothing beneficial. … Since consumer spending accounts for 70 percent of the U.S. economy, policies like these ensure that another crisis is inevitable.
The rich have enough to ride out each crisis, so they only become richer and more powerful unless people enact reasonable regulations.
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Copyrights
Google Nexus S vs Apple iPhone 4
Credit: TinyOgg
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07.05.11
Posted in News Roundup at 6:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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I have great respect for Digitimes. They have their finger on the pulse of IT, particularly in China, but they are out to lunch with the story that Apple will overtake HP in personal computing even if tablets are considered in the mix. Digitimes’ story assumes that Apple will continue with a huge share of tablets. That will fall apart because Android/Linux is being pushed by more than a dozen players large and small, each with some variation on the basic OS developed by Google. What this will mean is that consumers will be faced with many choices. While Apple has a large and growing following, the world is much bigger than Apple and consumers, particularly in the hot emerging markets will love small cheap Android/Linux tablets and smart phones.
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All in all I am very impressed and I would recommend Linux Mint to anyone who want to save money and not buy the Windows alternative. It is fairly lightweight, responsive and easy to run and configure. 9 out of 10 in my eyes.
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Here in Brazil, Linux usage is gaining more and more adoption for the past decade, and it is quite common to find Linux-based computers in supermarkets, computer shops, and so on. Of course, they are not that widely available as their Windows counterparts, but still, it is hard to find any computer store which wouldn’t have at least some computers running a Linux-based OS, and it is usually enough to do a web search on any Internet shop to find several compatible models which come with Linux pre-installed. Be it Mandriva, Ubuntu, or any other distribution – they all have the common open-source foundation and all the benefits of free software. And yes, they are ready for desktop and casual users to use!
It is great to know that the Open-Source movement is gaining more and more spread world-wide. I truly believe that it has the power to change the world, and I am really happy to know that it does it.
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Then I grabbed the mini-VGA to VGA adapter, a 24 inch HP monitor, and got it plugged in. Now I have a Chromebook workstation that makes me sing.
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I mentioned that my computer does not freeze. It darn well shouldn’t. It has a 64 bit dual core quad processor with 4 gigs of RAM. Windows 7 infuriated me just as much as Windows XP did with it’s intermittent stalls for no obvious reason. To be fair, a few Linux distros had momentary freezes with a slight darkening of the screen but after a bit of research, I turned Compiz off and it stopped doing it. Personally, I don’t see the point as I didn’t find it useful, just wobbly and shiny.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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While the FreeBSD Foundation is now paying for Linux kernel mode-setting and GEM/TTM memory management to be ported to BSD — and they are making some progress — this isn’t the first attempt at moving major parts of the graphics stack into the kernel. Pre-dating Linux KMS/DRM is the KGI Project, which still is technically around, but it’s pretty much dead in terms of new development and any hope of the Kernel Graphics Interface reaching its goals.
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Graphics Stack
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Now that NVIDIA has officially released the 275.xx Linux driver, they’re onto the 280.xx driver series. Just in time for the US holiday weekend they have released the NVIDIA 280.04 binary Linux driver beta.
While the 280.04 beta driver marks the introduction of a new series, the official change-log is shockingly small. All that’s officially mentioned for being fixed-up in the 280.04 beta is incremental bug-fixes and preliminary support for the X.Org X Server ABI 11. This is the video ABI that’s being used by X.Org Server 1.11 RC1. It’s good to see NVIDIA still at the top of their game in supporting new kernel and X.Org releases, while AMD continues to lag behind with their Catalyst driver. It will still be several months before AMD Catalyst is expected to support X.Org Server 1.11.
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While Intel’s OSTC (Portland) team is busy at work on Intel Ivy Bridge Linux graphics support for this next-generation hardware due out by year’s end, the same team doesn’t play with Intel’s Poulsbo or other graphics IP that isn’t an in-house Intel creation and part of their open-source driver. It seems, however, that Alan Cox is personally working on early “Cedar Trail” support for the open-source GMA500 driver.
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Applications
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There’s a number of open-source non-linear video editor programs that have been going for a few years, including Cinelerra, OpenShot, and PiTiVi, among others. None of these projects have been particularly promising and yet comparable to the proprietary competition in the video editing world. Lightworks is an option since it’s a professional software product that was then open-sourced, but it’s Linux client isn’t expected until late 2011. There is though another new option coming in the Linux video world and that’s Novacut. Novacut is an open-source video editor, but at least it’s taking a slightly different approach than the other projects.
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Proprietary
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Skype is without doubt one of the best proprietary software available to Linux users. However, ever since Microsoft acquired it, some people have started looking for free and open-source alternatives to the popular communication (Voice over Internet Protocol, instant messaging, videoconferencing) software.
Let’s take a close look at some of the best choices you have if you were to quit using Skype today. So without further delay, here are some of the best free and open-source Skype replacements (in no particular order) especially for those of you who are using Linux…
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Valve Software has announced they’ll be making the Source Engine’s Software Development Kit (SDK) available free of charge to the community and their gaming customers.
Details can be found on the Valve Software web-site. They also have information on their Wiki as making free access to the Source SDK should allow their “modding” community to further flourish.
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Jimmy Thomsen from Linos a company which specializes on customizing Ubuntu to suite costumers needs has released a GNU/Linux distribution based on Ubuntu for gamers called Game Drift Linux !
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Desktop Environments/Login Managers
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If you believe that you are not yet ready for Gnome 3 or if your hardware can’t handle the heavy desktop environments then you can always enjoy Fedora 15 Lovelock with your old hardware using light desktop shells like LXDE or XFCE.
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If you do a lot of work on a Linux computer, continuously switching between many windows, the right window manager can make you much faster and more productive than an extra 2GB of RAM.
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I love the idea behind LXDM: provide a lightweight, NOT freakingly bloated (in terms of dependencies, == doesn’t pull in half GNOME) Login Manager.
If it only worked properly. Until yesterday night at least.
Besides we all know that LXDM (the LXDE Login Manager) is in its early stage of development (kudos to its devs), it doesn’t mean that XDG specifications don’t deserve proper attention, and implementation.
Until yesterday, in Sabayon land, LXDM wasn’t able to load Desktop Environments correctly, for this reason (lxdm.c): the lxdm_do_login() is in charge of reading user configuration ($HOME/.dmrc or whatever) and fork() the DE loader away.
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As part of the Quality Assurance commitment I am making for compiz, one of the biggest parts of this is unit and regression testing. Previously, compiz has had no such infrastructure for doing so and this has allowed for subtle regressions to be introduced into earlier revisions and then not become noticable until much later ones, making the regression very difficult to track down. One of the more annoying ones is one I have just finished debugging at 3:45AM, bug 804683, where due to the way that clock_gettime () works, it can return time values which are less than what it previously would have returned a few nanoseconds ago. Luckily, I have a fix for this. However, it was difficult to find and a lot of time was wasted debugging one of the problems that came out of it (wallpaper plugin auto-cycling not being called accurately).
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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GNOME Desktop
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The design of the default GNOME 3 theme Adwaita has been optimized for the GNOME Shell where it really shines but it’s not really meant to be used in the Fallback Mode.
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Gnome shell may have started its bull run but the good old Gtk themes still don’t fail to pack a punch. Have a look at our choice of Gtk 3 themes sourced from the Mecca of all Gnome themes – gnome-look.org
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Ask every Gnome user. Every Gnome release, developers take away features, while giving us a proverbial carrot, but Gnome 3? They decided to just give us a stick.
For starters, the GDM, The screen where you log in? There used to be a way to select your keyboard language and other settings. That’s gone in 3.0. (Psst, some people use áccénts on their passwords but I guess Gnome isn’t designed for people)
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Well its almost a week since I upgraded to Fedora 15 and started using gnome-shell. The good news is I’m still using it and generally really like it, although admittedly there’s quite a few bugs, and quite a few regressions that I really dislike. Fortunately a lot of those are fixed in the short tern with a few extensions and gnome-tweak-tools. I’ve also filed quite a few bugs, updated others where I felt I could add useful information, or just added myself onto the bug for easier tracking. There’s a lot of fixes that are being worked on for gnome 3.2 and I appreciate that the gnome team is working hard to balance their vision and design with a workable desktop.
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After playing with Lightweight Portable Security for a few days, I have to say I’m a bit disappointed.
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ISO image of Porteus 1.0 is quite small, well below 300Mb. Of course, it can be burned to CD and ran from there. And also you can put Porteus onto USB drive and run from there. I wanted to use second option. Documentation says that I need to copy files from iso-image when it is mounted as loop device or via archive manager. Then script has to change Master Boot Record on the drive.
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New Releases
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· Announced Distro: PCLinuxOS KDE 2011.6
· Announced Distro: Vinux 3.2
· Announced Distro: Linux Mint 11 LXDE RC
· Announced Distro: Mandriva 2011 RC1
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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I think users are going to like Mandriva Desktop 2011 plenty. Check the main website for a full review when the stable version is released.
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Gentoo Family
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The Sabayon developers have done a good job at making Gentoo accessible for less technical users. However, this distro is in need of some software management improvements as I noted in the problems section. The Entropy Store needs to be a bit more aesthetically pleasing and it could also use a name change.
Overall though my experience with Sabayon was pretty positive and there’s not a whole lot to dislike about it. It’s a solid desktop distro that should get the job done for most people.
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Red Hat Family
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I was the first Massachusetts employee – early 2001. At the time we were a completely retail, boxed product. We decided that there was a need to bring Linux to the [business] enterprise, to make Linux enterprise-class. I did a job fair up here. I had 1,500 people show up, 400 of which had some kind of kernel expertise. I did job fairs in other parts of the country, and I would get one or two.
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Fedora
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Despite all the efforts to make Fedora 15 easier and more user friendly, making power users kind of unhappy by removing functionality and features, it doesn’t look ready yet (please, remove more features! :D).
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When installing Fedora , we can send hardware profile to Fedora Team.
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Our local Linux Users Group in my home town of Osijek has started workshops called knowledge exchange in partnership with our public library. So first step was to install Fusion Linux Fedora Remix on their PCs.
Are there other examples with Fedora being rolled out in public libraries or in some other public institutions? I would be really interested with their experiences.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Firstly, sorry about the lack of posts recently. I kind of function on a post-when-I’m-not-doing-anything-else schedule. Recently, doing anything else has involved, at least computer wise, breaking yet another Ubuntu based installation. This time it was Netrunner, which is a shame as it looked quite nice from what I saw. It was probably my fault. Anyway, I have never actually given KDE a fair shot. I like GTK a bit more, particularly because it is used in more than one environment. Netrunner’s implementation showed me that KDE 4 could actually be quite simple to use and of course, nice to look at.
So I wanted to keep trying out KDE, but also to escape an Ubuntu base and the instability it brings (at least in my experience, yours may very well be different). This left me with many options. Fedora, Mandriva, PCLinuxOS, OpenSuse, Sabayon, Calculate and Salix all offer KDE desktops, among others. MEPIS, Chakra and Pardus are also great devoted KDE distributions. Still, I wanted stability without losing the package variety I am accustomed to from Ubuntu so I opted for the only Debian stable based distro out of those, MEPIS 11.
[...]
Having used MEPIS for a few days now I can officially say that it is as stable, nice looking, and easy to use as it is said to be.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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According to a recent update to the Ubuntu Wiki Messaging Menu page, the MeMenu will be integrated into the Messaging Menu. Further more, the MeMenu Ubuntu wiki page now says it’s obsolete and will be replaced “by an IM status section in the messaging menu”, which makes it pretty clear that the MeMenu and Messaging Menu unification is about to happen.
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It has been two full months since Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty Narwhal” was released with the new Unity user interface. With Unity, Canonical has taken a very drastic step and cut down on a lot of customizability that many power users would want. Understandably, many proclaimed that Unity is the best thing that Canonical has ever done. There was even an article claiming that Ubuntu is on a decline due to Unity.
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The release schedule for the upcoming Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) operating system has been modified last week by Canonical. The second Alpha version was supposed to arrive for testing last Thursday, June 30th, but it was rescheduled for July 7th.
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Recently I’ve found that I have a problem with Ubuntu, but it’s not a simple one to explain.
You don’t expect a distribution at the top of the popularity charts to risk its user base and its wider community standing by making big changes in a single release, yet this is exactly what Canonical has done with Ubuntu 11.04.
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The latest version of Ubuntu, codenamed Natty Narwhal, isn’t just another release of the iconic distribution. We take a comprehensive look at the new interface.
[...]
Natty is nice. It boots fast, is slick to use, and Unity is the visual upgrade Ubuntu badly needs to compete in this age of Mac OS X and Windows 7. It’s also bold enough to go out on its own limb and not emulate either competing OSs (though it does clearly borrow from Mac OS X). And this is a good thing, because we need fresh ideas every now and then to see if there’s a better way of doing things.
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Second, everyone talks about this bad relationship Ubuntu has with Gnome. This I personally find amusing. If Ubuntu has upset Gnome, and the Gnome foundation so much, why do they accept financial support for them? Canonical sits on the Gnome Advisory Board because they support (donate money to) Gnome. This position allows them to help ‘guide’ the Directors of the Gnome Foundation in the overall direction of Gnome and the Gnome Foundation. Doesn’t sound like there’s a lot of bad feelings there, or neither of the two would be together is my guess.
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Flavours and Variants
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If you have used Bodhi before then you may be aware that one of the profiles we offer by default is one that is optimized for touch screen devices.
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Phones
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Hewlett-Packard, which makes and sells its own phones and tablets that run the WebOS operating system, rose 1.3 percent to a three-week high of $35.55 in New York trading yesterday.
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Android
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Android and Ubuntu are cousins, they share the same blood stream and DNA code. However, there seems to be some problem between the two brothers (or sisters). Honeycomb uses MTP as the file transfer protocol instead of Mass Storage Device (non-Android OS such as iOS for iPad are even worse as you can’t do anything without risky iTunes.)
While we can mount and see folders on Honeycomb tablets, we can’t see content inside those folders or take back-up of images or files that we downloaded.
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Well, it turns out they both love that other OS more than freedom but at least in China, Android and Linux get equal time.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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At 7 inches I found tablets as cheap as $86 CDN. So it’s not the latest and greatest – 4 hours battery life, 800MHz ARM11, Android 2.1, 256MB RAM and resistive touch screen.
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Each comes with a set of pros and cons and will almost certainly influence your tablet buying decision, so here’s our guide to every major system.
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We have written before about the International Free and Open Source Law Review, but it’s worth getting an update as to what was in the last issue. I also want to make you aware of the latest publication coming out of the community of lawyers interested in free and open source software, the IFOSS Law Book.
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Mantra is an open source, browser-based framework for penetration testing and security assessments. It’s based on Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser, so it’s cross-platform, and it’s part of the Open Web Application Security Project — OWASP. Techworld Australia recently caught up with project leader Abhi M. Balakrishnan to talk about Mantra and its goals
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Events
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Time has come again to think to our friends down under ! Since I was there in 2007 for a MondoRescue conference I think this is really a place to be in the FLOSS ecosystem when possible; Too bad it’s so far away from France 
Travel costs are not light either.
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The Debian Project is pleased to announce that it will be present at several events in the coming weeks, ranging from developer-oriented conferences to workshops for users and wannabe developers. As usual, upcoming events are also listed on our website.
From June 27 to July 3, during Campus Party 2011 in Bogotá, Colombia, Debian Colombia invites all to join the special event “Lleva un paquetico en tu corazón (Keep a Little Package in Your Heart)” during which attendees will work on bugs and will create Debian packages. It will also be possible to participate via IRC by joining the channel debian-co on irc.debian.org. Further information (in Spanish) is available on the wiki page.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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One reason I had for awhile considered cmake so strongly in GNU Telephony is that I choose to experiment with using Qt to build applications, and at the time I thought it rather difficult to build QT applications under autconf/automake. A week ago I revisited this question on my own, and found I was actually wrong about this.
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Project Releases
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Besides releasing libgcrypt 1.5 this week, another GNU project has been updated. Gawk 4.0.0 has been officially released as a major update to this popular free software utility. Gawk 4.0.0 presents several new end-user features along with revamped internals.
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Minitunes 1.0 has been released, The new release added a new search box that allow you to search music in your collection , added drag’n’drop, which let us to add songs or entire albums simply by dragging them within the application, adding new translations. Fixed some bugs found in previous versions to improve stability. and more.
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Public Services/Government
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Includes procurement guidelines and open source software policy.
The Federal Government has issued version 2.0 of its Guide to Open Source Software, after seeking public comments on a draft guide in March.
The new, 67-page document (pdf) replaced a guide that was issued by former special minister of state Eric Abetz in April 2005.
Australian Government CIO Ann Steward said on Friday that she was “very pleased with the response” to the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO)’s call for comments on the draft.
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Programming
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Hey all i am sorry for the last post i have many posts drafted to be posted within the next 2-3 weeks where i am going to discuss my project GccPy as there has been alot happening with it recently, i am working on a paper which shows everything about it so far but i want to have some posts demonstrating the basic principles of compilers and in deed creating an Ahead of Time version of Python on top of GCC and how this actually works. I personally find it a pretty cool topic but first i will am just in a bit of rant mood and its about whats happened since my last blog post:
Well anyway i’m currently in an awkward position i feel i may leave university but i will see because its simply causing me so much problems in my day to day life, I’ve got onto Google summer of code 2011 yet again to work on Gccpy with Ian lance Taylor but i may focus a little more on working on the Gcc middle-end to make some of my work a little easier. But the problem i am having at the moment with university is i actually failed all my modules last semester which may sound awful. Esp the one in compiler development i am writing a complaint about this at the moment due to the fact i actually took my own time to create a compiler specificity for this language they developed which works i cant emphasize this enough it actually works and demonstrates an IR properly designed and works well and doesn’t segv if you put in a syntax/grammar error i didnt even have to do this for the module.
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As open source usage has entered the mainstream, are users contributing less time and money to open source projects, thereby putting the future of the project at risk? One CEO of a leading open-source-based company thinks so.
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The GNU Awk developers have announced version 4.0.0 of Gawk, aka GNU Awk, the GNU Project’s free software implementation of AWK, the data-driven scripting language for extracting data and creating reports. Gawk 4.0.0 is the result of two years’ work in which the developers made a number of major changes.
For example, they have added BEGINFILE/ENDFILE allowing Gawk programs to execute rules when they begin or end processing a file and support for indirect function calls and “arrays of arrays” (including an isarray function). There is a new –sandbox option which disables the system() call and redirects input/output and extensions, allowing for “scripts from questionable sources” to be run with minimal access to the system.
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When Dominique Strauss-Kahn first mulled over the idea of running for president of France, he professed concern that his vulnerabilities in the coming election would be the trifecta of “money, women, his being Jewish.” In the week since a housekeeper at New York’s Sofitel Hotel alleged that he assaulted and attempted to rape her, all three of those elements have converged to render any thought of a political future for Strauss-Kahn entirely beside the point.
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Finance
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More than six months have passed since Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, and others cut WikiLeaks’ purse strings. And if that blockade lasts six more days, the secret-spilling group plans to take its financial fight to the courtroom.
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WikiLeaks and Datacell (a service provider assisting WikiLeaks) are to sue Visa & MasterCard for engaging in an unlawful, U.S. influenced, financial blockade.
On June 9th a the law firms Bender von Haller Dragested in Denmark and Reykjavik Law Firm in Iceland acting on behalf of DataCell and WikiLeaks told the companies that if the blockade is not removed they will be litigated in Denmark and a request for prosecution will be filed with the EU Commission. Visa Europe, MasterCard Europe, and Teller (a Danish company licensed to process transactions on behalf of the card companies) are the subjects of the complaint.
It was pointed out to these companies that their coordinated action on December 7th last year to block all credit card transactions to WikiLeaks and DataCell constituted a serious violation of the Competition Rules of the EU (Article 101(1) and 102). Furthermore, that the actions of these companies have violated Danish merchant laws when they terminated the payment services and by refused to reinstate them.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Creative Commons’ chief of staff, Lisa Green said that the campaign was partly aimed at combating the myth that it supported “giving everything away for free”.
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Anti-Trust
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Censorship
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Privacy
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Thanks to the PAT RIOT act, law enforcement does not have to ask a court for permission, so the rise in asking is just a drop in the bucket. People who want privacy should only free software and encrypted communications.
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Intellectual Monopolies
Android-контроль и зеленая фигня
Credit: TinyOgg
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Send this to a friend
07.02.11
Posted in News Roundup at 10:23 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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In retrospect, I have recently read a large amount of comments and articles on how Linux is not ready for prime time. Honestly, if I had read even a fraction of these articles, I doubt I would have installed it, even with Mark’s endorsement. In the past two months or so, I can honestly say I can not understand how these writers came to such a conclusion. Linux works extremely well for me.
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Linux IT is aiming to kick-start community-based open-source software adoption among UK enterprises with the launch of an indemnification scheme.
In what it claims is a world first, the integrator is offering to underwrite any community-based open-source software that meets the requirements of its
verification process.
The soon-to-be-launched programme, which is backed by an unnamed insurance firm, enables Linux IT to fix or replace the software if it does not work as expected. Cover to the value of £5m is provided.
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Desktop
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Virgin America is offering its flyers an opportunity to ‘test-fly’ Google Chromebook with fee Wi-Fi. Virgin America flyers will get a chance to check out a Chromebook at their departure airport gate and take the new notebook computer out for a spin onboard select Virgin America flights. The offer will run from July 1 to September 30, 2011.
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Server
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The issue with the MCSE is that the tests are glorified word association exams. To pass, all you need to do is learn all the technology names and keywords created by Microsoft, the contexts in which these words are used, and the contexts in which they aren’t used. Obviously an understanding of the technologies behind the buzzwords is helpful, but not essential.
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Applications
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Bioinformatics has been defined in many different ways, but it is common ground to regard this discipline as the application of mathematics, computing and statistics to the analysis of biological information. The objective of bioinformatics is to enable the finding of new biological insights, and to create a broader, more critical view from which unifying principles in biology can be perceived.
Bioinformatics is very important in the field of human genome research. It has become crucial for large-scale measurement technologies such as DNA sequencing, microarrays, and metabolomics. The field of bioinformatics has been aided significantly by Linux-based hardware and software. There are a number of Linux distributions which offer an integrated bioinformatics workstation. The popular distribution Bio-Linux packages hundreds of bioinformatics programs spanning a number of different fields.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Dead Cyborg, a new donation based episodic science fiction adventure is coming soon to Linux. The game is based on Blender game engine and is made by one person Endre Barath, who has done all the coding, designing and written the story as well.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Now that things are well on their way and that Mageia 1 is there, it’s time to discover some more about the persons that are making this a reality.
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IndigoVision announced a doubling of capacity to 2TB disks on its NVR-AS 3000 of Linux-based, surveillance-oriented network video recorders (NVRs). The NVR-AS 3000 systems are now available with up to 6TB of usable RAID 5 storage, as well as RAID 0/1 options, and can record full framerate video and audio from 64 cameras, and play back 20 streams simultaneously, says the company.
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Phones
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Android
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LINUX VENDOR Canonical has brought its cloud storage that it calls Ubuntu One to Android devices, saying that in order to stream files, it stores them as plain text.
Canonical’s Ubuntu One cloud storage service had previously been available from the outfit’s Ubuntu Linux distribution, however with the arrival of Ubuntu One Files on Android, users can access the service on both PCs running Ubuntu and Android devices. The free service offers 2GB of storage space and does not need a PC to operate.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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The Wi-Fi version of the 9.7-inch HP TouchPad tablet went on sale today for $499 (16GB) and $599 (32GB). Early reviews follow the same general pattern as those of the original Palm Pre two years ago: praise for the promise of WebOS, but disappointment over bugs, performance, lack of apps, and limited battery life.
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Because WebOS won’t survive if its runs only on HP devices, its as simple as it goes. HP doesn’t command the smartphone market as much as Samsung or Motorola do. In addition HP also needs what matters the most ‘apps’ for WebOS to be successful. Not many developers will be interested in porting their apps for a platform which has a non-existent market.
Most HP smartphone users are corporate users and they may not want Angry Birds on their devices. If there are no takers, Rovio won’t port Angry Birds to WebOS and if there is no Angry Birds there, many regular users won’t buy WebOS phones. Simple.
So, HP needs vendors which can take WebOS to consumer segment.
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Vizio announced the VTAB1008, an eight-inch tablet that includes infrared “universal remote” capabilities and runs Android 2.3. The company added that it will employ Android and its own Vizio Internet Apps Plus (V.I.A. Plus) additions in forthcoming TVs, Blu-ray players, smartphones, “and more.”
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In June of 2010, Cisco CEO John Chambers announced the Cius, an Android based tablet that was supposed to be the first enterprise grade tablet. Fast forward to 2011 and the Cius still is not yet generally available, but that’s about to change.
Cisco today announced that the Cius will become generally available in July and will include a new enterprise AppHQ component for the delivery of mobile applications. Cisco is trying to differentiate the Cius from consumer tablets like the Apple iPad as well as other Android tablets by providing enterprise grade collaboration, security and applications. The device isn’t just a tablet, it can also be docked with a phone and a keyboard as well.
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The Georgia Tech Research Institute has been designated the lead organization in a government project to develop open-source cybersecurity capabilities.
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Events
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Calls for papers were announced for CELF’s Embedded Linux Conference Europe, co-located with LinuxCon Europe in Prague on October 26-28, as well as the Australian Linux.conf.au, planned for Jan 16-20, 2012 in Ballarat, Australia. Meanwhile, the Linux Foundation announced Kim Blanche’s “Flying Penguins” as the winner of the 20th Anniversary of Linux T-shirt contest, earning her a trip to next month’s LinuxCon Gala in Vancouver.
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Web Browsers
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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A few minutes ago, July 1st, The Document Foundation company announced the first maintenance release of the LibreOfficeb 3.4 open source office suite software for Linux, Windows and Macintosh platforms, bringing several bugfixes.
LibreOffice 3.4.1 is available now (see download links at the end of the article), for both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures. The new release fixes some important bugs and updates several translations. Overall it is much stable than the previous release and everyone is encourage to update.
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Yesterday Sergio, a user of OpenOffice Impress, sent to the OpenOffice.org discussion list his list of the “Major Gaps of OpenOffice Impress 3.3 vs. Microsoft Office PowerPoint”.
Sergio compiled the list because, as much as he likes OpenOffice, “after struggling for over 1 year, sadly he had to stop using Open Office Impress and go back to Microsoft Power Point”.
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First I would like to thank everyone for their interest in LibreOffice! Second, I think it’s very important to understand that there’s a difference between PPAs and the default version shipped by Ubuntu. Just like any other distribution, Ubuntu releases a full GNU/Linux system that comes with a set of fully defined and qualified packages. Unless Ubuntu chooses to upgrade these packages themselves, they won’t move or change until the next version of the distribution is released. PPAs are a community based and convenient way to use more up-to-date version of software packages, but do not expect the same quality or to have a fault-proof software running; it’s an upgrade for the users who wish to enjoy their system with more spice and n
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It seems I’m continuing my pattern of posting less here, which I find to be a disappointing yet apparently an unescapable trend. If you haven’t seen my “dents” and “tweets” on the side of this page, feel free to follow me on identi.ca (charlesschulz) and on Twitter (ch_s). Note that I’m much more often on identi.ca than on Twitter. Today, I would like to send everyone reading this blog a very special invitation. The first LibreOffice Conference will take place in Paris, from the 12th to the 15th of October. These will be great days to meet face to face and to exchange though conferences and informal, quick talks about several topics related to LibreOffice development, distribution and design. Also, and this is important: our call for papers is open but it will close by the end of July, so feel free to submit your proposal now. I would like to unveil somewhat what we have in store for this event.
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Education
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Do you ever wish your kids would do something besides play video games on the computer? What if you could get a head start teaching them to be the next generation of open source developers?
Computers are increasingly easy to use, but programming is far more complex–and less accessible. For many of us who now have small children, programming began with BASIC programs on computers that forced you to make them do something by offering nothing but a command line.
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Business
Semi-Open Source
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Enterprise giant Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) has been warning its users this year that it plans to abandon the Intel Itanium architecture that powers HP’s (NYSE: HPQ) Unix operating system. While Oracle isn’t interested in supporting Itanium, others are.
EnterpriseDB today announced Postgres Plus Advanced Server 9.0, which provides Oracle compatibility and now supportS HP-UX on Itanium.
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This week, Google released Google+, which is basically a social network that’s a lot like Facebook, but run by Google instead of Facebook. The big deal here is that it’s a lot easier to modify privacy settings and configure what information to post to which group(s) (“Circle(s)” in Google+-speak) of contacts. This shows that Google, at least on the surface, takes privacy a lot more seriously than Facebook. I say this because whenever a controversial privacy settings change occurs on Facebook, it’s usually in the direction of less privacy, and only when the users get outraged does Facebook do anything at all (and it’s usually insignificant), because the truth is that Facebook’s business is built upon selling users’ data to companies for marketing, advertising, etc. I’ve also gotten annoyed with Facebook’s chat and constant UI changes that occur for no good reason, so I’m a little more drawn in that sense to Google+ because it integrates Google Chat (which I know works), and all of Google’s applications have kept pretty much constant, simple UIs over the years. Please note that I haven’t actually used Google+, though I have an invitation (it seems like Google can’t process that invitation right now); any statements that make it seem like I’ve used it are actually just my hopes and expectations.
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Texas Governor Rick Perry plans to host a “National Day of Prayer and Fasting” on Saturday, August 6 at Reliant Stadium in Houston, Texas, in an event is billed as a “non-denominational, apolitical Christian prayer meeting.” Despite the “apolitical” label, the event has some political undertones, particularly since Perry has been flirting with a run for the Republican presidential nomination and currently serves as chair of the Republican Governors Association. Perry has invited the other 49 U.S. state governors to the event. The portrayal of the event as a “nondenominational” ceremony is a misnomer, too, since the event will be exclusively Christian, and no other belief systems will be represented.
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Governor Scott Walker will sign the controversial state budget bill into law June 26. He was originally scheduled to sign his budget at Badger Sheet Metal Works, a private business operated by a man with six felony tax convictions, in Green Bay, at 2 p.m. on Sunday. However, now that Gregory A. DeCaster’s tax troubles have been publicized, the governor’s office has announced a new location for the ceremony: Fox Valley Metal Tech, also in Green Bay.
“While Mr. DeCaster has served his time in jail and paid his debt to society, it is fitting that the governor would choose to sign this budget at a business owned by someone who was once convicted of the felony of tax evasion,” said Marc Norberg, a Wisconsin native and assistant to the general president of the Sheet Metal Workers’ International Association.
Department of Administration Secretary Mike Huebsch said something quite similar earlier in the day when he told WisPolitics, “Green Bay, and certainly the company that we’re going to, reflects really what this budget and what Gov. Walker’s first term here is all about.”
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Health
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More and more Americans are falling victim to one of the most insidious bait-and-switch schemes in U.S. history. As they do, health insurance executives and company shareholders are getting richer and richer. This industry-wide plot explains how health insurers have been able to reap record profits during the recent recession as the ranks of the uninsured and underinsured continue to swell.
It also explains why the insurance industry and its allies are pulling out all the stops to kill a measure in the California legislature that could protect state residents from losing their homes and being forced into bankruptcy if they get seriously sick or injured.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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While the ban is cause for celebration for those truly in favor of a “clean energy future,” it is largely symbolic because only a tiny sliver of the Marcellus Shale actually touches the state. There is actually some truth to the statement made by Energy in Depth’s Chris Tucker, who stated that the ban, by-and-large, is “irrelevant.”
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Fukushima has been a wake up call about the dangers of nuclear power, and some countries are heeding the information. But it seems the U.S. is still sleeping when it comes to this issue. Light-to-absent coverage of TEPCO’s struggles to bring Fukushima under control, legislators who insist on acting favorably towards the nuclear power industry despite the deteriorated state of our current reactor fleet and an ineffective Nuclear Regulatory Commission have all contributed to a bad combination of a dangerous situation and a complacent American public on this issue.
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Finance
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Nowhere are health insurers working harder to thwart reforms that could save consumers billions of dollars than in California. One measure they are especially determined to kill is a bill that would give state regulators the authority to reject rate increases that are excessive or discriminatory.
The California Assembly passed a bill to do just that earlier this month over the intense opposition of insurers, including the state’s biggest supposedly nonprofit health plans: Blue Shield of California and Kaiser Permanente.
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Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), one of the richest members of Congress and the chairman of the House Oversight Committee who promised a hearing a day after the November 2010 elections, has always been slimy little creature who refuses to accept responsibility for his own misbehavior, everything from car theft to lying about his military history.
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The fifth-biggest U.S. bank by assets said yesterday it hired Bank of England economist Andrew Benito after recruiting Huw Pill from the European Central Bank in May and Naohiko Baba from the Bank of Japan in January. Moving in the other direction, Ben Broadbent, Goldman Sachs’s ex-chief U.K. economist, started at the Bank of England last month. Former vice chairman Mario Draghi will take up the presidency of the ECB in November.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Ah, the RIAA will apparently stoop to pretty much any old ridiculous argument to get PROTECT IP passed, I guess. The RIAA’s Mitch Glazier has written a typically ridiculous blog post defending PROTECT IP. Most of it tries (and fails) to counter the very credible claims of folks like Paul Vixie (who knows this stuff) that PROTECT IP (1) won’t work and (2) will break the internet and cause tremendous collateral damage. The arguments against Vixie pretty much amount to quoting people, who have known associations with those backing PROTECT IP, saying that “eh, things won’t be that bad, and we can minimize unintended consequences.”
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Finance
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Even though Think Computer Corporation, the company that runs FaceCash, is capable of meeting both of these requirements, the unfortunate reality is that the California Department of Financial Institutions (DFI) requires licensees to have far more than the dollar figures specified by the statute. The DFI has been unwilling to provide a single number to us explaining how much money is actually required to obtain a license.
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Anti-Trust
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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[the OECD's Paris statement] could undermine “online freedom of expression, freedom of information, the right to privacy, and innovation across the world
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Censorship
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Privacy
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Copyrights
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This article is propaganda by the publisher who cries that ““pirates” are reading journals “for pennies on the dollar.” Communist China is invoked for inflammatory effect. How dare people share journals with each other?
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Pharmacies are said to have a “free speech” right to sell doctor prescribing information. EPIC argued that “de-identification” techniques were insuficient to protect patient privacy. The dissenting opinion was:
the Vermont law affects expression “in one, and only one way” — by depriving data-mining companies of data that “could help pharmaceutical companies create better sales messages.” That is more linked to legal government effort to regulate a commercial enterprise, and not speech protected under the First Amendment,
Ludicrous decisions like this are predictable from a court that says corporations have free speech rights.
Greenpeace – The Darkside.mp4
Credit: TinyOgg
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07.01.11
Posted in News Roundup at 7:17 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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In John’s review of the new HP TouchPad, he claimed that “WebOS is the real star of this show. The OS offers true multi-tasking and uses a system of “cards” and “stacks” to display active applications.” I think it’s worthwhile to remind everyone that WebOS is built atop the Linux kernel, and that has several interesting ramifications. HP has continued Palm’s dedication to user experience, and WebOS should make it abundantly clear that “Linux” need not be synonymous with “complex and arcane”. But there’s a lot more than just superficial window dressing to consider.
HP could have chosen to use Android for their tablet. It would not have been a bad decision, really, but by buying and continuing to develop WebOS, HP is using Linux to better control their own destiny. Jim Zemlin, director of the Linux Foundation, says he sees this “as an anti-Microsoft decision so that they no longer need to rely on a third-party and be beholden when making important business decisions.” This tactic has been tried many times in the past: old-timers will remember various OEMs shipping DR-DOS rather than MS-DOS, and OS/2 rather than Windows 3.1, to fight the Redmond hegemony. But WebOS, and the proliferation of small mobile computing platforms (tablets, phones, printers, etc), allows HP to really own their whole stack, which allows them provide the best experience to their customers according to their own corporate vision.
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Today, I visited the same shop after a particularly hard day of a rather stormy week. I went in looking for an external HD and another clerk brought it to me. I instinctively started turning the box trying to find a Tux signal somewhere and the clerk noticed, so he politely asked me: “Excuse me…What are you looking for?”
Mentally, I sighed and said to myself “here we go again” before I told him: “I want to know if these devices support Linux”.
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Server
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e’ve ranted a lot about Linux not being able to catch up on Windows and Mac in the desktop arena. However, we can never complain about the position Linux enjoys in the server market. Of course 20-22 % is too small a figure to put the penguin in a dominant position, but the growth Linux has seen over the years has been astounding. From big companies like Google to small technology blogs that are read by a handful, Linux — as IBM prophesied in an advert long ago — is everywhere.
Here are some of the reasons why we think Linux is the future ruler of the server market:
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Applications
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Any laptop would definitely lose its charm if it requires frequent visits to the charging points and this is a fact that most Laptop owners hate in their laptops. Today this scenario is getting more complicated. As laptops are getting faster and as their graphics support increases the charge consumption also increases.
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One morning, not long ago, I ran the sudo conary updateall command in the terminal emulator. Conary did what it was told, as Conary always does unless the connection times out or something. But this time, one of its gifts was a beta of Opera 11.50.
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Instructionals/Technical
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For those Linux users still reporting a large difference in power consumption when using Ubuntu 11.04 or any other modern Linux distribution compared to past Linux releases or Microsoft Windows, more information would be helpful. A list of notebooks/configurations where the battery life is still frustrating would be helpful for my purposes and I’m sure the community at large would like this data too.
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Games
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Last week, Marco and I have integrated a new window switcher into Plasma Active. We had designed and started to implement this rather central component of the shell during the Tokamak sprint a couple of weeks ago, now it finally made its way into Active, so you can update your system to the latest packages and enjoy it. (In order for it to work correctly, you’ll have to delete your plasma-tablet-appletsrc file, as we do not update these automatically at this stage of development). The new window switcher works very well, and is quite snazzy on top of that. It also contains an application launcher! I’ve recorded a small demo video showing these new features.
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GNOME Desktop
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Nautilus Elementary Ambiance GTK theme by simplygreat is perhaps the most beautiful mod of default Ubuntu Ambiance theme. We have featured it already in our top themes for Ubuntu 11.04 post. Few things have changed lately and the latest Nautilus Elementary Ambiance theme now comes with a PPA. Installation has now become a breeze.
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These days there is a lot of discussion going on surrounding the future of Ubuntu and GNOME with respect to desktop user interface or “desktop experience”. For me personally I find a lot of good in both Canonical’s Unity and GNOME’s gnome-shell. There is, however, enough issues, both technical and political, that I have been more of a mind to try other desktop environments.
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Untangle it’s a software appliance (based on Debian) that can help you in managing your network from content security to web caching, remote access to policy enforcement, all from one simple, drag & drop command center.
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New Releases
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The new version of the distribution Calculate Linux 11.3 has been released. All editions of distribution are available for download: Calculate Linux Desktop with desktop KDE (CLD), GNOME (CLDG) and XFCE (CLDX), Calculate Linux Scratch (CLS), Calculate Directory Server (CDS) and Calculate Scratch Server (CSS).
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Zentyal Development Team is glad to announce the availability of a new beta installer, Zentyal 2.1-2! This is the last beta version: from July to September a series of release candidates will be published, and in September the next stable release (Zentyal 2.2) will see daylight.
This installer contains all the improvements and bugfixes done since the release of the previous beta installer (2.1-1 ). Moreover, it also comes with the first previews of three fully new modules: PPTP, Captive Portal and VM Management. It is important to notice that these modules are still under development and they may be in alpha status – They are not intended for production environments.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Mandriva, through Eugeni Dodonov, announced a few minutes ago, June 29th, the immediate availability for testing of the first Release Candidate version of the upcoming Mandriva 2011 Linux operating system.
Mandriva 2011 RC1 contains a huge number of changes, compared to the previous development release, Mandriva 2011 Beta 3. It has updated applications, such as Mozilla Firefox 5.0, Opera 11.50, Pidgin 2.9.0, as well as a new revamped interface with new artwork.
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Folks, just to drop you a quick note about Mandriva 2011 UI – if you enable Desktop effects, you’ll have a completely different UI experience when compared to the one with them disabled.
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Our verdict: A worthy successor to Mandriva that promises to deliver even more in the future. 8/10
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Gentoo Family
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We encourage our developers and users to create Gentoo artwork based on our newly released Larry.
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Gentoo Users, Developers, and Staffers are encouraged to submit their sweetest screenshots. This year likewhoa went all out and put together a custom cms for us to use for the contest. Please head over to the 2011 Contest Page for all of the details.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat’s CEO, Jim Whitehurst, expects the company’s revenue to TRIPLE to three billion dollars in five years. This is a company whose only business is providing service and support for open source software.
IBM, on its 100th year in business, has been richly rewarded for its billion dollar investment in Linux with a market cap today that eclipsed Microsoft’s back in May. I would argue that IBM has created so much shareholder wealth largely because they got open source and they got it early. They built services and products around open source instead of competing with open source.
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Fedora
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Debian Family
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I often get requests of persons who would like to contribute to Debian but who don’t know where to start. Let’s try to answer this question properly so that I can give out this URL the next time that I am asked.
The Debian website has a page explaining how to help Debian. While it provides no less than 10 suggestions in a daunting text-only list, it’s difficult to know what to do next once you picked up something that you could do.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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In my opinion, one area where successive Ubuntu releases continuously under-performed is on the overall system performance front. Every new Ubuntu release feels more and more bloated, especially so with latest Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal. I was quite taken aback by fact that, even the so called Ubuntu “derivatives” like Pinguy OS and Elementary OS were a lot slicker than the original Ubuntu. Having said that, Unity is still very young and I believe it will become vastly improved by the time of next Ubuntu LTS release. But what all can we do to significantly improve overall performance of Ubuntu Unity right now? Lets explore.
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Flavours and Variants
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Regular readers will recall that I was pretty darn impressed with Linux Mint 10 on my laptop. I’ve been slowly moving other machines to Mint since then, one at a time. First it was my test-bed machine, with various different versions – Mint 10, Mint 11, Mint Debian. I settled it on Mint 11 64-bit. Then my main desktop, which also got Mint 11 64-bit and is running nicely. The ancient Dell D610 laptop was next to go: that got Mint 10 32-bit.
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Kontron announced its first AdvancedMC (AMC) processor module equipped with Freescale Semiconductor’s QorIQ processors. The single-width, Linux-ready AM4120 module incorporates: a dual-core, 1.2GHz QorIQ P2020 processor with extended longevity support; up to 4GB soldered DDR3 SDRAM; four SERDES lines; three gigabit Ethernet channels; flexible boot options; and under 17-Watt power consumption, says the company.
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It seems Mr Elop, the ex-Microsoft executive now driving the once master turned mistress Nokia towards Microsoft’s bed, is more determined to turn Nokia into a hardware truck which delivers Microsoft’s mobile OS.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Once upon a time a company called iRiver made a name for itself with a line of MP3 players and portable media players. In fact I still have an old iRiver MP3 player lying around which I still use from time to time as a voice recorder thanks to its support for line and mic input. But while iRiver never exactly went away, the company has largely faded into the background after the launch of the iPod touch and iPhone.
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Motorola has announced the availability of Motorola XOOM Wi-Fi and 3G variant tablets in India. Motorola XOOM features a 1GHz dual-core processor and 1 GB of RAM, front-facing and rear-facing cameras, true multi-tasking functionality, and the latest Google Mobile services on a 25.6 cm (10.1-inch) widescreen HD display.
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You see I’m also on record as saying that the Android Linux-powered e-readers were quickly evolving into tablets. Like what tablets you ask? Try the Amazon Kindle and the Barnes & Noble’s Nook Color: they’re both powered by Android
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The term open source to me means – no vendor lock-in, it means i can try out (at least a community version) without getting some kind of license key. It means there is likely a mailing list and a bug tracker — you know the stuff that provides transparency.
What has happened in my view is that some of the commercial open core vendors have so watered down the term open source in their own marketing as to make it meaningless. After all if a so called open core vendor (software based on open source but with added ‘stuff’ around it) has the bulk of the added ‘stuff’ non-open source (often the case), then being open source in that context doesn’t really matter, does it?
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Recently a person was writing a paper and they used the term “FLOSS” (meaning Free and Li[bv]re Open Source Software) instead of “FOSS” (meaning Free and Open Source Software). The author happens to have been from Latin America and writing for a United Nations sponsored paper. In these types of papers the term “FLOSS” is used quite regularly.
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Scientists, academicians and researchers are a group of users that benefits greatly from Free and Open Source Software (FOSS / FLOSS). Most them would use free software not only to help in preparing graph and documentation, but also as the main tool in their investigation.
Although it is not explicitly required by the software license or by software authors, the role of free software should be appropriately attributed by academicians and scientists who used them in their investigations as it would not only acknowledge the contribution of free software authors (some of them are hardworking academicians or scientists themselves), but this will also done to fulfill the academic accountability on the researchers part.
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On this day he’s wearing his CEO hat. He’s come to talk about SharkCloud, his latest project, which could be a FOSS game changer if he gets it to fly.
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Are US open source organisations having their applications for non-profit status blocked?
In a post to a private mailing list I follow, Software Conservancy chief Bradley Kuhn has confirmed that an unexpected problem highlighted recently by CASH Music is indeed a real issue for open source groups in the USA seeking to formalise non-profit status. I asked Bradley if he’d be happy to share some of the information from that posting and he agreed.
The problem is that, for unexplained reasons, the US tax authorities (IRS) are not approving applications from open source organisations for tax-exempt status very quickly – if at all. As Jesse von Doom notes in the blog posting that drew attention to the matter, “no one wants to draw the ire of the IRS”, but Bradley observes that this is a problem he has been hearing about for over a year.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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According to a recent change, Thunderbird is now the default email client in Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot, replacing Evolution. The update should be available for Oneiric users in a few hours.
But this doesn’t mean Thunderbird will be default in the final Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot release because according to the default email client blueprint, the final decision has not been taken yet. We should find out if Thunderbird will stay as default sometime around Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot Alpha 3, after both Thunderbird and Evolution will be evaluated…
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The new Thunderbird comes with a handful of new features such as drag and drop enabled interface, improved add-on manager and account creating wizard and several fixes. The most apparent change you shall notice is definitely the better, minimal and more modern interface. The Add-on manager, Trouble shooting page and many bug fixes!
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Firefox may not have been overwhelming in the features department, but it has accomplished a major goal for Mozilla: The transition of users was accelerated by a factor of 2.
I cannot quite remember a Mozilla browser that was as controversial as version 5, a version that is loved and hated at the same time. For users, Firefox 5 is an almost insignificant update that does not deliver any tangible benefits with the exception of security updates that are phased for Firefox 4 (there was anyway just one big update.) However, as the days go by, we more and more feel that this is not really a browser that was made with Mozilla’s users in mind. This is a browser that was created as a launch platform for future Mozilla browsers. In some way, Firefox 5 is a browser that Mozilla made for itself.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Oracle has now filed its brief [PDF] in opposition to Google’s Daubert motion in which Google seeks to exclude Prof. Iain Cockburn, Oracle’s damages expert, as an expert in the patent infringement suit. Google’s arguments largely fell into the category of asserting Prof. Cockburn was ignoring or distorting facts and ignoring well established principles for determining damages.
In its response Oracle makes a compelling argument that Prof. Cockburn’s determinations are within the bounds of reason, that Prof. Cockburn is an established expert on patent infringement damages, and that, to the extent Google disagrees with Prof. Cockburn’s approach and findings, Google should put forward its own expert or save its criticism of Prof. Cockburn for cross-examination at trial. It is hard to argue that point.
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Patents are dangerous for the innovation and progress in the IT field. Monopolies like Microsoft, Apple and Oracle have stared using the so-called software patents as bane to block innovation and competition in the market.
America’s controversial software patent law is causing more damage to the IT industry than it is doing good. It’s time US congress must take steps to abolish the IT evil called software patents.
Smaller players, also known as start-up are living under threat of being bullied by mega-corporates like Microsoft and Apple with some unnamed patent seeking ransom or face legal action.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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It turns out there’s another fairly interesting Google Summer of Code project being worked on this summer beyond the exciting projects and the Mesa/X/Wayland projects that have piqued our interest this year. This project was somehow skipped past when looking at the GSoC information before, but it’s a continued effort (by the same student last year) to write a Python front-end to GCC.
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Public Services/Government
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Cenia, the Czech Republic’s Environmental Information Agency, is relying on a broad variety of open source solutions, says its director Jiří Hradec. “To provision services that vendor independence, we use open source wherever possible.”
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Openness/Sharing
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The internet has made the sharing and remixing of content into a common pastime but copyright laws, first designed more than 400 years ago, have not kept up. Creative Commons attempts to change that and this week the organisation published a guide, The Power of Open, that shows exactly how the system works.
Joi Ito, the chair of Creative Commons, told the Telegraph: “If you think about the success of the internet, it allows people to innovate without asking permission.” He said that existing copyright was an obstacle to that and so Creative Commons provided a way to let creators control their rights without stifling innovation.
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Scientific research is exhaustive, time consuming, and often frustrating, especially when the results don’t turn out. What’s more, when publishing research articles, fellow scientists, colleagues, and the general public tend to be unaware of the amount of work put into the research, as the paper published only contains the best of the best in terms of results and findings. All the other data collected, the procedures used, the false starts, unpredictable mistakes and surprises that happen along the way go unnoticed, stored away in boxes to collect dust.
But why? Why do scientists hide 90% of what they do? Are they afraid of their research being stolen? Are they worried that others in the scientific community may criticize or challenge their findings? Or is it just that they have gotten so used to doing their research behind closed doors that they stopped looking for a new way to do things? Whatever the reason, it seems that scientists should be collaborating and brainstorming together, utilizing the community resources available in order to better their research.
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At OStatic, we’ve frequently covered one of the most anti-open technology trends in existence: censorship in regions of the world that don’t support open Internet principles. There are many free tools available, including open source tools, that allow for anonymous browsing in these regions, and China remains one of the most restrictive regions of the world in terms of Internet censorship. Now, though, one Chinese city is proposing to break the mold, creating a haven in the center of China for a free Internet.
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Programming
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Standards/Consortia
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On Wednesday this week the European Commission adopted the legal package on standardisation. It consists of a Communication outlining the strategic thinking and directions for European standardisation and of a Regulation that will lay down the legal principles and constitute the future European standardisation framework. Both texts plus some accompanying material like the Impact Assessment are available from the DG Enterprise website.
To begin with, the legal package is excellent – highest congratulations to the Commission. It addresses the urgent needs for European standardisation that had been identified in the studies and reports over the last years. Above all, it addresses the needs of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector which has developed different structures globally with well-established fora and consortia being in the lead of ICT standards development. The legal package, following the Digital Agenda, takes this up and provides well-thought-out and sophisticated solutions. They build on the current European standardisation system which proved to be effective and efficient, but complement it with important means taking into account the global realities in ICT.
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Finance
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The prosecution case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund and French presidential hopeful accused of sexually assaulting a hotel maid, is close to collapse, a report in the New York Times has claimed.
The newspaper reports allegations that significant problems have emerged with the case against the former IMF boss that could see the conditions of his house arrest in New York being relaxed with immediate effect.
Based on interviews with two unnamed law enforcement officers, it says that “major holes” in the case will be admitted to a federal criminal court in Manhattan as early as Friday. New York Police Department had no comment last night.
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Civil Rights
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Cloud providers like Microsoft have to provide US criminal prosecutors with access to customer data, as ZDNet reports. This access applies even if the data is stored by firms based in the EU and in European data centres. This was explained by Microsoft’s British managing director Gordon Frazer in London during the launch of Microsoft’s Office 365, when he was asked whether Microsoft could ensure that the data stored at its data centres in the EU would never leave Europe.
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The US Congress has made a decision to start using the proprietary and insecure Skype at a time when there are growing concerns over the security and stability of Skype. In the last month alone, Skype has suffered major outages and exposed security holes.
A recent report revealed a dangerous exploit in Skype for Mac which can be exploited to create a worm that can take control of Mac PCs. I very much doubt that US congressmen use secure Linux machines, however they may be burning the tax-payer’s hard-earned money on expensive and shiny new Apple Macs.
On top of the outage problems and security issues, Skype is going through the transition of being acquired by an abusive monopoly, Microsoft, which creates quite a lot of uncertainty about its future.
Greek unrest ahead of new vote 29 to 30 June 2011
Credit: TinyOgg
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06.30.11
Posted in News Roundup at 6:15 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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I was intrigued. My first question to him was “How do I buy a computer with that already on it”, that of course being Linux. Mark explained that it not only acted as a recovery CD but that it could be installed as a permanent operating system and showed me the icon on the desktop.
I asked him if I could play around with the disk for the evening and he of course said yes.
After faxing in my story, I logged out of work via computer and began exploring my new digital visitor. I would have occasional fits of “This can’t be working.” and “Can this be legal?” Of course now I know it is but from my narrow perspective, I’ll ask you to understand my doubts.
I can’t tell you exactly when I made the decision but somewhere between playing with LibreOffice and the webcam software, I found myself dropping and dragging important files from my Windows world onto a portable hard drive.
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Server
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* 548,352 – the number of CPU cores in the K Computer in Japan, the world’s currently fastest supercomputer. It’s the result of having 68,544 SPARC64 VIIIfx CPUs with eight cores each.
* 1,820,352 – the combined number of CPU cores in the top 10 supercomputers
* 672 – The number of computer racks that make up the K Computer (one is seen on the image for this post).
* 8.2 petaflops – The computing performance of the K Computer. It’s more powerful than the five next systems (i.e. position 2-6) combined.
* 8,200,000,000,000,000 – 8.2 petaflops written out as floating point operations per second (8.2 quadrillion instructions per second).
* 2.6 petaflops – The computing performance of the second-fastest supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A in China.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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We chat with Travis Tidwell about MediaFront, the open source media solution for streaming and playing video over the web.
Guest: Travis Tidwell
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Kernel Space
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Bridge construction set (also referred as Pontifex II) is now available in available in Ubuntu Software Center under the purchase section. The game which tests your bridge constructions skills has received great reviews from critics and users and has won many awards.
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Desktop Environments
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It was big news in Canada when, in 2008, the country slipped from the top-ten list of the world’s most peaceful countries (all the way to eleventh). By this year, it was back in eighth, 74 places above the U.S. and, when liberals in the U.S. feel despairing, what dominates their fantasy life but “moving to Canada?”
And yet, today, you could make an argument that Canada has actually become one of the earth’s more irresponsible nations — namely, when it comes to the environment. Indeed, you could argue that the world would be better off if the government in Ottawa was replaced by, say, the one in Brasilia, which has made a far better show of attending to the planet’s welfare. It’s a tale of physics, chemistry, and most of all economics, and it all starts in the western province of Alberta.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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One of the primary results of Platform 11 was gaining consensus on making KDE’s development platform more modular, with each library (or technology within it) clearly defined in its purpose and how it can be deployed for use in a Qt or KDE application.
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GNOME Desktop
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With so much controversy surrounding the recent release of GNOME 3 and Canonical’s Unity, there’s only one way to resolve things: a head-to-head battle royale. Gareth Halfacree investigates which next-generation desktop environment might suit you better to set the record straight once and for all…
GNOME 3 and the GNOME Shell have their fans, who castigate Canonical’s Unity – and vice-versa. There are also those who decry both, claiming that a move to icon-based launchers represents a dumbing-down of the classic GNOME user interface. Worries over compatibility and extensibility cause further concerns, until nobody is quite sure what’s going on any more.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Almost as if Eugeni Dodonov read my post last night, he answered earlier this evening that the ISOs are now on the mirrors. I had found a copy a couple of hours before his post, so I was already burning. I had been looking forward to seeing the newer Mandriva, but in the end I’m afraid I was slightly disappointed.
[...]
All that looks stuff aside, I was really looking forward to seeing the new Mandriva Control Center that was alluded to in Dodonov’s post last night. But it just looked like the same ole same ole to me. They could have and probably did do some work under the hood, but there was no changes to the appearance. And the issue of setting up graphical drivers mentioned in an earlier post still exists. I looked in the software manager and NVIDIA proprietary drivers were included, but the configuration just seemed broken. Everything else seemed to function correctly as far as I tested. The installer hasn’t changed to the naked eye either except for the main image.
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Here are my first impressions.
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Am I happier now than I was before Mageia installation? Most likely yes. Mageia proved itself very stable and nicely composed system not only in Live run, but also in full install mode.
Yes, I still have something to work on before I can make final decision to dump Kubuntu. But that hour is very close I believe.
And even now I have system which works smoother and quicker then Kubuntu, does not have issues with desktop effects and shutdown. These two facts are more than enough.
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Gentoo Family
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Final Thoughts: The K Desktop Environment has all the features required to make an excellent desktop operating system, but one half of the problem lies in the default configuration shipped from the “factory.” The other half (of the problem) lies with distro developers who do not bother to tie the loose ends together. As much as I appreciate the time and effort involved in packaging a distribution, the community would be better off if more is done to ensure a more robust out of the box user-friendliness. Every feature that could work out of the box, should. The pieces are in place, they just need to be tweaked a little bit.
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Red Hat Family
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The 43-year-old executive, who in December 2007 took over the reins of what is now the biggest open source vendor in the industry, said what defines a 21st Century company is one with a significant number of workers who are “socially connected” through sites such Facebook and Twitter, and is governed by “meritocracy, not hierarchy”.
By virtue of being in the open source space, Red Hat has many young employees who are generally early adopters of technology and this is a demographic that he has helped lead by influence and example.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Chronic Logic’s award winning game, Bridge Construction Set, is officially for sale in the Ubuntu Software Center. In Bridge Construction Set you build a bridge that hopefully does not break, however having a train plunge into the depths below may be fun for some!
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Paolo is one of the amazing people out in local Ubuntu communities spreading the word, organizing events, and helping to nurture stronger teams. When you tune into Paolo’s presentation at Ubuntu Community Week, please be sure to ask him to sign your card. (And don’t worry, the bullets he’s referring to are those that appear in nearly every presentation you’ve ever yawned through.)
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We are one week away from Alpha 2, so right now you can see lots of developers trying to get as many things into Ubuntu Oneiric as possible: AirPrint, theme changes and loads of other stuff. After this milestone we will have only 4 weeks left until Feature Freeze at which stage most of the features should have have landed. As always: the status overview should give you a very detailed look on how each feature is progressing.
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“The Ubuntu apologists are making all sorts of noise about how Canonical is targeting a new market (tablets and similar screen resolution devices), but we’ve seen this show too many times before,” explained Slashdot blogger Barbara Hudson. “Red Hat didn’t get to be profitable (something that still eludes Canonical) by dumping their target customers every year to chase new opportunities.”
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Flavours and Variants
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Released in July, Peppermint Two is based on Lubuntu 11.04, an Ubuntu-derived distribution using the LXDE desktop environment (see our overview). Its main distinguishing feature is that it mixes traditional applications with cloud applications that are closely integrated into the desktop.
Previous versions of this distro made use of Mozilla Prism for running web applications directly on the desktop, but Peppermint has now switched over to Chromium. This means that Chromium is the web browser and also powers the rendering of web applications thanks to the ICE SSB (single site browser), a framework developed by members of the Peppermint OS team.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Licensing WebOS could be a double-edged sword for HP though. When you look at the tablet and phone market, as of this moment, Apple and Google are clearly dominating. When it comes to the tablet, the iPad continues to blow away the field. HP gets it turn at bat on Friday when the HP Touchpad hits stores.
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What is the real value that Open Source has brought to the economy? This is not a peregrine question. Since most of the current evaluation methods are based on assessing “sales”, that is direct monetization of OSS, we are currently missing from this view the large, mostly under-reported and underestimated aspect of open source use that is not “sold”, but for example is directly introduced through an internal work force, or in services, or embedded inside an infrastructure. Summary: OSS provide cost reduction and increases in efficiency of at least 116B€, 31% of the software and services market.
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Analytics company Ravel has announced it is releasing GoldenOrb, its massive-scale graph analysis software, as open source. GoldenOrb is based on the ideas behind Google’s Pregel architecture which is in turn inspired by the Bulk Synchronous Parallel Model developed in the 1980s.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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After dealing with Firefox 3.6.17′s abrupt end of life in favor of 4.0, and then 4.0′s deprecation in favor of 5.0 (and yes, I had to change repositories every time because Linux in general and Debian in particular doesn’t force new software on users), now I learn that Thunderbird is jumping from 3.1 to 5.0.
I use the Debian Mozilla Team APT archive for all my Mozilla software needs (Firefox/Iceweasel and Thunderbird/Icedove). Now I’ll be dipping into my sources.list files to up the Icedove repo from 3.1 to 5.0 once the Debian Mozilla Team offers the new version (they generally need a little time to package it up).
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Mozilla has released version 5 of Thunderbird, the popular open source e-mail client. The update includes some new features, updated components under the hood, and a number of performance and stability improvements.
Mozilla spun off Thunderbird in 2007, creating a separate organization called Mozilla Messaging. The split was reversed several months ago when Mozilla announced that it would reabsorb the messaging group and integrate it into Mozilla Labs.
The Thunderbird development model underwent some significant changes alongside the organizational restructuring. Its versioning and development cycle have seemingly been harmonized with that of Firefox. The Thunderbird version number was bumped up directly from 3.x to 5—skipping version 4 entirely. This change allows Thunderbird’s version number to match Firefox and reflect the version number of the underlying Gecko rendering engine that is shared between both applications.
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SaaS
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VoltDB, a leading provider of high-velocity data management systems, today announced the release of VoltDB Integration for Hadoop. The new product functionality, available in VoltDB Enterprise Edition, allows organizations to selectively stream high velocity data from a VoltDB cluster into Hadoop’s native HDFS file system by leveraging Cloudera’s Distribution Including Apache Hadoop (CDH), which has SQL-to-Hadoop integration technology, Apache Sqoop, built in.
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Application developers can now use BIRT 3.7 from the Eclipse Foundation to access Hadoop using Hive Query Language (HQL). Not only can BIRT provide native access to Hadoop as a data source for analysis, dashboards, reporting and custom BI and information applications, it can be used to build data sets or data visualizations that seamlessly combine Hadoop data with other data sources including SQL databases, XML data, document archives and flat files.
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As the originator of the Hadoop technology, Yahoo’s official entry into this space should play a big role in shaping how the market of Hadoop-based products evolves.
Yahoo’s Hortonworks (as in the Dr. Suess book “Horton Hears a Who,” a reference to the elephant logo that Apache Hadoop bears) will be comprised of a small team of Yahoo’s Hadoop engineers and will focus on developing a production-ready product based on the Apache Hadoop project, the set of open source tools designed for processing huge amounts of unstructured data in parallel. It’s a natural step for Yahoo, which uses Hadoop heavily within its own web operations, and which has contributed approximately 70 percent of the code to Apache Hadoop since the project’s inception.
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Business
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Semi-Open Source
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Zenoss, Inc., a leading provider of management software for physical, virtual, and cloud-based IT infrastructures, today announced the availability of Zenoss Service Dynamics. The new offering includes the market’s first service impact management solution that both unifies and automates impact and root cause analysis for IT services that span private and public IT infrastructures.
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Openness/Sharing
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What I was keen to do there was not so much the usual “look at all the fun things you can do to money from giving stuff away”, since that by now is well-explored territory (one, moreover, that is visited briefly in the earlier slides of the set below). Instead, I’ll focus on the other ways in which openness of a general kind can provide benefits to businesses that embrace it.
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Programming
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The Eclipse Foundation is pleased to announce the availability of Indigo, the 2011 annual release train. This is the eighth successive year in which the Eclipse community has shipped a coordinated release on schedule. Indigo is available for immediate download from www.eclipse.org/downloads.
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Standards/Consortia
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Microsoft Office patch today. “Office File Validation Add-in” http://bit.ly/kFXlEA Interesting, uses a “binary schema”
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Security
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The hacker group Anonymous has taken down a US tourism website in Orlando, Florida as a protest against the arrests of people handing out food to the city’s homeless.
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Cablegate
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If you haven’t seen the new fundraising video from WikiLeaks, which plays off an old Mastercard commercial, don’t miss it. It’s smartly done, and doubly effective given that Mastercard is one of the companies that are refusing to process donations to the whistleblowing site. With more than 100,000 views on Vimeo since being posted a few days ago, you have to give Julian Assange credit for knowing how to make a viral video.
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Civil Rights
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Speech is never a punishment, and it strikes me as especially dangerous for supporters of free speech to suggest otherwise. If libertarians call it a “punishment” when the government subsidizes your opponent’s political campaign, it’s hard to object when more censorious types call it a “punishment” when a third party runs a nasty campaign ad against a politician. The solution to speech is more speech. I don’t love the Arizona campaign finance system, but I think it’s hard to argue that it runs afoul of the First Amendment.
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Google launched its social networking platform last night. The initial response and reviews are positive. Google+ has exceeded all expectations by bringing all needed features under one roof. The integration with different Google properties and services is amazing.
Having spent one day with Google+, I can say that finally we have a strong Facebook competitor. It also puts both the companies and products under a direct comparison when it comes to data ownership.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Three Canadian companies have been ordered to pay roughly $2.5- million for selling knock-off Louis Vuitton and Burberry handbags in what a Federal Court judge described as an “egregious” case of trademark infringement.
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Copyrights
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BT has warned the High Court that if an injunction to block access to the Newzbin2 website were to be granted, it would be the ‘thin edge of the wedge’ opening the floodgates to content owners desperate to prevent sites pointing to pirated content. BT told the court that it could face up to 400 applications for injunctions in the next year if the Motion Picture Association (MPA) prevail in an action against the UK telecoms giant.
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ACTA
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Essentially the Council Decision would endorse it permissable that the Commission and the member states together circumvent parliament prerogatives under the Treaties (and Treaty conditions) via an Agreement with third nations using the trade funnel. Outrageous and inacceptable.
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David Hammerstein reports that the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement has been determined to be a “mixed agreement.” This means that the agreement must be approved by both the EU and by the 27 member states. That suggests a long process to obtain individual parliamentary approval throughout the EU (the EU Council is moving quickly on the issue, however).
History of the Commodore Amiga Part 1
Credit: TinyOgg
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