03.24.10
Posted in News Roundup at 12:16 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Previous editor Russell Barnes confirmed to MCV that he is moving across to Imagine Publishing’s Linux User, where he will take the role of editor.
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Pogo Linux (www.pogolinux.com), a Seattle computer-hardware company focusing on the open-source Linux operating system, was proud to support Team Seattle and the team’s fundraising efforts for Seattle Children’s Hospital and its Cardiac Intensive Care Unit (CICU) at this year’s Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona 24-hour endurance race.
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Credativ has launched a pre-paid Linux Support Card in Britain, Germany, USA and Canada, which gives holders access to case-based Linux support for Debian and CentOS with no contractual commitment. The support is available for all servers and desktops within an enterprise and is carried out over email, telephone and remote access.
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This page is simply a place to collect links to presenters’ slides.
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Server
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The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) has announced that the much anticipated Blue Waters supercomputer will be using Linux as its operating system.
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FAI (Fully Automatic Installation) is a non-interactive system to avoid the boring and repeating task of installing, customizing and managing Linux systems manually. Nowadays FAI is used for maintaining chroot environments, virtual machines as well as physical boxes in setups ranging from a few single systems up to deployments of large-scale infrastructures and clusters with several thousands of systems.
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Virtualisation
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Many server-side applications are available in virtual-appliance versions. These are VM images that include an OS (Linux, typically) and a copy of the application pre-loaded, so the whole thing can be deployed and run by simply booting the virtual PC and connecting to it over the network. WordPress, SugarCRM, Joomla! and Drupal, just to name a few such apps, all exist in virtual-appliance editions.
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Browser Appliance is a Ubuntu Linux-based VM installed with Mozilla Firefox. It lets you securely browse the Internet without leaving a trace on the physical computer. This is a good VM to test drive initially as well as use later on.
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Kernel Space
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Linus Torvalds has integrated the Ceph distributed network file system and released the second release candidate of 2.6.34. Torvalds intends to vary the length of the merge window from now on. Slides of the presentations at the Chemnitz Linux Days provide background information about kernel and KVM topics. Ubuntu has been given an AMD graphics driver which cooperates with series 1.7 X Servers.
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Masen Marshall, pictured above, is not your ordinary Linux user. No, he’s the Ultimate Linux Guru, a title bestowed upon him by his significant contributions to the Linux.com user community. He’s seen here holding a laptop signed by Linux creator Linus Torvalds.
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Today we are announcing the 2010 Linux.com Linux Gurus and want to thank them and the rest of the Linux.com community for their important contributions to the site.
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Applications
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Proprietary
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Opera 10.50 has been available for a couple of weeks on Windows and Opera 10.51 has just been released, but Linux fans are still stuck at Opera 10.10. Hopefully, this won’t be for much longer, as the new browser is packing some serious punch and is coming with an impressive feature list. The final release isn’t here, but Linux users can finally get to testing Opera’s latest creation as the first snapshot builds of Opera 10.51 6252 for Linux have been made available by the development team.
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The AVG Rescue CD is essentially a portable version of AVG Anti-Virus supplied through Linux distribution.
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Coraid’s EtherDrive storage platform has organically amassed over 1,100 customers, including large enterprise and government organizations, since its 2005 launch into the Linux market.
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Instructionals
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If you don’t wish to tamper with your system, there are ways to run Linux with USB sticks. The easiest way to go about is to take the help of http://www.unetbootin.com UNetbootin allows you to create bootable Live USB drives for a variety of Linux distributions from Windows or Linux. You can let unetbootin download a distribution or use your own Linux.iso file if you have one.
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Parted Magic developer Patrick Verner has announced the release of version 4.9 of the open source Parted Magic, multi-platform partitioning tool. Parted Magic can be used to create, move, delete and resize drive partitions and will run on a machine with as little as 64MB of RAM. File systems supported include NTFS, FAT, ReiserFS, Reiser4 and HFS+, LVM and RAID are also supported. The latest 4.9 release is based on the 2.6.32.9 Linux kernel and includes several bug fixes, updates and changes.
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Robert Young, author of one of the hottest IPOs markets have ever seen, is out to prove that he’s got another bestseller up his sleeve.
The founder of software firm Red Hat Inc. is in the midst of an initial public offering for Lulu Ltd., a book publishing company with a premise no less revolutionary than Amazon.com.
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Ubuntu
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I’ve been playing with the Ubuntu 10.4 beta for the past two days, and it’s bloody brilliant.
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Thankfully, the wealth of free software that’s always been such an integral part of Linux’s allure can now be accessed through the Ubuntu Software Centre, which is essentially an open-source app store, complete with a “Featured Applications” section that provides a handy stepping off point for software experimentation.
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Ubuntu is Linux for the rest of us. It is simple to install and use. Despite that, not that many users are on board with estimates of 1-2% of all computer users running various Linux operating systems. But with the release of Ubuntu 10.04, there might be a few reasons to give it a try. It is currently in beta, so you may not want to install it on your primary computer.
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The software package includes the user program PIMikromove, Labview drivers, DLLs and support of Linux operating systems.
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This application note provides general information regarding the board initialisation process and the memory mapping implementation of the Linux kernel using the LTIB in an i.MX51 board support package (BSP).
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Equipped with 4 additional RS232/422/485 serial ports, the JetBox 9532 Linux-based embedded platform allows users to connect and remotely manage card readers, cameras, speakers and other access and security control devices via Ethernet.
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The introduction of Linux-related technology, such as video recorders, storage, video management, video analytics, I/O controls, and embedded systems were also introduced in the road show for the first time.
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Stretch Inc., the pioneer and leader in software configurable processors, today announced that Exacq Technologies, Inc., developers of the exacqVision VMS software and systems for video surveillance applications, is using Stretch S6000 family processors to power its new exacqVision EL-S embedded Linux NVR appliance.
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This solution combines the Opera Devices SDK for Linux, Opera’s fully compliant HbbTV framework and Ocean Blue’s DVB middleware, which incorporates HbbTV extensions. The resulting package gives full flexibility to OEMs, enabling them to implement HbbTV portals and services, such as ARD/ ZDF Mediathek, Tagesschau and Arte.
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Opera Software today announced that its Opera Devices SDK 10.15 for Linux was selected by Loewe, the premium European brand in-home entertainment. Opera will help Loewe fulfill its promise to deliver “innovation for the senses” by providing Web browsing, widgets and HbbTV implementation on Loewe connected TVs.
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That’s it for this week’s report. If you’ve been hesitating over the purchase of either the BCF/BCR or the FCB, hesitate no longer. The units are well-supported by Linux, they work beautifully, and software editors are available that can help you design more creative and effective configurations.
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Set to be available in May 2010, the Platform enables developers to bridge multiple interfaces and create gateway access to the cellular network by leveraging Linux-based open source software and field-tested, globally approved hardware.
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By using the epoch-making Ubiquitous QuickBoot on ARM platform, Android or Linux can boot in 1 second, after turning on the power as a “cold” boot.
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It’s going to be running Linux. Now I love Linux. I use it for my web servers, all of my thin clients have a light Linux OS, and whenever I can get someone to give it a shot on their own computers, I hand them a live CD. Ubuntu will be the only way that these little tablets will be able to run on the Marvell chipset and the only way to hit that $99 pricepoint (or, for that matter, a sub-$200 pricepoint). The Flash implementation that Rachel King reported rules out Windows 7 Mobile as well.
So Linux it is (and I say Ubuntu because that has been well-developed for embedded applications and runs the Tonido Plug quite handily). The problem with Linux is two-fold: 1) Most people don’t like it as much as I do and teachers will be put off by “something different.” 2) Development efforts in interactive ebooks are favoring the iPad and Microsoft slates, not Linux-based devices.
While most folks don’t realize that their Kindles and other e-readers are running Linux, they expect these devices to be “different.” Over and over, though, I’ve encountered users who expect a computer-like device to either look like Windows or look like OS X.
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Phones
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With features including new operation systems like OMS and Linux giving high quality functionality, and an assortment of different options, the ZTE is sure to be a very sought after phone once it’s released to the public.
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If you’re thinking about getting your hands on one, head on over to Chinagrabber, where it retails for $569 (USD).
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Nokia
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A new version of the Maemo 5 SDK is now available for download, yet it seems that it comes only as an early access version of the SDK update 5, and that it includes a series of known issues, which are expected to be fixed as soon as the final update 5 release is delivered. The new version comes with a wide range of additions, updates and more, as well as with the Qt4.6 library.
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Android
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Android’s co-founders Andy Rubin, Nick Sears, and Chris White went to work for Google. Rubin is also the co-founder of Danger, Sears is a former Vice President of Product Marketing at T-Mobile USA, and White headed design and interface development at WebTV. Android Inc was an unknown company that made software for mobile phones. Then rumors were circulating that Google was planning to enter the mobile phone market. At Google, a team lead by Rubin developed a mobile platform powered by the Linux kernel which they marketed to headset makers and wireless carriers on the premise of providing a customizable and upgradeable system.
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File syncing service DropBox is set to get an Android app very soon, which means that another swathe of smartphone users will be able to access their Desktop files via the cloud.
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Tablets
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Another product is joining the tablet wars. It’s WePad, which comes from the German company Neofonie. Specs wise, we’re talking about the device that’s more powerful than the Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) iPad, but as you know, it’s not the specs that win the consumers’ hearts, minds and ultimately wallets.
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The Neofonie WePad has similar form and function as the wet dreams of our Crunchgear editors, but facts are that the German Android device has a bigger multitouch screen and a faster CPU than the iPad. Also it runs Flash, has USB ports, an inbuilt card reader and expandable memory. Additionally it allows complete multitasking and has a webcam. Beat that baby.
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What is Free Software Foundation then? Free Software Foundation (FSF) happens to be a non-profit corporation founded at the behest of Richard Stallman on 4 October 1985 and the main intention was to support the free software movement, a copyleft-based movement with the sole objective to encourage the universal freedom to forge, disseminate and change computer software. The FSF is incorporated in Massachusetts, USA.
Ever since its foundation in the mid 80s, the organization has been working relentlessly based on its sole dedication to the cause. It should also be noted that in agreement with its goals, only free software is used on FSF’s computers.
What do we get from all these? The descriptions of these two entities indicate self-confident software scenario. However there is also a question and this is rising gradually. What is that? Many have started to enquire whether the advocacy group has been solely responsible behind the exponential success of Linux.
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The one place where Thunderbird blows Mail out of the water is with the add-ons. Using the add-ons, you can GPG sign mail using the Enigmail add-on; you can sync contacts with Gmail or Zimbra using the Zindus add-on; and expand tiny URLs (via URL shortening services) using TheRealURL. Looking at the Thunderbird add-ons page, there truly is something for everyone: with over 640 “miscellaneous” add-ons alone, how could there not be?
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At Saturday on Libre Planet, Richard Stallman announced the publication of an essay on software as a service (SaaS). By my count, it is his first published piece on the subject since Stallman’s controversial comments on GMail a year and a half ago. Readers of this blog will all be interested in reading the new essay if they haven’t already already done so.
In his article, Stallman defines SaaS as, “a network server that does certain computing tasks … then invites users to do their computing on that server.” His basic message is simple: users should reject SaaS network services because SaaS users are inherently disempowered and out of control. Indeed, users should reject SaaS even if a service is implemented using free so
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The Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced the winners of the annual free software awards at a ceremony on Saturday March 20, held during the LibrePlanet conference at Harvard Science Center in Cambridge, MA.
The award for the Advancement of Free Software was won by John Gilmore. The award for Project of Social Benefit was won by the Internet Archive. The awards were presented by FSF president and founder Richard M. Stallman.
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Openness
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A debate is underway among the proponents and gainsayers of open access about the reality of whether OA leads to more citations. I am not over-concerned with citations as they are not the sole indicators of the usage of research output. As one of the contributors has said, there is an ‘invisible college’ within which data, methodology, ideas are shared among researchers via conferences, coffee-breaks, workshops, emails, reports, social networking and other communication devices. While this ‘college’ informs, it is seldom cited.
Another statement made in these exchanges was that ‘open access is a solution looking for a problem’. This stopped me in my tracks, since over the last decade, evidence has been accumulating showing the high level of information imbalance and paucity, especially – but by no means only – in the developing world. And it was for this reason that the EPT and many other initiatives were formed to help resolve the problem. It is indisputable that access to all necessary research findings had not been met in pre-web days. Researchers, we had a problem.
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As regular readers of this blog will know, for the last five years or so I have been tracking the diffusion of the ideas behind open source into other spheres. I’m particularly interested to see what does and does not translate easily to other domains.
Here’s another application: open philanthropy.
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In order to understand the implications of the shift and to internalize it, you need to experience it firsthand. You can’t tell your organization that you’re going to be implementing “social media” and everyone is going to start “collaborating,” and assume that waving a magic wand is going to make this happen. My experience has been that I had to learn what trusting and sharing means on my own.
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What does society reward? Cheating. Stealing. Exploitation. Fame. Big houses. Fancy cars. Executive titles. Material stuff. All these things are attached to something else. Something has to be sacrificed to get these things. And they often don’t make you happy in the end. They’re not who you really are, or what you really care about, but you do them because that’s how it’s set up, and we’re just operating within the framework that exists.
But, there’s this other way.
In this experimental society in which you can participate, if you want – people are a little more “real.” People will give you advice, pass along a link they think might interest you, offer to collaborate on a real project, or exchange some information with you, for no other reason besides that it’s “how THIS system works.”
The precondition is trust. You can’t buy trust. You can’t force trust.
You earn trust.
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Open notebook science (ONS) is the practice of making the primary record of a research project publicly available online as it is generated. This involves placing the personal, or laboratory, notebook of the researcher(s) online along with all raw and processed data, and any associated material. The approach can be summed up by the slogan “no insider information”.
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Mr. Shields’s book consists of 618 fragments, including hundreds of quotations taken from other writers like Philip Roth, Joan Didion and Saul Bellow — quotations that Mr. Shields, 53, has taken out of context and in some cases, he says, “also revised, at least a little — for the sake of compression, consistency or whim.” He only acknowledges the source of these quotations in an appendix, which he says his publishers’ lawyers insisted he add.
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Foreign claimants will find it more difficult to initiate libel cases in UK courts and a “public interest” defence should be introduced to protect investigative journalism, under reforms unveiled by the government today.
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When Lalie Walker set about using the Marché Saint Pierre as the setting for her latest crime thriller she thought she was paying a nostalgic tribute to a much-loved Parisian landmark.
But, after reading her tale of a crazed killer who sews fear and loathing among the rolls of taffeta, the owners of the much-loved Montmartre fabric store have signalled that they do not appreciate her gesture.
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Chris Avenir faced 147 charges of academic misconduct two years ago for his Facebook group, which let engineering students “discuss/post solutions” to homework problems. The course stipulated that students had to conduct independent work. Mr. Avenir faced expulsion, but a faculty committee ruled he should instead receive a zero for one assignment and a disciplinary note in his file.
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Science
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A million-dollar prize for solving one of toughest problems in mathematics has been awarded to a Russian mathematician, but the real puzzle is whether he’ll accept it.
The reclusive Grigori Perelman has been recognised for his proof of the Poincaré conjecture, one of seven Millennium prize problems selected by the Clay Mathematics Institute (CMI) in 2000 as the most important unsolved problems in mathematics.
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Security
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Opening the case, Nicholas Paul, prosecuting, said Smellie had “lost his self control” during an “excessive and unjustified” attack on Fisher. “He went from level one to level five without considering the intervening steps,” said Paul.
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Toronto author Peter Watts was found guilty Friday of assaulting, resisting and obstructing a U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer at the Blue Water Bridge.
Jurors returned the verdict about in St. Clair County Circuit Judge James Adair’s courtroom. He will be sentenced April 26. Watts, 52, faces up to two or three years in prison.
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Amnesty International today (23 March) released a new briefing outlining its call for a full, independent and impartial inquiry into UK involvement in human rights abuses overseas post-11 September 2001. The briefing outlines ten key questions that an inquiry should seek to answer.
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1. What have been the UK government’s policies and practices in response to grave violations of human rights such as torture or other ill-treatment, enforced disappearances, renditions and unlawful detentions perpetrated by the USA and other states against people, including UK nationals, held overseas since 11 September 2001? Have they changed since then? If so, when, how and why?
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Environment
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The Conservatives today criticised the government for failing to support proposals from a number of African countries to impose a 20-year ban on any legal sales of ivory.
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So, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) rejected international trade restrictions on northern bluefin tuna, thus probably consigning it to extinction, and removing a key predator from the oceans, with who knows what knock-on effects.
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Below the fold is a guest post by John Howe, an engineer who invented the solar tractor. In this post, John says, “Our only hope for a drastic course correction is to support grass-roots movements to elect leaders who clearly understand energy and the growing tension between an economic system based on continued growth (especially population) and declining energy.”
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Danish journalists have confirmed that The Institute for Energy Research commissioned and paid for the anti-wind energy study released last year by a Danish think tank that claimed Denmark exaggerates the amount of wind energy it produces (it doesn’t), questioned whether wind energy reduces carbon emissions (it does), and asserted that the U.S. should choose coal over wind because it’s cheaper (it’s not when you count the true costs of coal).
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IER has railed against green jobs, arguing that oil and gas are better job creators, despite the fact that investment in clean energy technology creates four times as many jobs as investment in oil and gas. IER continues its campaign against wind energy as well, asserting recently that the Obama administration had been “caught red-handed working with Big Wind energy lobbyists.”
Yes, those scary “Big Wind energy lobbyists” pose a real threat to America. You can’t make this stuff up folks. Unless, of course, you work at the oil-and-coal-funded Institute for Energy Research.
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The scandal is growing at Environment Canada of how Canadian climate researchers are being “muzzled” by draconian policies of Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
This week the Montreal Gazette reported on a leaked document showing that the information restrictions brought in by the Harper government have severely restricted the media’s access to government researchers.
“Scientists have noticed a major reduction in the number of requests, particularly from high-profile media, who often have same-day deadlines,” said the Environment Canada document. “Media coverage of climate change science, our most high-profile issue, has been reduced by over 80%.”
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Former minister says he did not break MPs’ guidelines after being caught on camera offering political influence for money
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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But the NCAA and its trademarks, restrictions and sponsor partners are putting the lid on any sanctioned events — rallies, parties and the like — for the Syracuse community and the other three cities hosting what’s come to be known as the Sweet 16.
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China
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Following are excerpts from media guidelines that the Communist Party propaganda department and the government Bureau of Internet Affairs, conveyed to top editors before this month’s annual sessions of the National People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference.
The sessions are often referred to here as “the two meetings.” Such internal guidelines are typically circulated weekly, and the list issued before this year’s sessions was described as considerably lengthier than the norm.
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10. During the two meetings, do not feature or sensationalize news about petitioners.
11. Do not report on the hunger strike by Ai Weiwei and other artists. [There was no hunger strike, but Beijing artists are protesting being forced to relocate their studios without fair compensation.]
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The letter concludes with several statements about censorship. “We support necessary censorship of Internet content and communications, whether it is on Google or any other foreign or domestic company,” the authors write.
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You know things are getting serious when Chinese editorial writers start invoking the specter of the infamous Brtish East India Company in the context of Google’s decision to withdraw its search engine services from China. As a symbol of oppressive imperialism, the British East India Co. is hard to beat in a nation where the scars from the Opium Wars still linger, raw and tender.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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The BBC want an offshore consortium of entertainment companies called the “Digital Transmission Licensing Administrator” to decide how your high definition TV and video can work.
The American courts rejected these draconian restrictions, so the DTLA has chosen to pick on British TV viewers instead.
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Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights
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Still, Gnutella captured the imagination of many, one of them being Mark Gorton, founder of the New York-based Lime Group. Gorton was at the time pursuing a vision of automating businesses through structured data, and Gnutella, as something that could, for example, distribute real estate listings wrapped in XML, seemed to fit that image quite nicely. Early versions of the Gnutella client of Gorton’s LimeWire venture were still written with this vision in mind, hoping to build a P2P network that could eventually be used to do all kinds of things with which we’re now familiar on the web, thanks to web services.
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BitTorrent is undoubtedly the most efficient way to share large files on the Internet. The key to BitTorrent’s widespread adoption can nevertheless not be exclusively attributed to its technical superiority. Much of BitTorrent’s success lies in the fact that it is web-based, easy to monetize and indexed by Google.
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ACS:Law have been making news headlines damaging to their reputation ever since they started sending out thousands of threatening letters to alleged file-sharers in the UK. Now they are threatening to sue Slyck.com, one of the Internet’s oldest file-sharing forums, because they don’t like what members have written about them.
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The news of the approval sparked an immediate wave of protest on the Internet. Several Web sites that offer unauthorized links, such as Cinetube.es, Series Yonkis.com and Divxonline.com shut themselves down until midnight, showing only the message “For freedom in the Web. No to the closure of Web [sites],” with a black background.
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Most Americans were too busy tweeting about health care to notice, but MGMT’s forthcoming album Congratulations leaked over the weekend. The band is now streaming the whole thing from their website. Full disclosure: I listened to about five seconds of the first song, and it totally justifies that insane cover art.
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In many ways, all of this business model experimentation is similar to the kind of experimentation these musicians do in the music itself. That is, they take ideas they have themselves, combine it with ideas inspired from others, and come out with something wholly unique and creative, which best matches with their own community. It’s improvisational business modeling.
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Taking away choice.
While Comcast pitches Xfinity as giving users more control over content by being able to watch what they want when they want, the reality is that Comcast is locking people into their menu of offerings for cable TV. And, most importantly, they are giving people the chance to watch content on other platforms — laptops, smartphones, etc. — only if they keep paying their cable bills. There is still no choice for people who want to pay less for just the shows they want. The ultimate in customization comes from the Internet, where you watch what you want and aren’t usually forced into bundles of content and channels.
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EMI is in talks to mortgage its back catalogue of music recordings in a last-ditch attempt to solve its mounting cash crisis.
The group is offering rival labels the chance to manage its North American catalogue business, which includes tracks by The Beatles and Blondie, for a five-year period.
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ACTA
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Members of Act Up-Paris and La Quadrature du Net attended this morning a « stakeholders meeting » on ACTA hosted by the European Commission. Questions asked by the public faced a wall of condescendence and disdain. Luc Devigne’s answers did not reassure us. On the contrary, they strenghtened Act Up-Paris, April and La Quadrature’s concerns that ACTA could endanger access to medicine, Free Software and freedom of expression on the Net, while circumventing democratic processes.
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Le Monde diplomatique has just obtained a copy of section 2 of the ACTA treaty project, titled “Border Measures” and consisting of a dozen pages outlining, in very detailed practical terms, the future of customs practices with respect to “goods suspected of infringing intellectual property rights”.
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At a public hearing in Brussels today, the EU executive tried to reassure business and civil liberties groups that the EU would impose criminal sanctions only on counterfeit goods “on a commercial scale,” but not on “proverbial housewife file-sharing,” meaning by private individuals.
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The talking points from ACTA negotiators seem clear. When accused of being secretive, deny it and insist that you’re being open. If really pushed on the matter, blame mysterious, nameless “others” for keeping the documents secret. Then, when specific items in the text are brought up, insist that these are being misrepresented, and if only you could see the real text (which you can’t, because it’s a secret) you’d know that it was all blown out of proportion. Then, finally, insist that ACTA won’t change any laws. Of course, if that were the case, there would be no need for ACTA at all.
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Without much fanfare, the European Commission has arranged an “ACTA Stakeholders’ Consultation Meeting”. Of course, the big problem is that it’s in Brussels, and few of us can afford to take a day off work to attend – unless we are professional lobbyists, of course, who get *paid* huge sums to attend.
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La Quadrature du Net has obtained another ACTA document – and it’s a biggie, but at the moment only a 56-page PDF. You can help convert it into text.
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The E.U. version:
Where a traveler’s personal baggage contains goods of a non-commercial nature within the limits of the duty-free allowance and there are no material indications to suggest the goods are part of commercial traffic, each Party may consider to leave such goods, or part of such goods, outside the scope of this section.]
Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and Singapore support alternative wording:
Where a traveler’s personal baggage contains trademark goods or copyright materials of a non-commercial nature within the limits of the duty-free allowance {Aus: or where copyright materials or trademark goods are sent in small consignments} and there are no material indiciations to suggest the goods are part of commercial traffic, Parties may consider such goods to be outside the scope of this Agreement.]
Japan favours the following:
Where a Party excludes from the application of the provisions in this Section small quantities of goods of a non-commercial nature contained in traveler’s personal luggage, the Party shall ensure that the quantitites of goods eligible for such exclusion shall be limited to the minimum allowed within its available resources.]
And Canada, New Zealand, and the U.S. would also support this approach:
Where a traveler’s personal baggage contains goods of non-commerical nature in quantities reasonably attributable to the personal use of the traveler there are no material indications to suggest the goods are part of commercial traffic, each Party may consider that such goods are outside the scope of this section]
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Digital Economy Bill
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For months, my head has been jammed with anger and ideas about the Digital Economy Bill that’s in the last stages of being rushed through parliament. I keep meaning to discuss it on this blog, and I haven’t. Not because I don’t care – actually, this piece of legislation offends me personally and politically more than anything Labour have done since they took us into Iraq – but because I care so profoundly that I don’t think anything I can say can really do it justice. Pathetically, I’m also a bit intimidated by the volume of clever stuff that’s been already been said about corporate copyright protection, and I’m scared that if I try to express how I feel I’ll reveal myself as a Stupid Shouty Girl who Doesn’t Understand. But I’ve got to at least acknowledge that this matters to me. It matters because the Digital Economy Bill is one of the most significant assaults on human rights that Labour has managed to execute in its twelve-year trigger-happy showdown with British civil liberties.
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In one corner, we have the major record labels saying filesharing is theft that has “cost” billions; in the other we have the rest of the market showing that they don’t agree. That cost includes the death of a retail market, which would seem an inevitable part of all downloading, not just illegal downloading. Music is downloaded (legally and illegally) on a scale that record sales never matched and there is evidence to show that consumers who download and share the most music are also the people who are buying it. Some companies want to grasp the opportunities the internet gives, but not adjust to its challenges.
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We’re in the final days for the British Digital Economy Bill. This Thursday, the House of Commons will decide whether to subject the bill to line-by-line debate (which will probably kill it or at least delay it until after the election), or whether to pass it without any real scrutiny or debate. Given that the DEB will touch every part of British life, from education to civic engagement to health to law enforcement to justice, it’s insane to think that Parliament might pass it without even examining what it says.
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What does the Parliamentary candidacy of the BPI’s main spokesperson tell us about the links between the BPI (the four major record labels) and the Labour party?
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Mollett is unlikely to be elected. In fact, Mollett stands a greater chance of scaling the north face of the Eiger than he does of winning leafy Farnham under a Labour banner. But his candidacy tell us more about the close ties between the organisation he lobbies for – the BPI – and the Labour party. The BPI, for which Mollett is head of corporate communications, has lobbied extensively for the Digital Economy Bill, and wrote at least one amendment. The BPI is currently trying to get the bill through Parliament without a debate, before the election. It is lobbying for the bill to either be voted through by lazy and uncaring MPs, or that in the so-called ‘wash-up’ before the election, a deal will be done which ensures it goes through. A leaked email recently exposed the BPI’s attitude (see also my previous article on the BPI email).
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The U.K. government says it will add measures to the Digital Economy Bill that will create an appeals procedure for those accused of online copyright infringement.
Ricardo Mireles, Free Open Source Software advocate in Los Angeles 02 (2004)
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03.23.10
Posted in News Roundup at 8:23 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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It was not long ago when Microsoft Windows had a tight stranglehold on the operating system market. Walk into a Circuit City or Staples, it seemed, and virtually any computer you took home would be running the most current flavor of Windows. Ditto for computers ordered direct from a manufacturer. In the last decade, though, the operating system market has begun to change. Slightly more than 5% of all computers now run Mac, according to NetMarketShare.com. Linux is hovering just beneath 1% of the overall market share in operating systems. And although that might sound like a small number, Linux is far more than just a fringe OS. In fact, it’s running in quite a few more places than you probably suspect. Below are fifty places Linux is running today in place of Windows or Mac. For easy reading, they are divided amongst government, home, business, and educational usage.
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Kernel Space
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Perhaps the title should have been; ‘the lack of a suitable compressed file system on linux’. A compressed file system in this case refers to a setup where the files are saved on the disk in a predefined compressed format (such as gzip or bzip2). When you read from those files they will be automatically decompressed by the file system. Similarly when you attempt to create a new file or modify an old file, it should be automatically compressed before saving. Such a file system is sure to be very slow for random access but for sequential access it wouldn’t matter so much. It might even be faster than an uncompressed file system because hard drives continues to be the real bottleneck in most computers today.
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Graphics Stack
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Earlier this month AMD rolled out a new workstation graphics card driver, which is effectively the same Catalyst driver used by the consumer-oriented Radeon graphics cards but with greater testing and certification for the ATI workstation offerings. The press release announcing this new driver was titled “Application Performance Increases By Up To 20 Percent with Latest ATI FirePro Graphics Driver,” so we decided to see if this proprietary driver really lives up to its claims under Linux.
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X Server 1.8 may be the first X.Org release in recent times where it’s released on time or at least close to being on schedule. Back in October, X Server 1.8 was given a release date of the 31st of March. This is just a little over a week away, but it looks like this next major update to the X Server that brings udev input handling, DRI2 updates, xorg.conf.d support, and other changes.
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Applications
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Interaction With Proprietary
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While Apple provides support for the iPod and iPhones on Mac OS X (of course) and even Windows, complete with iTunes support, they provide no such love for those wishing to use their gadgets on Linux. This has led the Linux community to reverse-engineering Apple’s USB protocol for the iPod/iPhone devices, developing different hacks, and in some cases even needing to “jail break” the product in order to use it fully under Linux. There’s a few different projects around that seek to implement iPhone/iPod support on Linux, but one of them that takes an entirely free software approach and does not depend upon any DRM or proprietary libraries is libimobiledevice. This week the libimobiledeviceproject is celebrating their version 1.0 release after being in development for nearly three years.
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Were happy to announce a new open source project called Almost Native Graphics Layer Engine, or ANGLE for short. The goal of ANGLE is to layer WebGLs subset of the OpenGL ES 2.0 API over DirectX 9.0c API calls. Were open-sourcing ANGLE under the BSD license as an early work-in-progress, but when complete, it will enable browsers like Google Chrome to run WebGL content on Windows computers without having to rely on OpenGL drivers.
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Instructionals
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KDE document reader Okular doesn’t just read multiple document formats; it also allows you to add annotations to files as you read them. Note that to get this functionality, you need version 0.8, which is in Ubuntu Karmic, or Debian Squeeze (see my howto if you want to install this on a Lenny box).
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Games
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It hasn’t been that long ago that we brought you news of 2d boy World of Goo and the Frictional Games trilogy Penumbra. Since then, things have been pretty quiet on the Linux Game Front…at least to my ear, but then again, I’m not much of a gamer.
Sure, I’ve played all the repository shooters…bloody chunks flying and monsters galore. I have a short attention span…mostly because I suck at shooter games. I just don’t play them often.
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We would like to formally announce the arrival of Xonotic – A free (GPL), fast-paced first-person shooter that works on Microsoft Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. Xonotic is a direct successor of the Nexuiz Project.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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This summer the KDE project will once again participate in Google Summer of Code! Summer of Code will allow KDE to grow and bring in new developers to the community.
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This is the first article in a series of articles that wrap up achievements, work in progress and some background of what happened during Tokamak4, the Oxygen, KWin and Plasma sprint. Tokamak4 took place from 19th to 26th February 2010 in Nürnberg, Germany in the openSUSE premises and was kindly made possible by Novell and KDE e.V. During the sprint, 26 hackers gathered to work on various aspects of the KDE user experience. The combined sprint of the workspace and window manager teams and the Oxygen artwork team made cross-collaboration possible across these KDE software components.
In this article, we actually start off with a side-track of Tokamak4 which was hardware integration. It turned out that many people working on this were actually participating in Tokamak4, so the team took the opportunity to sit together and hack some on different aspects of hardware integration in KDE SC and specifically Plasma.
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KDE’s Plasma Team took the opportunity of their Tokamak 4 get-together to also celebrate the release of KDE SC 4.4. The team went out for dinner and then headed straight into a Karaoke bar, where various performers brought real culture to this part of Frankonia. One highlight was Chani performing the German 80s anthem “99 Luftballons” and making everybody in the audience be in awe of her mad language skills. Previously, Sebas had taken the stage to present a KDE version of The Man in Black (Johnny Cash) performing Ring of Fire. After a good couple of hours of Karaoke, the team decided to move on and conquer a 70s-style bar in the heart of Nuremberg to lift the glasses on a great KDE SC 4.4 and a successful Tokamak 4.
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We also need to learn how to define ourselves by our successes and see our failures as interesting, expected and required by-products of the road to those successes. There are people in the community who look at our success in countries around the world and discount it all as being “not relevant” because it isn’t in the country they live in, and therefore conclude Free software has failed generally. Similarly when we talk about using KDE (or other F/OSS) software in production usage, instead of defining our successes and positioning ourselves in line with them we too often discount all possible usage of that software because of failures that affect only a portion of the market. This leads to us eliminating ourselves from entire market segments that we are perfect for just because we aren’t (yet? 
universally perfect.
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GNOME Desktop
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If Gnome developers are to be believed, the desktop of the future arrived last week when the release candidate for Gnome 2.30–which could become Gnome 3.0–was made available. My CPU needed a workout, so I recently compiled the new desktop and gave it a run. Here’s a look at the desktop environment that–like it or not–may soon be coming to a computer near you.
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Bottom line: Software can’t save a mailing list full of people who actively dislike each other. Maybe I’m crazy, though, but it seems like software that helped mailing lists function more like parties could really help mailing lists cope better with anti-social people.
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GNOME Shell provides core user interface functions for the GNOME 3 desktop, like switching to windows and launching applications. GNOME Shell takes advantage of the capabilities of modern graphics hardware and introduces innovative user interface concepts to provide a visually attractive and easy to use experience.
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New Releases
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Trisquel GNU/Linux 3.5, codename Awen is ready. Click on the player below to see the video announcement (HD version) we made for the LibrePlanet 2010 conference. More info after the jump.
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Tiny Core lead developer Robert Shingledecker has announced the availability of version 2.10 of Tiny Core Linux. Tiny Core is a minimal Linux distribution that is based on the 2.6.29.1 Linux kernel and is only 10.6 MB in size. In addition to the usual bug fixes, the latest update includes several changes and updates.
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The interface changes. We were planning to release these with PC/OS 11, but since we have to do an update to PC/OS 10.1 we figured what the hey. There isnt much change to the panels, just the theme. We now use the PC/OS Daylight theme, derived from Light X as the standard theme.
Up…date Manager is now included with PC/OS 10.1.1. This just delivers critical system updates and will not allow you to update to a later Ubuntu system. But for critical updates its a must have.
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Should be 14.0 due to new kernel, new Xorg, new GCC, new GTK… but we follow Slackware versioning for compatability. Kernel is 2.6.33, Xorg is 1.7.5.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat, Inc., a provider of open source solutions, announced that IBM has selected Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization as a platform in its new cloud computing service for development and test.
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Shares of Red Hat (RHT) have been red hot this past year.
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Shares of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) are trading higher by +0.17% ahead of its quarterly earnings release. Red Hat, world’s leading open source technology solutions provider is expected to release its quarterly results on March 24th.
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Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the launch of JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 5.0. with enhanced functionality to update its JBoss Enterprise Middleware portfolio. JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 5.0 is a comprehensive platform designed to integrate applications, services, transactions and business process components into an architecture for automating business and IT processes.
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JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 5.0 is the latest major upgrade to Red Hat’s middleware platform. Along with the improvements to web services integration, Red Hat said the product includes an updated enterprise services bus with enhanced protocol listeners, management consoles and a new rules engine that can be managed by JBoss Enterprise BRMS (Business Rules Management System). The enhanced platform enables enterprises to deploy new applications and services more rapidly.
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Red Hat announces new Java development tools as well as a new version of its service-oriented architecture (SOA) platform at EclipseCon 2010.
Red Hat has announced new Java development tools as well as a new version of its service-oriented architecture platform.
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Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Red Hat Enterprise Linux was selected by Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) as the standard operating platform for its next-generation “arrowhead” trading system. Developed by TSE and Red Hat strategic partner FUJITSU LIMITED (Fujitsu), the “arrowhead” platform was designed to accelerate TSE’s order response and information distribution speeds to bring a new level of execution to the Tokyo stock market.
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Debian Family
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Squeeze works well enough as it is for production use here. Where are they hiding those bugs?
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Ubuntu
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When Ubuntu drinks, the free and open source software (FOSS) community gets a hangover. The distribution is so influential that its every development sends echoes rippling through the greater community. How else to explain how a simple change in desktop themes should spark not only debates about usability, but about how decisions are made in FOSS?
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Still, the Lucid beta is pretty enough as it is out of the box. With its speed and performance improvements, users can look forward to an exciting, and even ground-breaking release when the final version becomes available next month.
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After downloading a few tracks myself, my overall impression is positive. Canonical has largely succeeded in making the music store feel like a convenient and well-integrated part of the Ubuntu user experience. Although it’s impressive, the software is still in the beta stage of development and isn’t entirely stable yet. It functions properly, but I experienced several crashes during my tests, primarily during the checkout stage of the purchasing process. There are also some minor bugs in the HTML user interface, like links that accidentally cause it to load the regular 7digital Web site instead of the one that is customized for Rhythmbox.
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ARM and its extensive Partner ecosystem can now leverage its considerable knowledge and experience working with a wide range of these elements, together with many years of Linux-based open source collaborations, to deliver innovation and diversity to enhance the end-user automotive experience.
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Too bad it’s only for professional use the HGZ Linux based coffee machine. I’d love to have on of these. A Dream come true. The Linux coffee maker.
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ViXS says each of the XCode 4210′s application processors runs its own RTOS (real time operating system) simultaneously. However, the MIPS core runs Linux 2.6.28, with support for the Linux DVB driver subsystem.
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Timesys announced that its LinuxLink development framework for custom embedded Linux devices supports the Texas Instruments (TI) TMS320DM365 DaVinci video processor. The LinuxLink for DM365 service offers Linux development tools and a pre-integrated build environment for the ARM-based chip, says Timesys.
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Wind River and Cavium launched their original partnership to support the Octeon processors back in 2007. In September of last year, after Wind River was acquired by Intel, the company signaled that it would continue to work with Cavium when it announced that Wind River Linux 3.0 for MIPS complied with the Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) 4.0 networking equipment specification, thereby extending CGL 4.0 support for Cavium’s Octeon processors. The support was also extended to MIPS64-based multi-core processors from RMI Corp., which has been acquired by NetLogic Microsystems.
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Android
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Motorola announced what it says is the first push-to-talk phone to run Android. The rugged Motorola i1 runs on Sprint’s iDEN-ready Nextel Direct Connect service, and offers a 3.1-inch, 480 x 320 touchscreen, up to 32GB of flash, WiFi, a five-megapixel camera, plus the Opera Mini 5 browser running on Android 1.5.
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Tokyo-based Ubiquitous Corp. announced the availability of an ARM-focused technology claimed to load Android or Linux in one second. QuickBoot Release 1.0 preferentially restores memory areas necessary for booting from nonvolatile storage to RAM, says the company.
QuickBoot, which is available in a Linux SDK (see below), is aimed at TVs, STBs, automotive infotainment systems, smartbooks, and smartphones, says Ubiquitous. QuickBoot 1.0 supports ARM9, ARM11, and Cortex-A series processors, says the company, which develops “compact, efficient and high-speed network and database software” for embedded devices.
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But right now, the N1/Android 2.1 combo is in a really sweet spot.
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At 7:45 AM on Monday the 15th, I and a bunch of really nervous-looking new employees stood together in a lobby at the Googleplex, waiting to be led in. Here are some random first-week notes while my eyes are still fresh.
This might turn into a series, because I recognize that my current employer is sort of a technology tourist attraction and people might want to read about it. On the other hand, it has a culture of very cautious communication, so I’ll have to be careful.
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This phone is announced along side the first pair of GSM webOS smartphones, Palm Pre and Palm Pixi, to make it to the United States. It also marks the second Android phone to come to AT&T since the Motorola Backflip. We can only hope that the Dell Aero does not follow in the Backflip’s disastrous footsteps. No release date known yet.
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With the addition of the three new phones, AT&T is the only U.S. carrier to offer devices representing all major OSes, says the company. Two weeks ago, AT&T added Motorola’s Backflip to its lineup in a so-far exclusive arrangement, thereby making the carrier’s Android debut. In October, the company began selling the GarminAsus Nuvifone G60, which runs a custom Linux OS.
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Swedish software company MoSync AB today announced support for Android devices in its cross-platform mobile development SDK.
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Motorola (NYSE: MOT) and Sprint (NYSE: S) today released details of a new push-to-talk, Android-powered smartphone, the Motorola i1, combining the popular ruggedized form of the iDen device family with the features typically found in smartphones.
The curtain was raised on the i1 at CTIA 2010, being held this week in Las Vegas, and is expected to be available this summer. While pricing details were not disclosed, the two companies had plenty to share in terms of features and specifications.
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Miguel: We are in Grenoble in the Alps, 3 hours from Paris and also pretty close to Switzerland and Italy. The Bonita Open Source project was created in 2001 at INRIA labs. Then, in 2003 Bull was interested in building a middleware stack based on Open Source and Bonita became one of the key pieces of this stack. Bull supported Bonita development between 2003 and 2008 and by the end of 2008 we had released version 4. We got quite good momentum from a community point of view, with thousands of downloads. And we started to sign some big customers, mostly in Europe.
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Tim asked a question to the audience: “Could anyone in the Open Source community build the infrastructure to deliver Google Voice Search?” The response: a stony silence. The implication? Vendor lock-in is lo longer about proprietary source code. It’s about massive, hard-to-replicate data sets — making Google a potential Microsoft of the next decade. The corollary? The future will be about who has the most data, and who is able to extract meaning from it and deliver it in real time.
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IBM executive Bob Sutor had a message for attendees at the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) in San Francisco last week: “Ask the hard questions.”
Sutor, despite himself being an open source software enthusiast (his full title is vice president of Open Source and Linux in IBM’s Software group) said, compared to traditional software vendors, too many companies give open source a pass when it comes to due diligence and scrutiny. And while he said open source has matured quite a bit to where it’s now a proven enterprise asset, that doesn’t mean it should get a rubber-stamp approval.
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Athena Security’s Firewall Browser offers network admins a number of options for troubleshooting on firewalls. According to the company in its press release on The Open Press, Firewall Browser was developed in the spirit of other free and open source network tools like Nessus or Snort, based on the value that functionally-rich non-commercial alternatives should exist for practitioners.
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Konstatin Dmitriev’s Morevna Project is to 2-D animation what the Blender Foundation’s Open movie projects have been for 3-D. The goal is to produce a production-quality, full-length animated feature, using only open source software, and license the source content and final product under free, re-use-friendly terms. Along the way, the work provides stress-testing, feedback, and development help to the open source software used, while raising awareness of the quality of the code.
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“Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging (videologging, podcasting, comic drawing etc.!) to draw attention to the achievements of women in technology and science.Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines, whatever they do. It doesn’t matter how new or old your blog is, what gender you are, what language you blog in, or what you normally blog about – everyone is invited. Just sign the pledge and publish your blog post any time on Wednesday 24th March 2010.”
I have many heroes that inspired me to go ahead. Valorie Aurora, Telsa Gwynne, Pia Waugh, Akkanna Peck, Carla Schroeder, so many… but today I would like to talk about two women, who were the most inspiring for me from the beginning. One is a historical figure, other you may not know.
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SaaS
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Fortunately we know FLOSS thrives on servers and will continue to do so in the cloud or on a thick client or terminal server. My servers dance and provide a much better environment for users than that other OS.
The question remains whether the big guys can lock us in on the cloud so that the monopoly moves from the thick client to the cloud and nothing really changes regarding the cash-flow of the big guys.
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A new company is launching today to helped popular web applications handle their growing data management needs. NorthScale built its tools around the open source memcached technology, and it has already enlisted some high-profile venture firms and customers.
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People with an open source background prefer this solution because they instinctively distrust the idea of proprietary platforms controlled by a single vendor. The open source movement has demonstrated the ability of software to move ahead at a rapid pace of innovation when many top developers all have a stake in moving the code forward.
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Oracle
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The Italian revenue agency has just released the list of ONLUS and volunteer organizations that are eligible for tax payers’ donations (5 per mille), and PLIO, the Italian OpenOffice.org association born in 2007 ,is among them!
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An anonymous reader writes “Recently, the Oracle/Sun conglomerate has denied public download access to all service packs for Solaris unless you have a support contract. Now, paying a premium for gold-class service is nothing new in the industry, but withholding critical security updates smacks of extortion. While this pay-for-play model may be de rigueur for enterprise database systems, it is certainly not the norm for OS manufactures. What may be more interesting is how Oracle/Sun is able to sidestep GNU licensing requirements since several of the Solaris cluster packs contain patches to GNU utilities and applications.”
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The vast majority are still at Oracle, some have left, but plenty are still there. This got me thinking about “who wrote what”. Innodb is a sizable piece of code and it continues to be at Oracle. Without Innodb, you don’t really have a database that is 24/7. Innodb has been there for years.
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Russia’s anti-monopoly regulator (FAS) said on Friday it had approved a $7 billion takeover of Sun Microsystems JAVA.O by Oracle (ORCL.O) on condition that Oracle continues to develop Sun’s MySQL database.
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MySQL still has one major ally, however, and it’s the one that most people thought was its biggest enemy:
Oracle.
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It is now one year since a few colleagues and I left Sun to start our own company, Monty Program Ab (after which more have joined). A lot has changed during the year. For instance we ended up producing a full fork of MySQL rather than focusing on the Maria engine as I planned a year ago.
This February we released the first stable version of MariaDB, version 5.1.42, which is our enhanced and backwards compatible MySQL branch/fork. You can download it from the askmonty.org website. Please test it out and comment upon it here or on Launchpad, the code host for the MariaDB project.
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The fact is that if you run a business website, you need to perform proper backups, and not just the stuff that gets put on a tape and thrown in a closet each evening.
I am writing this article specifically for those beginning Linux web administrators who need to know how to properly backup their website. Just because you’re new to Linux and web serving does not mean it is difficult or that you should try to avoid performing proper website backups.
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Business
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The releases of Nuxeo DAM and Nuxeo Studio are also planned for 2010. The Nuxeo Digital Asset Management offering, Nuxeo DAM, helps organizations catalogue, process, store, retrieve, and distribute rich media content, including images, audio, and video. Nuxeo Studio is the configuration and customization environment for Nuxeo EP, Nuxeo DM and Nuxeo DAM.
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Releases
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Google has released an open source scanner that allows web application developers to test their applications for security holes. The application, called Skipfish, offers a similar functionality to that of tools such as Nmap or Nessus, but it’s said to be much faster. Using fully automated heuristics, it detects code that is vulnerable to cross-site scripting attacks (XSS), SQL and XML injection attacks and many other attack types. The tool’s comprehensive post-processing of the individual test results is designed to help with the interpretation of the final report.
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Government
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That shouldn’t affect too many people, though, if there are any photographers still left with a business. The Party believes that “in this fast moving world [sic] 10 years of copyright protection is long enough”. The creator would need to re-apply after five years, however, or the work would fall into the public domain.
“An exception will be made for software, where a 5 year term will apply to closed source software, and a 10 year term to open source, in recognition of the extra rights given to the public by open source licences.”
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The speech is a clear sign of the parties’ maneouvring ahead of the election, expected to be called on 6 April to be held on 6 May. In the past month the Tories and Labour have been jockeying for position over their commitment to creating more accessible online government services, broadband and also public access to non-personal government data, with the Tories saying they would introduce a “right to public data” bill to let people request and receive public datasets, publishing details of government contracts worth more than £25,000 online, encouraging use of free open-source software in government development, and encouraging telecoms companies to offer superfast broadband.
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Not only do we have the key words “open” and “open source” in there, but the UK government is talking about “the will and willingness of the centre to give up control” (and if you believe that last part, then I have a bridge I’d like to sell you.) And yet there is something deeply disturbing about this speech that makes me wonder what on earth Gordon Brown was thinking when he uttered it.
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Instead of civil servants or politicians being the sole authors of government information, he claimed that open source information will allow citizens to shape information for their own needs.
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Open source technology was cited as the ethos on which Digital Britain will be built. The PM used the shared services centre in the Department for Work and Pensions (the Dole), which already supports 140,000 staff in three departments and plans to take on four more in the next year, as an example of what he wanted.
Needless to say the Open Source companies are thrilled. Steve Shine, executive vice president of worldwide operations, Ingres, the world’s largest open source database provider released a statement saying that this was just the beginning.
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Until now, businesses and government agencies in Israel have been heavy users of Microsoft software, but the open source movement is gaining traction thanks in part to the help and encouragement of the French tech community, says Stolar. “We hope HaCantina will create the necessary ground for collaboration and development and new innovation,” he says. HaCantina doesn’t yet have a physical home, but Kesos and Stolar hope to find a location soon.
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Licensing
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I was intrigued by an excellent (as usual) post by Matthew Aslett of 451 group, titled “On the fall and rise of the GNU GPL“, where Matthew muses on the impact of cloud computing and other factors in the decreasing role of the GPLv2 versus other type of licenses. Simon Phipps twitted “you only consider number of projects and not volume of deployed code.
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Openness
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First there was Open Source — for software. The next phase is about data — Open Data. And local, state and federal grovernments are setting the trend.
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Programming
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Our goal is to create the EclipseRT community for runtime technology similar to what Eclipse has done for developer tools. The foundation of EclipseRT is based on the OSGi standard, supporting a wide spectrum of contributing organizations/individuals. EclipseRT delivers the ability for organizations and developers to build customizable runtime solutions from existing open source technologies.
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Sonatype, caretaker of the Maven project and leading provider of enterprise software development infrastructure, today announced Sonatype Maven Studio for Eclipse. The Studio is the only Eclipse Integrated Development Environment specifically optimized for Maven, the de facto standard for Java project and build management used by more than 3 million Java developers worldwide.
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Applications
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There are a host of smaller tools (QJackCtl is indispensable and worth special mention) that help round out a project studio, but the biggest shift in thinking was from running one program, to connecting multiple ones together via Jack.
It’s funny because in that sense even GUI-heavy big applications mirror the “do one thing and do it well” Unix philosophy.
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A British worker on night shift was arrested and later sacked after he helped himself to a few biscuits from a colleague’s desk, a media report said on Tuesday.
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Pamela Harrison said that taking biscuits from her desk on December 9 had invaded her privacy, adding: “I’m disappointed that someone who is working as a work colleague finds the need to prowl around people’s personal space and take items which, though of low value, can make someone feel insecure.”
After the hearing, Campbell said he couldn’t believe that he was being prosecuted.
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She was a young American journalist living in East London – and she was fed up the secrecy of officialdom. Then Heather Brooke decided to ask for MPs’ expenses receipts. In her new book she tells how she changed Parliament forever…
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A federal appeals court said it can be acceptable for a judge to conduct an Internet search to confirm an intuition about a matter of common knowledge.
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Science
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A new type of nuclear reactor that could permanently “destroy” atomic waste is being developed by French scientists, according to the chief executive of Areva, the world’s largest nuclear energy company.
Anne Lauvergeon told The Times that the French group was developing a technology to burn up actinides — highly radioactive uranium isotopes that are the waste products of nuclear fission inside a reactor. The technology could be critical in winning greater global public support for nuclear energy and cutting emissions of carbon dioxide.
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China
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China’s state media has attacked Google for having what it said were “intricate ties” with the US government.
Google provides US intelligence agencies with a record of its search engine results, the state-run news agency Xinhua said.
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It came as a surprise this month to Wang Jianwei, a graduate engineering student in Liaoning, China, that he had been described as a potential cyberwarrior before the United States Congress.
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Security
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Research just released claims to show that 58% of business software is vulnerable to the same security breaches as a seen on Google, the US Department of Defense, and other sites.
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In this the heavy tax season where billions of dollars and tons of personal information is relayed to and from the government, it’s more disconcerting to hear that the Internal Revenue Service is still struggling to keep private information secure.
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Rep. Phil Hart, R-Athol, has some serious concerns about the use of whole-body imaging machines, which are becoming more common in airports and government building. Thursday, lawmakers approved Hart’sbill to restrict use of the machines in Idaho.
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But the overall impression one gets reading this survey is that it is all about building a profile for each person in the area, so that they can be targeted and sold-to at every opportunity. The state wants to know what we eat, drink, smoke and feel because it already knows where we go, how much we spend and what our interests are.
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Environment
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Patel’s career – spent at Oxford, LSE, the World Bank and with thinktank Food First – has been spent trying to understand the inequalities and problems caused by free market economics, particularly as it relates to the developing world.
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Activists around the world marked World Water Day 2010 by highlighting the growing presence of industrial hazardous chemicals in the world’s water supplies.
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Murkowski, who once seemed to represent a pro-environment voice among Republicans, is now among the most effective forces obstructing legislation to help the environment.
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As chairman of FreedomWorks, the group credited with mobilizing the Tea Party movement, Armey is the movement’s de facto leader. Yet Armey’s years spent lobbying for a group recognized by the State Department as being a terrorist organization—should give Tea Partiers pause.
In the weeks before April 15, 2009, local newspapers began reporting that groups calling themselves TEA, or Taxed Enough Already, were planning rallies to protest wasteful government spending. By the time Tax Day rolled around, over 300 protests were under way in all 50 states. More than 100,000 people took to the streets, gathered in parks and city centers with signs, slogans and costumes evoking America’s revolutionary past.
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With just five words quietly slipped into legislation, Illinois lawmakers are moving to include tire burning in the state’s definition of renewable energy, a change that would benefit a south suburban incinerator with a long history of pollution problems.
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Finance
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In another of those court decisions that infuriate critics of intellectual property, Judge Denise Cote, of the United States District Court in New York, ruled in favor of Barclays, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley. The banks claimed that the website, theflyonthewall.com, violated their copyright when it published headline news like changes in stock ratings link here. The site must now wait until 10 a.m. to publish news about research that was issued before the 9:30 a.m. opening bell or if issued during the day, by a full two hours.
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With over 400 amendments readied for the committee debate on Senator Chris Dodd’s financial reform package, Banking Chairman Dodd decided to ditch the democratic process and vote his own version of the bill out of committee. This moves the real debate to the Senate floor and worsens progressive’s chance of improving the bill.
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In the banking world, there are generally four types of risk; liquidity risk, credit risk, operational risk and reputational risk. Of these, only reputational risk failures threaten the entire value of the business and its goodwill. If our questions remain unanswered, the entire financial system will remain dangerously exposed.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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TROUBLE-plagued Attorney-General Michael Atkinson has fallen on his sword to make way for fresh blood in a new Labor ministry.
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He has been dogged by a string of controversies – think internet censorship, stashed cash, Ashbourne-Clarke and the senior magistrate defamation case.
He also has attracted national criticism over his refusal to allow an R18+ rating for video games.
His humiliating backflip over internet censorship laws on the night of Februrary 2 came after a furious reaction on AdelaideNow to The Advertiser’s exclusive report on the new law.
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In a nutshell, Howard said that anonymous comments were an abomination (I’m paraphrasing somewhat) and were in fact unethical, since commenters on a news site had a “fundamental right” to know the identity of the other people commenting. I tried to make a number of points, including the fact that anonymity is a red herring, and that the more important thing in encouraging a strong and healthy community conversation is standards of behaviour, regardless of anonymity. I also tried to make the point that anonymity has its benefits, and that many people — some of whom might have valuable contributions to make — would never comment if they had to use real names (Howard made the point that allowing anonymity excludes other people).
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Egypt has begun enforcing a ban on international calls made through mobile internet connections, the head of the telcoms regulator told Reuters on Tuesday, potentially boosting voice revenues at landline monopoly Telecom Egypt.
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With the help of the University of California Berkeley’s Samuelson Clinic, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for documents from the government about how they monitor and use social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn to gather information for investigations. The EFF struck gold with this request, as both the IRS and the Department of Justice released training presentations on social networking sites. While this may seem benign, the training material from the DOJ suggests that feds go undercover on sites such as Facebook to gather information on crime.
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Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights
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It then goes into a list of specific policies, which pretty much all focus on adding lots of external links to stories. Of course, given how UK newspapers are suddenly working hard to block links from others, you have to wonder if those same papers are going to start blocking the BBC as well…
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True to form, Cablevision decided the best thing to do with Newsday was to spend $4 million redesigning and putting up a paywall that drove away some writers and convinced 35 people to sign up in its first three months. Yes, 35. Of course, Cablevision insisted that the goal was really about reducing churn by offering the newspaper website to Cablevision cable TV and broadband subscribers, but it still seems like a pretty big failure all around.
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Basically, there’s proof that free-to-the-consumer video has worked in the past, and can work again.
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Craiglist was told by the spammer that he’d sold about $40,000 worth of the autoposter software. Craigslist pursued both Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. §§ 1201 (“DMCA”) and the TOU (Contract) claims.
The spammer did not hire a lawyer to defend the lawsuit and failed to respond to pleadings and court notices.
Craiglist obtained default judgments pursuant to Rule 55 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure under both the DMCA for statutory damages of $470,000 and under the TOU (Contract) for $840,000. The court found the liquidated damages clause of $200 per unauthorized post to be enforceable. The court accepted Craigslist’s lowest estimate of unauthorized posts. The spammer, Igor Gasov was held personally liable.
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So please pay careful attention to the actual arguments being made here. No one is saying that copyright infringement should be allowed on YouTube. The only question is whether or not it should be YouTube’s responsibility to proactively monitor that content and stop it from being uploaded. The law is pretty clear that this is not required — and, as Google’s filing makes clear, even if it were required, given Viacom’s own actions, this would be impossible.
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With these big professional reporters, you might think they would try to fact check a claim like “90% of all “pirated” DVDs come from camcorded movies.” They might have trouble doing that, because the actual research suggests something quite different. A study that we wrote about a few years ago found otherwise. Specifically, it found that “77% appear to have been leaked originally by industry insiders.”
But, of course, we need to save the AP, because they do real fact checking, right?
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I agree. Copyright infringers should not be called pirates. A pirate is a robber, plunderor, predator. The term much better describes the patent and copyright lobbies, which use state monopoly grants to plunder and rob the masses.
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Via Michael Scott, we learn that there was recently a debate over whether or not the government could use the phrase “music piracy” to describe the actions of an individual who had been charged with criminal copyright infringement.
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WHEN the Walt Disney Company agreed in August to pay $4 billion to acquire Marvel Entertainment, the comic book publisher and movie studio, it snared a company with a library that includes some of the world’s best-known superheroes, including Spider-Man, the X-Men, the Incredible Hulk and the Fantastic Four.
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ACTA/Digital Economy Bill
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1. Copyright and Related Rights
2. Trademarks
3. Geographical Indications
4. Industrial Designs
5. Patents
6. Layout-Designs (Topographies) of Integrated Circuits
7. Protection of Undisclosed Information
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The ten defined terms include:
* days
* intellectual property (See below)
* Council (ACTA Oversight Council)
* measure
* person (natural or juridical)
* right owner (includes federation or assicaitons that have legal standing or authoirty to assert rights)
* territory
* TRIPS Agreement
* WTO
* WTO Agreement
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Sometimes a story is so insane that you can’t help but wonder if someone has slipped you some crazy pills. See, for example, the Google prosecution in Italy. I honestly thought that story could not be topped. But lo and behold, it appears that the EU has proposed to add third-party CRIMINAL liability to the Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement (ACTA). This essentially outlaws the entire Internet. Insanity.
Background: Third party civil liability for copyright infringement is an emerging, but still controversial, doctrine as applied to the Internet. A site may be liable if it has incited and/or facilitated the violation of copyright, see Grokster. The limits of this doctrine are still being tested: it is not clear what level of hosting or facilitating actually triggers liability. For an example of this endemic uncertainty, the § 512 of the DMCA creates a safe harbor for ISPs, provided that the ISP expeditiously removes infringing content after the ISP is put on notice. However, it is unclear what material is so obviously infringing that its very presence should put the ISP on notice (this is the controversial “red flag” test).
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DEMOCRACY:
ACTA aims to create a new model of global governance that bypasses the normal procedures of multilateral international institutions, the European Parliament and national legislatures.
A FAIRER WORLD:
ACTA is a vast protectionist initiative to defend a few economic interests of the richest countries and to limit access to knowledge and other socially essential goods like medicines in the developing nations. Poorer countries will be forced to agree to ACTA’s unfair provisions as a condition for free trade agreements and other bilateral accords.
ACCESS TO AFFORDABLE, SAFE MEDICINE:
ACTA willfully confuses fake, fraudulant drugs with legal, generic drugs under the same suspicion and same possible confiscation. Draconian border measures and criminal enforcement imposed on third countries will create barriers to trade in essential, life-saving medication and other goods.
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The European Commission hosted a fascinating consultation on ACTA today. Luc Devigne, the lead European negotiator, opened with a brief presentation and proceeded to field questions for over an hour. The full consultation video is available online. The discussion touched on many issues including Devigne arguing that the WTO consistently blocked any attempt to address IP enforcement issues and stating that the treaty is limited to enforcement and not new substantive provisions (this assumes that anti-circumvention rules are a matter of enforcement, not substance).
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So far, over 10,000 people have written to their MPs demanding that the government does its job and holds a proper debate on the Digital Economy Bill. If you haven’t done so already, send a letter to your MP now, and ask your friends to do the same. It’s a simple, quick and easy process. You can either email the standard letter provided on that site, or write your own.
Ricardo Mireles, Free Open Source Software advocate in Los Angeles 01 (2004)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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Posted in News Roundup at 6:08 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Linux is a free operating system just like Windows or Mac OS. The great thing about Linux is that it is completely free to download and use. I am shocked when I see people going into computer stores and paying hundreds of dollars for Windows. Most people do not know about Linux because there is no single company behind the project. It is a community effort and many individuals, companies and organizations are involved to bring you this amazing OS.
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Did Windows crash beyond repair? If so, you probably want to get your files off of the drive before you erase everything and reinstall Windows. This tutorial will help you do exactly that.
We’re going to use Ubuntu’s LiveCD mode. Ubuntu is a popular Linux distribution that’s a free and open source alternative to Windows. The LiveCD mode lets you boot into and use the operating system (OS) without installing anything on the computer. You should be able to view your files and copy them to another drive, backup to discs, or transfer via a network. Now let’s get started!
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The XtreemOS consortium developers have announced the release of version 2.1 of their Linux-based Grid operating system. The project, which has as its motto “Making Grid Computing Easier”, is aimed at creating an open source Grid OS with native support for virtual organisations (VO) and the ability to run on a wide range of platforms, from clusters to mobiles.
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Server
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The goal of this article is to review the history and architecture of Linux as well as its present day developments to understand how Linux has become today’s leading platform for cloud computing. We will start with a little history on Unix system development and then move to the Linux system itself.
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Today’s news that TSE (Tokyo Stock Exchange) has moved to Red Hat’s RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) as the operating platform for its next-generation “Arrowhead” trading system shouldn’t come as a surprise. Linux has become the smart stock market’s operating system of choice.
Red Hat has been working with TSE and Fujitsu for some time on the Arrowhead platform. As always with stock markets, the name of the game is to accelerate TSE’s order response and information distribution speeds. According to Red Hat, “Arrowhead is designed to combine low latency with high reliability to accommodate diverse products, trading rules and changes within a short time window.”
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Czech-German company xITee has announced a recent delivery of a new version of the CFD–Trading-Platform to the German company Panthera Capital AG, which is the technical solution provider for CeFDex AG.
Version 2.1 is fully based on open-source software. It uses an EnterpriseDB/PostgreSQL database, and JBoss server as an application server.
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Applications
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File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a popular and time-honored method of transferring files to and from a remote network site. FTP is built on a client-server architecture and uses separate control and data connections between the client and server applications. The FTP client connects to the FTP server, and enables the user to send and retrieves files from that server.
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Linux users can choose from more IRC clients than you can shake a stick at, dozens of clients depending on how expansive your definition is. To winnow it down to a reasonable herd of clients, I decided to rule out a couple of clients that are undeniably awesome but not well-suited to many users. For instance, Emacs has several clients, but if you’re not using Emacs then you’re not going to want to learn it just to use a nifty IRC client.
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Another factor that led me to take Radio Tray for a spin was that python is the language dujour for its development and the fairly small number of dependencies involved in building it. In fact, if you’re running one of the popular GNU/Linux distributions out there, then you should have all you need. Carlos has done a pretty good job at keeping the code simple and easy to follow, so anyone who’s tinkered with pygtk before can aspire to contribute to the project. Those who have taken the time to provide feedback and report issues or file for new features will agree that the level of attention to user satisfaction is pretty high for such a young project!
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One thing you’ve really got to admire about the open source application ocean is the wide availability of good, really good, music players.
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Despite its power and convenience, Gmail has one serious limitation: the desktop integration. The Gnome Gmail tool solves this problem for users running the Gnome desktop environment.
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I have had a lot of fun playing with compiz fusion in Linux. I really like the desktop cube feature especially with the transparency settings in place to where you can see all sides of your desktop cube. Unfortunately there is a problem and that is with the desktop icons. When you make your desktop cube transparent the wallpaper and icons become transparent also. There are two possible ways to work around this problem. One is to adjust the transparency to where it is transparent but not so transparent that you cannot see your icons. This may be acceptable with some themes and I have used this to some nice effect when working with under water themes and the cube atlantis plugins. The downside to this is that even after fine tuning your settings things still are not quite as crisp and sharp the icons don’t have as nice of a shine nor does your sky dome.
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For those of you who are new to Linux and to accelerated 3d one of the advantages of the desktop cube is that you can see all of your work spaces. So if you want to open a program up and then have another free space to work in, then you can and since it is transparent you can have multiple desktops with programs running at the same time and be able to see all that is going on. Here is a screenshot to demonstrate this feature:
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Klavaro is FREE and offers you an easy way to learn to type quickly and correctly on a keyboard. Every finger has its place on the keyboard with associated keys to press.
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Proprietary
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Instructionals
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Patching a kernel refers to upgrading to the latest ‘n greatest by small increments.
Rather than downloading a 25 meg source, it is possible, indeed desirable from your point of view, to simply apply the changes in source code that occur between revisions. These changes can be as little as half a megabyte. A considerable saving in download time.
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Games
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Xonotic is this new project that is a fork of Nexuiz and takes away some of the main developers within the Nexuiz community. Apparently they already have in excess of 30 core community members for this new project. This project aspires not only to take the GPL Nexuiz code and release it as a new game, but they are planning to provide new models and animations, new sounds and music, a makeover of many maps, higher quality content, and other organizational changes for the project.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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I stared to change the function that produce the brush mask and affects it’s softness. I selected Gaussian as it is nice function and I experiment with this function, but I found it complicated to control it (you setup sigma, uh what is sigma, you artist ask?). So let’s add some different function to the brush mask code. Oh, let’s put this decision to the artists hands, let’s give him some curve he can model as he want. We already has nice widget for that in Krita, so use it. So you can setup the brush mask by curve!
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A friend was showing me his Hackint0sh today, and while it was interesting to see that fine OS on an non-approved platform, it confirmed a few things to me, such as the idea that regardless of where it was installed or how hacked it is, I still wouldn’t use it. This I knew already, but it was nice to come back to it after a year of not really having touched it and confirming what I already knew.
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For years, before I knew how to create my own keyboard shortcuts really effectively in KDE, I would subconciously hit unique-to-App1e keyboard shortcuts (like command-shift-3 or command-shift-n) and expect them to work on KDE. I’d do a double take when they didn’t work, then my brain would kick in and override the muscle memory and I’d do whatever the correct procedure was.
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This is Elive’s slogan. As I am sure you can guess, it is a Debian based distribution that uses the Enlightenment window manager. I always like to jump in with both feet when it comes to playing with technology, so to get the best feel for what Elive is and how it works I downloaded the LiveCD and installed it as the primary operating system on my Sager Laptop.
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The first bugfix release of KDE 4.4 was released at the beginning of this month and again thanks to neoclust we have packages for Mandriva 2010 available since last week. You can follow the instructions of my previous post about the upgrade to KDE 4.4.0 to upgrade to 4.4.1. If you are upgrading from KDE 4.4.0 then don’t forget to disable or delete the old KDE 4.4.0 repository before starting this upgrade, just in case.
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Epidemic GNU / Linux is a Linux distro created by Brazilians using the KDE graphical interface. Modern is one of the main attractions which classify Epidemic distrobuições one of the best current Linux using KDE.
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Linux specialist Red Hat Inc. (RHT) is scheduled to release its quarterly earnings report after the close of trading on Wednesday, March 24. Analysts are currently looking for a profit of 16 cents per share from the company, up from earnings of 14 cents per share in the same quarter last year. Historically, Red Hat’s results have been modestly better than expected during the past four quarters, topping the consensus estimate twice and matching twice for an average upside surprise of more than 14%.
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Ubuntu
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The Ubuntu project released its first beta of Ubuntu 10.04 (“Lucid Lynx”), offering two new themes, social-networking tools, cloud-related enhancements, faster boot-times, and an updated Firefox browser with Yahoo search as default. Meanwhile, an oddball icon placement in one theme has Ubuntu users up in arms.
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No. Ubuntu has a kernel team because Canonical thinks it needs one, Canonical feels the need to change the kernel. How many serious security flaws have there been in Ubuntu? And how many were specific to Ubuntu? Linus Torvalds makes the kernel decisions, not Ubuntu’s kernel team. Ubuntu’s kernel team should only be there to make appropriate changes, like which modules are included, swappiness, hard disk parameters, and which kernel version should be used.
Linus makes these decisions because he started the kernel. Ubuntu’s kernel team’s messing with it has only caused problems. And because Linus believes in democracy he doesn’t complain when Ubuntu’s kernel team messes with it. He wouldn’t have any right to anyway, because the GPL is designed to allow open development and democracy of software development.
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It’s difficult to understand why GNU/Linux users have this sense of entitlement and often make meaningless threats to try and get their preferences implemented. The software is free, one benefits by using it (else I doubt anyone would be doing so) and it comes out with clockwork-like regularity. There really is not much scope for complaint.
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In terms of resources for this community, we have the following key components:
* Wiki Pages – these wiki pages include best practise and details about how to join the community.
* Teams List – this is the big list of teams, complete with contact details and online resources.
* Mailing List – this is where the LoCo community discuss general LoCo related topics. In most cases cases teams have mailing lists too.
* #ubuntu-locoteams on Freenode – this is an online discussion channel where you can ask questions and socialize with other LoCo community members.
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I want to be clear that my team is a fast-paced, hard-working, hectic environment. I am going to work you hard, and you should expect that, but my goal here is to help you squeeze every ounce of opportunity out of your internship. We will have 1-on-1 weekly calls, I will help guide you on what to work on, help you manage your work, solve problems, and be effective in your projects. In other words: when you sign up for your internship, expect a solid six month adventure, but an adventure that will sow the seeds for many great opportunities in the future.
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The Ubuntu community, shepherded by the company Canonical, has delivered not only its fastest operating system to date but has included so many flourishes that are relevant to today’s PC market that it should receive much stronger consideration in competitive engagements than ever before. From social networking to security to desktop cloud services, the Beta 1 of Ubuntu 10.04, the so-called Lucid Lynx version, leaves Windows 7 behind in several areas with tightly integrated applications.
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The store is “built in” to Rhythmbox meaning you don’t need to install any extra add-ons to use it – simply start Rhythmbox and click the ‘UbuntuOne’ sidebar entry to load up the store and do some browsing.
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Ubuntu is Linux for the rest of us. It is simple to install and use. Despite that, not that many users are on board with estimates of 1-2% of all computer users running various Linux operating systems. But with the release of Ubuntu 10.04, there might be a few reasons to give it a try. It is currently in beta, so you may not want to install it on your primary computer.
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Overall there seems to have been quite a few changes to Ubuntu in this release. However, most of these are cosmetic measures. As well, many of them look like an attempt to boost revenue at Canonical. Over the long term, this may not go down too well with the community. Still, I’ve found this to be an excellent release, far better than the 9.10 which I didn’t give a lot of love.
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NComputing shipped a SoC (system-on-chip) designed for thin clients that will provide multimedia-enabled remote access to Windows and Linux desktops, and optionally run Android 2.1 locally. The $20 Numo SoC is based on a dual-core ARM-based CPU, and is designed to work with the company’s VSpace virtualization software.
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AT&T said it will soon announce the Dell Aero, which appears to be a version of Dell’s Android-based Mini 3 phone, and is claimed to be the lightest Android smartphone on the market. The wireless carrier also announced that it will soon offer the Palm Pre Plus and Palm Pixi Plus smartphones.
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This entry in the not403 blog discusses OpenSSO, a single sign-on project which Oracle acquired from Sun and has subsequently shut down.
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The open-source Arduino electronics platform has received a ton of attention from the hardware enthusiast community. And one more follower is joining the fray–Mario himself. The mustachioed plumber of console video game fame has been converted into an eight-by-eight LED matrix by Carnegie Mellon University student Chloe Fan. And, yes, she’s even made a separate Arduino device to give her side-scrolling adventure the classic Mario theme.
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You might think of customer relationship management (CRM) software as something that’s only useful for businesses, but it can play an important role in the health of a community project as well.
Think of it not as “customer” relationship management, but community management software. In every community I’ve worked with, there’s been a revolving cast of participants who each have contact with a slice of the internal community and external contacts for that community. Think about everything from managing conferences and sponsorships, to working with other open projects.
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The role of a mentoring organization is to provide a list of projects for students to choose from, and shepherd a student through the Summer of Code process. The organization is also expected to provide feedback and a written evaluation of the student’s work, as well as make sure work is down well and turned in on time.
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Facebook, et. al., would not be possible today if it weren’t for open source software. Commodity hardware and open source software have provided the fertile breeding ground for Web-scale sites like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and others. Of course they’re going to turn to open source for the next generation of software. Had the initial stack of software they rely on been proprietary, their existence wouldn’t have been possible. But these companies have enjoyed the control and flexibility that open source enables and they are wisely choosing to invest their profits into more of the same.
Web companies should absolutely, and fully, commit themselves to rolling their own code or hitching their wagon to existing open source solutions. The alternative is to cede an unhealthy amount of control over their infrastructure to outside parties.
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DocumentBurster is a light, loosely coupled free report-bursting tool that lets you automate high-volume document delivery to customers, vendors, employees, and prospects. You can pay the big money to buy a similar solution from the likes of Oracle, IBM, or BusinessObjects, or you can turn to this open source application.
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Skills
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And while open source jobs declined slightly in the nearly 40,000 jobs posted on U.S-based online workteam builder oDesk (PDF link) that was mainly due to a surge in job requests for folks with social media skills. MySQL, Joomla, Linux, PHP and other open-source skills were comfortably in the top 50 skills requested by job posters.
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Demand for nearly all skills fell in the period compared with Q4 2008. Only demand for PHP and AJAX skills grew in Q4 2009 compared with the same period in 2008, 17 percent and six percent, respectively.
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Oracle
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Translate.org.za has recently released local language versions of OpenOffice.org which give users a full set of office tools including a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool and a drawing application.
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CMS
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This is on top of Vosao’s support for WYSIWYG editing, content versioning, SEO-friendly URLs and other standard CMS goodies. The goal of the project isn’t just to produce a free software CMS (it’s licensed under the GPLv2), but to support App Engine, which allows free hosting for sites with up to 500 MB of storage and 5 million page views per month.
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Programming
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The Python developers have released two new version of the programming language. Versions 2.6.5 and 3.1.2 are both new maintenance releases; 2.6.5 of the older Python 2.6 development strand, and 3.1.2, of the current Python development version. Because Python 2.6 is currently in bug fix mode, there is no added functionality, but over sixty bugs have been fixed in the Python 2.6.5 release since the previous version.
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The strong sense of community standards in Perl and the CPAN offers many benefits. The uniformity of conventions suggests that all of the code I’m likely to use has decent documentation, a test suite, a project page on the CPAN, dependency tracking, and a very reasonable chance of installing correctly (or at least strong community pressure to figure out why it doesn’t and to fix it).
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Web
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Alongside promises for superfast broadband, the government today announced £30 million to create an Institute for Web Science, lead by web creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee and professor Nigel Shadbolt.
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In the view of Tim Berners-Lee, “the lesson from the proliferation of new applications and services on top of the web infrastructure is that innovation will happen provided it has a platform of open technical standards, a flexible, scalable architecture, and access to these standards on royalty-free terms.”
H.264 is owned by MPEG-LA, the company that runs the patent pool shared between companies with patents on the codec. It is in the interest of the patent pool to encourage adoption of the codec, and to this end, MPEG-LA has promised that H.264 will remain royalty-free until 2016.
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“Standards are as interesting as a Russian Truck,” said Ken Olsen, president and CEO of Digital Equipment Corporation, at that time the second largest computer system company in the world.
It was a fairly strange statement to come from a person whose company had helped develop more computer standards than almost any other, and the press had a field day with that quote. If he said it today, Ken might be thought to be addressing HTML5, the long-awaited standard of what has become the most important publishing mechanism on the face of the earth…the web.
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Kaltura, an open source online video platform, is headed to college. The company has partnered with IT consulting firm Unicon, Inc. to deliver its video services to higher education institutions. Kaltura’s software already integrates with popular learning management systems like Moodle, so Unicon’s role as an authorized reseller will be to do the heavy lifting associated with getting the product up and running in schools and universities.
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Security
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That’s apparently the statute: if you don’t comply fast enough with a customs officer, he can beat you, gas you, jail you and then imprison you for two years. This isn’t about safety, it isn’t about security, it isn’t about the rule of law.
It’s about obedience.
Authoritarianism is a disease of the mind. It criminalizes the act of asking “why?” It is the obedience-sickness that turns good people into perpetrators and victims of atrocities great and small.
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New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg apologized to an elderly Brooklyn couple on Friday for about 50 door-pounding visits police made to their home resulting from a glitch in one of the department’s computers.
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Finance
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A House committee requested that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke turn over documents related to Stephen Friedman’s purchase of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. shares while he was on the boards of both the Wall Street firm and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
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Which begs the obvious question: Why on EARTH would Goldman, if it has the slightest interest in rehabilitating its public standing, bring in a former honcho from Wal-Mart to help oversee its management?
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The idea of a transfer tax, on financial trading generally, has resurfaced. European leaders, like Gordon Brown in England, are in favor. Timothy Geithner, the U.S. Treasury secretary, has resisted the idea. The ideal of a frictionless market is so instinctual that we have lost sight of the peril that comes with speed. Maybe it’s time to slow the markets down.
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So the message from Goldman seems to be: Don’t expect any significant form of tightening in 2010.
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Government officials told the WSJ that the pay czar, Kenneth Feinberg, will review compensation at all 417 firms that took government bailout funds, including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley.
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But the filing did note that Ms. Stecher’s son made $200,000 last year and that Mr. Viniar’s stepdaughter made $225,000 last year. That’s a substantial increase from 2008, when the two children made $124,000 and $150,000, respectively, according to Goldman’s 2009 proxy.
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Last year, the high compensation accrued across the banking industry — at a time when most people were suffering from a recession partly created by bankers’ excesses — provoked an angry response. A special industry tax was imposed in Britain, and various levies were proposed in the United States. Ultimately, most banks reined in pay.
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Lobbyists for financial firms are seeking to water down language in Section 619 of the 1,336-page proposal by Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat. Their message: Study the issue first to see if it’s needed, then give regulators the option of imposing a ban.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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For the third time in a decade, New York City has agreed to pay millions of dollars to settle a lawsuit stemming from the illegal strip searches of thousands of nonviolent prisoners.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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EA proudly declared that C&C4 has “NO DRM” but clearly this is not the case. C&C4 will boot you if your connection drops, making it no less insidious than Assassin’s Creed 2 and Silent Hunter 5. Electronic Arts is trying to justify the DRM by saying the game updates user statistics, but it’s a poor excuse given that other games simply wait until a player is back online to update stats.
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ACTA
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The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) isn’t just another secret treaty—it’s a way of life. If ACTA passes in anything like its current form, it will create an entirely new international secretariat to administer and extend the agreement.
Knowledge Ecology International got its hands on more of the leaked ACTA text this week, including a chapter on “Institutional Arrangements” that has not leaked before. The chapter makes clear that ACTA will be far more than a standard trade agreement; it appears to be nothing less than an attempt to make a new international institution that will handle some of the duties of groups like the WTO and WIPO.
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03.22.10
Posted in News Roundup at 5:46 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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· Announced Distro: Announcing Linux Mint 8 RC1 LXDE Edition
· Announced Distro: openSUSE 11.3 Milestone 3 Comes with GCC 4.5
· Announced Distro: Berry Linux 1.01 Is Based on Fedora 12
· Announced Distro: PCLinuxOS 2010 Beta 2 Comes with Linux Kernel 2.6.32.10
· Announced Distro: SimplyMEPIS 8.5 RC3 Is Here, the Final Release Candidate
· Announced Distro: SystemRescueCd 1.5.0 with Linux Kernel 2.6.32.10
· Announced Distro: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Beta 1 Out for Testing
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The New Jersey Linux User’s group will present a film titled “Revolution OS” at the Darress Theatre in Boonton on Wednesday, March 31.
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This pilot fish works his way up to managing one of the two main groups in his company’s IT organization.
“One group — ours — was running the Unix and Linux machines and managing a slew of database servers,” fish says. “The other group provided the Microsoft support, which included managing some server-supported applications.”
[...]
“I’m now working for another company. I’ve heard the Microsoft manager has since been fired. I’m guessing he wasn’t as successful as they thought he would be.”
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Ncomputing makes powerful chips that make thin clients work: Essentially turning a keyboard, mouse, monitor and small box of electronics into a fully-functioning powerful Windows or Linux PC, with its real complex “guts” in a different location accessed over a network, and serving up desktops to many different users.
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After locking down the X25-M in my computer’s drive bay chassis, I turned on the computer with an expectation that something different should happen. Of course, nothing out of the ordinary occurred beyond the BIOS recognizing that my primary hard-drive capacity had changed and the fact that no operating system booted. As such, I proceeded with a fresh install of Ubuntu 9.10 64-bit desktop edition and was once again stunned how quickly the installation occurred compared to my older hard drive install experiences. This result greatly raised my expectation for OS boot times and I was not disappointed. Because the X25-M has virtually no access time and significantly faster read and write times, what normally took nearly a half hour was completed in roughly two-thirds the time.
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Desktop
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On the second count, it found that Ubuntu is by far the most widely deployed GNU/Linux distribution. OpenOffice, the Firefox web browser, Thunderbird mail and Lightning calendar are used for the core desktop functions. Respondents use The Gimp image editor, Inkscape graphics editor, and Evince PDF viewer to provide other common functions.
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Commodore
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It comes with the latest version of Ubuntu Linux
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Google
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Chrome OS is set to arrive in the fall on x86 and, yes, ARM netbooks. Google first unveiled Native Client in December 2008, calling it “a technology that aims to give web developers access to the full power of the client’s CPU while maintaining the browser neutrality, OS portability, and safety that people expect from web applications”. Then, in October of last year, it slipped the plug-in into its Chrome browser, which serves as the centerpiece for Chrome OS. The OS is essentially Chrome running atop the company’s Goobuntu flavor of Linux.
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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 rPath is its newest member. rPath is an innovator in automating system provisioning and maintenance across physical, virtual and cloud environments and works with Linux users to achieve flexibility, scalability and control within today’s limited budgets.
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Some 18 hours ago the Linux 2.6.34-rc2 version was tagged and is now available, but oddly we have yet to come across a kernel release announcement from Linus Torvalds.
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The recently completed Linux 2.6.34 merge window included a patch to eliminate a type of denial-of-service attack against routers. The “Generalized TTL Security Mechanism” (GTSM) is described in RFC 5082 as a means to protect routers from CPU-utilization attacks—essentially overloading the router with bogus Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) packets. With the addition of a simple socket option, those attacks can be easily thwarted.
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HostV, a leader in managed Virtual Private Servers and Dedicated servers, announced today it has completed deployment of Ksplice Uptrack, a subscription service that enables server administrators to apply important Linux kernel security updates without rebooting the server.
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This entry is a continuation of one published in May of 2009. In fact it is relating to a comment made earlier today which I responded to in brief words. I am now taking the time to offer my viewpoint on the whole ZFS licensing under the CDDL and the reasoning for it.
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Graphics Stack
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OpenGL 3.0 was announced in the summer of 2007 and since then we have seen the subsequent releases of the 3.1, 3.2, and 3.3 specifications. Just last week there was even the release of OpenGL 4.0. The proprietary Linux graphics drivers have picked up support for these latest industry standard specifications, but it hasn’t been smooth sailing in the open-source world.
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A week ago we reported on open-source GPU offloading, which allowed multiple GPUs from different vendors that were backed by open-source graphics drivers to offload the 3D rendering work to a secondary GPU and then to pass the rendered result back to the primary GPU driving the display.
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The NVIDIA Fermi support in CUDA 3.0 includes native 64-bit GPU support, multiple copy engine support, ECC reporting, concurrent kernel execution, Fermi hardware debugging support via cuda-gdb, and Fermi hardware profiling support for CUDA’s C and OpenCL via the NVIDIA Visual Profiler. The first of the NVIDIA Fermi graphics cards in the GeForce 400 series, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 and GeForce GTX 480, are expected to be launched in just a few days and are both built upon the “GF100″ core.
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It has taken years of work for Tungsten Graphics (now VMware) and the Linux development community to develop Gallium3D into a robust and reliable multi-platform graphics architecture, but this investment should begin paying off later this year or within the next year. Nouveau’s Gallium3D support is becoming reliable and working across the range of NVIDIA GeForce/Quadro graphics cards that they are targeting to the point that Red Hat is shipping this driver by default in Fedora 13. For Ubuntu users there is a Gallium3D Nouveau PPA too, but we would not be surprised if Ubuntu 10.10 is to pull in this driver as it finally provides a free software 3D NVIDIA driver for Linux.
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At a time when Nvidia might make its GPU comeback – the launch of the Fermi chips, AMD has decided to concentrate their efforts in the 3D field, in an attempt to catch-up with the green graphics giant. It does this in typical Advanced Micro Devices style, by setting the open source atmosphere with what it calls Open Stereo 3D. Similar to its Open Physics venture which goes head to head with Nvidia’s PhysX, AMD now launches its open offensive against the 3D Vision front.
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Applications
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Compression is compression is compression. Right? Wrong. There are some compression utilities that eek out every drop of space possible. On the Linux operating system the standard is gzip or bunzip2. But if you’re looking for one of the highest compression ratios to be found you might want to turn your sites to 7-Zip. 7-Zip is a free (even for commercial usage) compression/archiving utility that has its own compression algorithm (LZMA – Lemple-Ziv-Markov chain algorithm).
Although 7-Zip is available for both Windows and Linux, only the Windows port has a GUI front end. This means, by default, using 7-Zip in Linux requires the use of commands. Normally this is fine, but the 7-Zip commands can be fairly confusing (even to the experienced user). Fortunately 7-Zip does integrate well with the GNOME and KDE desktops. And it has a front end available. This front end is Q7z and was not created nor is maintained by the makers of 7-Zip.
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Those are the cubemodel and atlantis plugins, of which are arguably quite complex. Regardless of their size, I actually managed to get them done within a day for each (so about ~4h), which is good considering atlantis is over 8000 LOC (most of it autogenerated). I’ve refined my porting technique to use member variable prefixing, of which I wish I knew about earlier, since it would have saved me sooo much time debugging silly typoes at runtime.
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Today Samba is used world-wide by all sizes and types of users and businesses. It has won plenty of awards (including an award to Andrew Tridgell from the Google O’Reilly Open Source Hall of Fame Awards), yet Samba remains humbly in the background connecting different operating systems together day in and day out.
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Who would have thought microblogging would be so popular? 2009 was probably the ‘crossover’ year for microblogging and Twitter in particular, as high-profile people started to massage their egos with some online idolatry.
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Proprietary
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What’s new in this release (see below for details):
– A wide range of Direct3D improvements.
– Support for SHA-256, SHA-384, and SHA-512 algorithms.
– A number of MSHTML fixes.
– Support for mp3 decoding on Mac OS X.
– Various widl improvements.
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Instructionals
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Games
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In actual fact there’s a growing body of research that shows game playing can improve productivity by allowing the brain to concentrate on other things for a while. It makes sense to me, we have after all evolved playing games that have allowed us to try out new mental strategies.
Originally we’d considered doing this last week to coincide with the Games Developer Conference in San Francisco. But we’d been planning the women in IT feature for weeks and that took precedence. However, with the game BAFTAS in the UK tonight we had an excuse to do the Top 10 list we’ve been mulling for a while now.
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The Linux Users Victoria (LUV) beginners workshop will include something extra when it is held on March 20 — games on Linux.
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Now French company Stonetrip has announced its ShiVa3D technology, which was previously limited to web, PC, Mac, Linux and iPhone, now supports Android.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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The KOffice team is happy to announce the first beta of the upcoming 2.2 release of KOffice. This release brings back Kexi, the data management application similar to MS Access. The new beta also offers many new features and improvements, bug fixes, and improved support for Microsoft file formats.
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The KOffice team is happy to announce the first beta of the upcoming 2.2 release of KOffice. This release brings back Kexi, the data management application similar to MS Access. The new beta also offers many new features and improvements, for example improved support for Microsoft file formats with the addition of import filters for MS OOXML, and bug fixes.
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Strange na but its reality KDE 4.3.4 is lighter than Gnome 2.28.I am going to prove it.On my machine Linux Mint 8 KDE 4.3.4 use only 135 to 160MB Ram while Windows XP 240MB and Gnome take around 210MB. While windows fastest edition Windows 7 uses more than 450MB RAM.Don’t believe that KDE 4.3.4 uses 145MB Ram,Lets have a look below.
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There were two main problems with the Lancelot Part applet.
The first was the name. The name, although it does represent what the applet is technically, it doesn’t really say what the applet is meant for and what it does.
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GNOME Desktop
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In light of the last post and this post from a day or two ago, I suppose it’s worth mentioning (or showing) that a simplified Gnome desktop is possible in Ubuntu too. But in showing it, I will probably be underscoring a few other issues that I have grazed in the past.
[...]
Beyond that it’s quite slender, and you’re in a good position to build upward. If you have a preference for certain parts of what Ubuntu delivers, but an extreme distate for anything else, I would recommend starting with gnome-core.
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Of course we already have ClamAV and in terms of the scanner interface and incremental updates both appear quite similar; however, I am not aware of a ClamAV live CD. On top of this, security-conscious people do not like to put all their eggs in one basket and it is recommended in some settings, even at home, to periodically scan and re-check with different products. I have had anti-virus software in the past detect Trojans that another (free) one did not detect. This was on a different operating system, but you don’t have to use this rescue CD exclusively on your UNIX/Linux systems.
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New Releases
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SystemRescueCd Logo The SystemRescueCd developers have announced the availability of version 1.5.0 of their Linux distribution that’s configured as a tool kit for administering or repairing an operating system and recovering data after a system crash. The SystemRescueCd is based on the Gentoo LiveCD and the kernel supports a wide variety of file systems including Ext2, Ext3 and Ext4, ReiserFS, XFS, JFS, VFAT, NTFS, ISO9660 and Btrfs.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the launch of JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 5.0. with enhanced functionality to update its JBoss Enterprise Middleware portfolio. JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 5.0 is a comprehensive platform designed to integrate applications, services, transactions and business process components into an architecture for automating business and IT processes.
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Fedora
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Fedora’s old way was to stop development at a certain point in Rawhide (the name of the development branch), stabilise, release, and then pick up development again. This meant that uploads to the development branch would have to cease until the release process was over.
Fedora’s new method is to split off the development branch at the point when it is deemed fit for stabilising and releasing. This is then released as the next Fedora release. Development on Rawhide continues apace.
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Debian Family
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MY fondness for CrunchBang Linux is well documented, so when the release of the first alpha version of the next generation of this fine UK-based distribution was announced I was excited, to say the least.
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MEPIS has now made available the third release candidate of its upcoming Linux-based operating system, SimplyMEPIS 8.5 RC 3. The new release comes with several updates, both upgraded packages and fresh features, and is available for 32-bit, as well as 64-bit platforms. There is no clear time frame for the final release but this is the last release candidate version and SimplyMEPIS 8.5 should be coming in a week or two.
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Ubuntu
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First there was news that Yahoo would be the default search engine in Ubuntu, then we heard about the move to a closed source Single Sign on Service built on OpenID, now we find out that the Ubuntu Music Store will be sacrificing the open-source ogg-theora format for proprietary MP3. Is Ubuntu drifting away from the Open-Source movement?
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Why Ubuntu? Well mostly because I took a chunk out of Ubuntu a few days ago when I complained about the weight of the Gnome desktop in Karmic, and I’m still feeling a little guilty about that. And also because I still see random notes here and there about how the button location in Lucid is a dealbreaker 
and it’s clear that a lot of people haven’t cued in on how simple (dreadfully simple) it is to get your own system built in Ubuntu.
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Yes there needed to be change in the way Ubuntu looked from the factory, but the change should have added to the uniqueness of it, not cause people to actually have to think twice to know that Ubuntu is not Mac OS. Change is good, but a unique form of change is even better. What do you think?
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Spring is in the air! The trees are budding and the flowers are starting to come out of their slumber. It also means that it is time for another release of the desktop oriented Ubuntu Linux.
Ubuntu will frequently produce what is called a LTS or a Long Term Support release. That means unlike non LTS releases, this version is meant to be stable and to also have security updates and fixes for the next three years. A release like this is meant for those who want to install something that will be somewhat guaranteed to work for the next 3 years. The previous LTS, Ubuntu 8.04 codenamed “Hardy Heron” was released in 2008.
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Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #185 for the week March 14th – March 20th, 2010. In this issue we cover: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Beta 1 released, Ubuntu Global Jam: time is ticking, Call for Community help: Ubuntu.com Website Localization Project, Launchpad’s Bug Watch system and other animals, Upgrade Jams – made easy, Server Bug Zapping – eucalyptus and euca2ools, Nominate your favorite Ubuntu Server Papercuts, Full Circle Podcast #2: The Full Circle of Light (Brown), and much, much more!
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For anyone who doesn’t know by now, Ubuntu has decided to ditch their world famous brown “human” suit in order to look more like a washed out version of Mac. Ever since Ubuntu came on the scene, it has sported a brown theme. Many people have poked fun or just flat out hated it. I read a comment about how Ubuntu looked like something off a “pumpkin pie box” for instance.
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It would be icing on some tasty cake if this tool could be made to work for Windows users. If that can be pulled off, or there’s a similar tool, do let us know in the comments. In the meantime, it’s a free download for Ubuntu users, who can install it by running the command sudo add-apt-repository ppa:testdrive/ppa, then reloading their sources and installing the testdrive package.
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If you give Ubuntu 10.04 a go as a live CD, virtual machine, or on your hard drive, tell us what’s new and exciting, and what’s just goofy, in the comments. If you’re an Ubuntu user who doesn’t want the fuss of setting up a test run, consider using TestDrive for a super-simple VirtualBox try-out.
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New Pogo Linux servers and workstations built with the new Intel Xeon processor, automatically shift the CPU and memory into the lowest available power state at any given time. In addition to integrated power gates for increased energy savings, Pogo Linux Intel Xeon 5600 systems automatically regulate power consumption and adjust system performance to meet application and user-environments needs.
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Datalight announces support for Linux kernel versions up to 2.6.29 with new versions of FlashFX Tera, the file-system independent flash memory manager and Reliance Nitro, the highly-reliable, high-performance file system.
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E-Readers
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This is the idea behind the Worldreader project, which has just put 20 Kindles into a school of 11 to 14-year-olds. I know what you’re thinking: What’s wrong with paper books? Why do they need this expensive, fancy gadgetry? Because paper books take a long time to replace. These schools are on a 5-year book-renewal cycle right now. A Kindle, although pricy to start, essentially gives access to thousands of free, public domain books.
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A Berlin-based software company is preparing an Intel Atom N450-based e-reader that runs Linux with Android extensions. Billed as the “tablet PC for publishing houses,” Neofonie GmbH’s “WePad” tablet sports an 11.6-inch touchscreen, 16GB of flash storage, a SD card, WiFi, Bluetooth, USB, and a webcam, says Neofonie.
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Spring Design’s Alex eReader is one of those products that probably would have gotten a lot more attention had it managed to come out before Apple’s iPad. However, as it stands, the $399 Android-powered device, which features both a 6-inch e-ink display and a 3.5-inch, 16-bit color touch-screen LCD, is scheduled to ship in the middle of April and threatens to get overshadowed by the iPad’s arrival on April 3.
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Phones
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Nokia
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The Nokia N900 may have been designed as an open-source tablet allowing you to make the most of the Linux-based OS for high-end tasks on the go. However, it also happens to be a pretty awesome gaming machine in its own right. Check out our guide to the Top 20 free games Nokia N900 games of all time…
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Android
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Not quite three weeks ago, I made a request in this column for “reasons for root” — business arguments why a device manufacturer should be willing, perhaps even interested, to allow replacement firmware and/or root access on their devices. That post received a number of comments, as did a tweet and a thread on the [android-discuss] Google Group.
[...]
Obviously, this report does not include every possible argument, specifically trying to stay away from emotional or ethical points and sticking to business and financial ones. I am sure there are more ideas and arguments to be made, so I expect this report to be a “living document”, republished periodically, gaining strength each time.
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Speaking to a member of the DailyTech team, a member of Verizon confirmed that the provider will be offering the phone just two weeks from now.
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Tablets
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With so many concept Android tablets floating around lately we were inclined to just ignore this one — until we learned two particularly interesting aspects: it starts at $155, and it’s actually shipping now. It’s the zenPad from Enso, a five-inch, 800 x 480 Android 1.6 tablet with 8GB of storage (on a replaceable microSD) that, for an additional $25, comes with GPS.
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Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, recently spoke about large screen Android Tablets at the Abu Dhabi Media Summit keynote (at timecode 10 minutes and 39 seconds). It’s a nice way of Eric Schmidt to indirectly confirm that Google is definitely going to support the development of Android based Tablets as alternatives on the market to the upcoming iPad.
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Though skipfish performs the same functions as other open-source scanning tools like Nikto and Nessus, Google engineer Michal Zalewski argues that skipfish has a several advantages.
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We’re happy to promote this one – a SHARE SIG on-line event. The organisation’s slogan is ‘Improving European Embedded System Industry through Open Source SW Sharing’.
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Health
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Auckland health shared services unit HealthAlliance has resuscitated efforts to develop a standard desktop based on open-source software, but CIO Phil Brimacombe says it looks as though the District Health Boards will never be able to divorce their desktops entirely from Microsoft.
First mooted in 2005, the open-source desktop idea, seen as potentially relevant for all DHBs, was “put into mothballs” in 2009, owing to many higher-priority projects, Brimacombe says.
[...]
“There’s no way we could be Microsoft-free,” says Brimacombe, “but we expect a hybrid solution will still lower our total cost of ownership.”
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To get that money, however, hospitals have to meet certain criteria drafted by the federal government. Since Medsphere’s e-health software is free — so-called open-source software that you could download from home — the firm is hoping to turn a profit by helping hospitals set up e-records and meet those federal requirements. They developed the calculator as a marketing tool to show potential clients that much of their fees are offset by the stimulus cash.
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Asia
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Designed by the Open Source Competency Centre under MAMPU, this application makes it possible for stakeholders to track the status of decisions and action items.
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Free Software is not just about writing GNU/Linux software or choosing one technology over the other.
Taking forward the ideology of Free Software — that includes free knowledge, science and digital societies in its ambit — delegates at the National Free Software conference announced the formation of a national coalition, the National Free Software Movement of India.
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Media
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For Google Chrome on Windows and Linux Only: The Chrome Radio extension for Google Chrome makes it much easier to playback online radio streams right inside the browser. The extension is very nifty, streamlined and fits smoothly in the browser without interfering with the user’s browsing experience.
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The billions of Dollars of the recording industry versus your dozens of Dollars will always mean ground breaking fines and terms of imprisonment should you fall foul of their rules. If you are a music lover and want to enjoy music without looking over your shoulders at all times, then the following 5 Open music sharing sites should be of interest to you.
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Another interesting question is if the stores will offer the same titles.I can see exclusive arrangements with each service and consumers will have both services in order to get songs they want.It will also be interesting if the Ubuntu Music Store can be used outside of Linux.
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SaaS
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Drizzle is currently being developed by many of the same people who originally developed MySQL, but this project is decidedly more robust in terms of performance, which Bryce said makes it ideally suited for the cloud.
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Earlier this week, IBM announced a cloud computing program offering development and test services for companies and governments. That doesn’t sound like much, yet on closer inspection it’s a flagstone in the march toward a comprehensive cloud offering at Big Blue. It also demonstrates how operational efficiency is a competitive weapon in our service economy. Let me explain.
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As today’s fast-paced IT industry changes, with the development and growth of virtualized infrastructure and cloud computing, both open-source network and cloud-based monitoring tools are attracting growing interest.
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CMS
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A few panels at SXSWi gave rather convincing evidence this has become the norm, not the exception.
It wasn’t any surprise that speakers at the Friday panel, “Selling Your Milk When the Cow is Free,” were in the open source corner. After all, the moderator was Jeff Eaton, software architect for Lullabot Consulting and a core developer for the Drupal project. Panelists were Brad Fitzpatrick, creator of LiveJournal; Evan Prodromou, founder/CEO of StatusNet Inc, the Open Source microblogging company; Eric Gundersen, president/co-founder of Development Seed; and Tiffany Farriss, president of Palantir.net Inc. and member of the Drupal Association Board of Directors.
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The Panthers site is hosted on a Linux system, so it took me a little while to remember all of my Linux/Unix stuff, but within a day or two I was cruising. I updated the Word Press install and installed the automatic update plug in for future updates. I also installed a bunch of other plug ins that bring all kinds of functionality to your blog. There are literally 100′s if not thousands of plug ins that let Word Press do virtually whatever you want.
I love the dashboard and control panel for Word Press. Many of the plug ins have their own configuration screens that you can access and you can use the widget page to arrange your side bars.
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Business
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National hardware chain Mitre 10 implemented a business intelligence system in eight weeks to centralise its reporting while maintaining compatibility with existing spreadsheets.
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You’ve probably seen a commercial at some point with some guy throwing money in the air, declaring his intent to “Save you money!” Of course, the deal invariably required that you pay money to “save” money, which makes marginal sense at best. Still, this perennial exuberant exclamation has served as a regular reminder of the natural human desire to pay less than retail price (whatever that means).
Saving money these days carries vastly more weight than it has in previous years – and that trend will surely continue throughout 2010, one way or another. The reason is simply because lots of money really did just disappear, and new money will take time to infiltrate the system (read: your pocket). So, what’s an information manager to do in the meantime?
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This is where standards really shine, and what master data management is all about. By employing standards at the semantic level, with a corporate taxonomy, for example, a company can manage its metadata in a most meaningful way, and that will make for much happier – and less expensive – times down the road when new systems come online.
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“An open source, truly integrated solution for market data distribution is long overdue. NYSE Euronext is pleased to join with Bloomberg in delivering this innovative, market-based approach to benefit our customers and the investing public,” said Larry Leibowitz, Chief Operating Officer, NYSE Euronext.
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Releases
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Release 7.1 of GDB, the GNU Debugger, is now available via anonymous FTP. GDB is a source-level debugger for Ada, C, C++, Objective-C, Pascal and many other languages. GDB can target (i.e., debug programs running on) more than a dozen different processor architectures, and GDB itself can run on most popular GNU/Linux, Unix and Microsoft Windows variants.
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After two years of development, the developer team at Würzburg, Germany based vendor Mayflower responsible for the PHProjekt project management software has released a completely rebuilt version 6 of PHProjekt under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). The latter allows developers to combine their own modules with PHProjekt and release them under a different licence.
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Government
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Civic problem got you frustrated? Mayor Sam Adams hopes you’ll build an app for that.
Adams announced the launch of CivicApps, an open source design contest to “showcase regional open data and promote collaboration between citizens and government to create applications … that address civic issues” to benefit the community at large.
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Openness
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OpenADR — the Berkeley Labs open source system for automating the way utilities do demand response — is already being used to control some 70 megawatts of capacity for big industrial and commercial customers of California’s biggest utilities. Could it expand its reach into homes and small businesses? Mary Ann Piette, research director at Berkeley Labs’ Demand Response Research Center, believes it can and mentioned a list of interested parties on Wednesday during a California Public Utilities Commission workshop in San Francisco.
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GoAhead Software said that it is shifting its business model and technology strategy from its SAFfire product to an open source software model. In conjuction with the move to open source, GoAhead has also acquired Avantellis from Emerson Network Power.
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Located in downtown Palo Alto, Open Source Digital Voting Foundation’s goal is to build a publicly owned digital elections system that is practical, secure, affordable and above reproach.
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Most of us don’t think about the cultural context of our washing machines–we just toss in clothes, turn on the device, and don’t ponder it further. But the reality is that the majority of people on the planet wash clothes by hand, mostly because of poverty and lack of available resources. Enter the Open Source Washing Machine Project, which rethinks the way we wash clothes based on economical, sociological, cultural and environmental conditions.
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The Open Source Washing Machine Project was created by students from the École Supérieure d’Art d’Aix-en-Provence of France. The project’s objective is to develop affordable alternative washing technologies based on the unique economic, climatic and cultural contexts of different countries.
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The Cochin University of Science and Technology(Cusat) will soon become a part of the Team India consortium for the Open Source Drug Discovery(OSDD) programme of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). The OSDD programme aims at developing modern medicines at cheaper rates and developing newer solutions for diagnosing diseases like TB which are responsible for more than 1,000 deaths a day in India.
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“A highlight of last month’s Greener Gadgets conference in New York was a cute, emerald-colored product designed by Yves Béhar of FuseProject that is aimed for citizens of the developing world who might never have dreamed of possessing such an object.
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Programming
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Today, embedded compilers handle C++ as well as C, and code size is improved even if that is less important in the new powerful 32-bit devices. The difference in size between compilers from different vendors is marginal on most cases, and the free GNU compiler is in many cases even better than some commercial compilers. Debuggers are better too, but it is still functions for execution of code and inspection of variable values that are in focus.
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Standards/Consortia
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“The world needs an open video standard which allows everyone to produce and share video, without licensing fees or browser plugins,” said Erik Moller, Deputy Director of the Wikimedia Foundation. “HTML5 offers such a standard, and we have partnered with Kaltura to develop an open source HTML5 video solution for Wikipedia. We encourage you to check it out, and to support open standards in your web applications.
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Security
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The next time someone tries to “friend” you on Facebook, it may turn out to be an undercover fed looking to examine your private messages and photos, or surveil your friends and family. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has obtained an internal Justice Department document that describes what law enforcement is doing on social networking sites.
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Parents representing about a quarter of the high school students in the suburban Philadelphia school district accused of spying on teenagers using their laptops’ cameras said they’re “outraged” by a lawsuit seeking monetary damages.
Meanwhile, Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) has scheduled a hearing on March 29 by the Judiciary subcommittee on crime and drugs, which he chairs, on the use of student-issued computers to allegedly spy on students in their homes.
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In a few weeks time, Bexley’s new CCTV control room will be up and running. LINDA PIPER has been taking a sneak preview.
AFTER signing a £7m 10-year contract with one of the world’s top technology companies to run the borough’s CCTV system, it is hardly surprising Bexley is pleased.
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Yet, in 2008 the government lost over 29 million personal records. Amongst the data lost were the details for 25 million child benefit claimants; the Ministry of Justice lost information affecting more than 45,000 people, in some cases revealing their criminal records and credit histories; and the Home Office lost the personal details of 3,000 seasonal agricultural workers – including their passport numbers – when two CDs went missing in the post.
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In a bid to catch motoring criminals trying to escape via the North and South Luzon Expressways (NLEX, SLEX), Metro Manila police have earmarked P10 million for a closed-circuit television (CCTV) system that can recognize vehicle license plates.
But Metro Manila police chief Director Roberto Rosales asked the management of NLEX and SLEX to provide counterpart funds for the ambitious project.
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In case of a car chase, chokepoints and checkpoints could immediately be established in case suspected vehicles are spotted around the jurisdiction of the monitored area.
“The monitoring system will not only help us document incidents of crime for purposes of presenting them as evidence in court but, will also enable us to immediately and appropriately respond to any crime incident that happens within NLEX and SLEX and adjoining thoroughfares,” Rosales said.
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Political activists have reacted with anger to revelations in last week’s Observer that their organisations were infiltrated by an elite undercover unit of the Metropolitan police.
Members of one of the groups demanded a public inquiry after the Observer disclosed that a former member of Special Branch, known as Officer A, had infiltrated far-left organisations in the mid-1990s to gather intelligence about potentially violent demonstrators. He was regularly involved in brutal confrontations with uniformed police officers and activists from the extreme right. On numerous occasions he engaged in violent acts to maintain his cover.
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Environment
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BALTIMORE — Microbes living under ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland could be churning out large quantities of the greenhouse gas methane, a new study suggests.
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Terapii Williams from the Cook Islands has come to Prunerov to support this action. He warned: “Pacific nations are endangered by rising sea levels and rising sea temperatures. Our homes are threatened and the marine ecosystems on which we depend are being damaged. The very existence of whole nations and cultures is at stake. If industrialised countries like the Czech Republic continue to fuel climate change, we are doomed.”
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Finance
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A Bernard Madoff victim who lost $15 million is suing Goldman Sachs for allegedly failing to tell him in 2004 that it had put a taboo on the Madoff Fund and that he should pull his money out.
Retired businessman Jerome Goodman, 69, of Hardwick, N.J., claims in his suit in federal court in Newark, N.J., that “Goldman Sachs implemented an internal ban on investment with the Madoff Fund in or around 1999, after Goldman Sachs conducted or attempted to conduct satisfactory due diligence into the Madoff Fund.”
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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But Thomas is no ordinary activist. She is the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and she has launched a tea-party-linked group that could test the traditional notions of political impartiality for the court.
In January, Virginia Thomas created Liberty Central Inc., a nonprofit lobbying group whose website will organize activism around a set of conservative “core principles,” she said.
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A new study published in the March issue of Environmental Health Perspectives finds that phthalates (pronounced “THA-lates”), chemicals used to make plastics flexible and artificial fragrances linger, could have an effect on brain function in children who have been exposed to them. These phthalate plasticizers, are being eliminated from children’s products in this country due to health concerns. But they’re still present in many products children are exposed to on a daily basis, including countless home, medical, and personal-care products, as well as cleaning supplies used in schools
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A group of MPs, including former ministers, have been targeted in an elaborate sting operation in which journalists set up a bogus lobbying company and offered to pay them in return for political influence.
Among the politicians approached was Stephen Byers, the former cabinet minister and arch-Blairite, who was filmed describing himself as a “bit like a sort of cab for hire”. He offered to trade Westminster contacts for £3,000 to £5,000 a day.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Kevin Rudd’s plans to crack down on Internet content appear to have drawn the attention of no less than the Chinese Government. The website of the State Council Information Office recently featured an article (Google translation here) on Rudd’s endorsement of an “online ombudsman” to deal with inappropriate Internet content and discusses the upcoming mandatory filtering legislation.
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A California appeals court ruled this week that threatening posts made by readers of a website are not protected free speech, allowing a case charging the posters with hate crimes and defamation to proceed.
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Earlier this week, reader Jorvay sent over the news of how food giant Nestle had massively overreacted to an (admittedly disgusting) anti-Nestle video put together by Greenpeace and posted to YouTube. The thing was, this video was getting no attention. It had less than 1,000 views… but someone who should have known better at Nestle filed a bogus copyright claim to take down the video.
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A global game of Whack-a-Mole broke out Wednesday on the Internet when YouTube removed a gruesome anti-Nestlé commercial by Greenpeace after the multinational food giant complained, only to have viewers flock to the video-sharing site Vimeo.com, where the spot became an instant cause célèbre because of the reputed censorship.
The 60-second video depicts a bored office worker enjoying a Kit Kat, which rather than being the popular chocolate-hazelnut ladyfinger-style confection, appears to be a chocolate-covered ape finger. As he munches on the treat, it oozes blood over his chin and across his keyboard, shocking his co-workers. “Have a break?” reads the on-screen text. “Give the orangu-tan a break.”
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Like our colleague Alison Frankel at The Am Law Litigation Daily, we had not before heard of the “hot news” tort that places some limits on the publication of information, even if that information is already in the public domain in some form. That’s the tort three banks represented by Weil, Gotshal & Manges used to win an injunction against the breaking Wall Street news site Theflyonthewall.com, according to The Am Law Litigation Daily. The banks claimed Fly’s practice of publishing pieces of research reports almost instantly undercut their work by making key nuggets meant for exclusive client use available to a wider audience immediately. Why would clients pay big money those reports–which themselves cost the banks money to produce–if Fly was going to publish the important stuff right away?
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Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights
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Uh, perhaps because the market is shrinking because people find it too expensive otherwise. Either way, this move seems like way too little, way too late. Doing this in the late 90s might have been a start, but this isn’t going to get people who have stopped buying CDs back into a plastic disc fix.
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The Recording Industry Association of America announced Tuesday that the combined revenue brought in by Warner, Sony, EMI, Universal, and countless independent music labels in 2009 totaled $18. “The music industry is back,” RIAA representative Doug Fowley said. “Not only was Kenny Chesney’s Greatest Hits CD purchased at a Knoxville, TN Borders for $12.99, but we also had two songs downloaded through iTunes, and our ringtone sales reached three.” Fowley added that as long as no one returns or exchanges the CD, the music industry would continue to be a vital and creative force in American culture.
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THE HIGH Court has asked the European Court of Justice to decide legal issues raised in proceedings brought in an effort to have hotel operators pay a charge for playing copyright music in guest bedrooms.
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In the past 10 to 15 years, music has gone from a finite good available only in physical form from various brick and mortar retailers to an infinite good readily available for legal purchase and illegal download on the internet. As I write this post, I’m listening to music on an iPhone, a device smaller than a deck of cards, which holds approximately 8 GB of music that has been ripped from CDs, purchased from iTunes, and downloaded from the internet. Music’s relatively new status as an infinite good has led to an intense debate between the music industry and consumers. How far may the recording industry limit consumers’ free speech rights to hear and disseminate recorded works in the interest of protecting copyright? The ACLU event that I attended was led by staff attorney Sara Rose, and was an attempt to facilitate a discussion on this inherent conflict between copyright and free speech. However, it became clear that many of the audience members lacked an understanding of the basic economic, ethical, and technological issues impacting the music industry in the 21st century.
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The Tribune Co. bankruptcy keeps producing juicy legal storylines: a bench smackdown of Sidley Austin’s proposed $1,100 per hour rates, a debate over expensive fee examiners, a cameo from Warren Beatty and, most central to the case, a possible lawsuit against the banks that engineered the leveraged buyout that ruined Tribune.
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Just last week, we were talking about how UK firm ACS:Law, who has been condemned by UK politicians and ISPs, was still pushing forward with its efforts to send out tens of thousands of threatening “pre-settlement” letters. These letters attempt to scare recipients into paying up to avoid a potential (though rarely filed) lawsuit claiming copyright infringement, based on quite weak evidence (an IP address collected by DigiProtect after DigiProtect purposely puts a file online). The whole thing has been called a “scam” by Lord Lucas in the UK, and lawyers at the firm that initiated this practice, Davenport Lyons (and who apparently provided ACS:Law with its original documents) were recently referred to a disciplinary committee by the Solicitors Regulation Authority.
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Of course, in theory, ACS:Law could push forward against Slyck anyway, and could potentially win in the UK. But given the mass scorn being heaped upon ACS:Law right now in the UK, combined with a recent push in the UK to rewrite defamation laws to prevent these sorts of questionable lawsuits, if ACS:Law does decide to push forward, it may find that the backlash is a lot more damaging than some anonymous person in a forum calling its plan a wank plan.
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Today, plagiarism is an honor code offense, not a violation of law, and this seems to be quite adequate. The defense against plagiarism accusations is simple, though: simply identify your sources. This informal attribution requirement hardly needs enforcement.
Formal attribution requirements do carry a burden though, of transactional costs involved in tracking the information and meeting the notice requirements. In this way, they are similar to the BSD advertising clause that the GNU project objected to. So, I think it is reasonable to have time limits to the formal requirements of attribution, exactly as for copyleft terms.
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For years, we’ve heard complaints about using the term “piracy” to describe the online copyright infringement—but most have come from Big Content’s critics.
As noted copyright scholar William Patry argued in his most recent book, “To say that X is a pirate is a metaphoric heuristic, intended to persuade a policymaker that the in-depth analysis can be skipped and the desired result immediately attained… Claims of piracy are rhetorical nonsense.”
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ACTA/Digital Economy Bill
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While one of ACTA’s biggest supporters, Rep. Howard Berman, is now pushing for laws to stop companies aiding in China’s censorship, he might want to consider that a better plan would be to back down on ACTA. If ACTA passes, it seems quite likely that China would then use it as justification for its own “great firewall” censorship program. Already, we’re seeing that China is looking to use plans for internet filters in Australia to its own advantage by comparing that system to its own — and you can bet China would be thrilled to be able to use a US-backed concept to support its continued censorship.
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KEI has access to yet undisclosed sections of the negotiating ACTA text. The text is organized in 6 chapters. The longest is Chapter 2 on “legal framework for enforcement of intellectual property rights.” The second longest is Chapter 5, on “Institutional Arrangements.” In ten pages of text, the ACTA negotiators have set out a plan to create a new institution to administer, implement and modify ACTA. ACTA is seen as playing an important role that will rival in some ways the WIPO or WTO.
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New ACTA leaks have emerged this week that fill in the blanks about the remainder of the still-secret treaty. While earlier leaks provided extensive detail on the Internet and civil enforcement chapters, these latest leaks shed new light into the criminal enforcement section, the chapter on ACTA institutional issues, and international cooperation.
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There’s a race on, and no it’s not the Cheltenham festival. Should the election be held on the 6th of May as is expected then parliament will be duly dissolved around the 6th of April, which leaves only 10 days of parliamentary time to debate all the remaining laws trying to be passed. It is this reason that when the Lords finally passed the Digital Economy Bill on the 15th of March they spent a significant portion of time discussing the issue of the “wash-up”, or a (relatively) clandestine period of legislative discussion that occurs in the twilight between an announcement of an election being made, and parliament being closed down for the impending election.
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The Digital Economy Bill is a step back for all of us, and another shot in the foot for our very democracy; a heavy handed approach to a relatively small issue. So again, if you haven’t done so please write to your MP and let them know you simply want them to do their duty in representing you and protecting you against hastily crafted law that isn’t in your best interests. If we’re lucky then we may make sure that it is only the few uncontroversial parts of this law that make it on to the books.
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We’ve teamed up with Open Rights Group to make it easy for you to write to your MP urging them to stop the Government rushing the bill through. It’ll take you less than 2 minutes. Just enter your postcode above (so we can find your MP) and click “participate” to get started.
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Just as it considers kicking people offline via the Digital Economy Bill, it looks like the UK is getting set to move all sorts of government services online — giving every UK citizen a unique webpage, where they can access all sorts of personalized gov’t services.
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A group of senior public figures have called on the government to abandon its plan to push through controversial digital economy bill before the election, amid claims that the move could “sidestep” the democratic process.
Earlier this week the government revealed that it wants to force the digital economy bill – which includes the controversial “three strikes” rule to cut off the internet connections of those accused of illegal file sharing – into the statute books in the next few weeks.
Scottish Parliamentarian Patrick Harvey_05 (2004)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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Send this to a friend
03.21.10
Posted in News Roundup at 5:04 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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But I think the real goal is not to enable us little birds to do great things like we can do with our standalone Linux apps, like create professional-quality music, photographs, publishing, drawings, programming, make movies, and what-have-you. We’re not supposed to do anything but open our little beaks and consume whatever they see fit to serve us. Which is such a waste when we have all this great technology at our fingertips. No thanks, I’ll keep my Linux Shopsmith.
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The next thing that I wanted to do is copy the video to my computer. This is where I was concerned. As you know I use Linux and according to the Flip web site (here) this little beast only supports windows and MacOS. Not one to shirk at a challenge I decided to plug it in to my Linux (Gentoo) and see what would happen.
I am sorry to say that it was not a challenge at all. The Flip was instantly recognized by my computer and I could browse its memory at will. Apart from the programs to install the windows and MacOS software the videos were stored in the same directory format as normal digital cameras. I simply navigated to where the videos were stored and double clicked on a video to play it directly from the camera.
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Kernel Space
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Well, that didn’t take long. Just earlier this month the Khronos Group unveiled the OpenGL 4.0 specification that brought many long-awaited changed to this open graphics API. On the same day this industry consortium also released the OpenGL 3.3 specification, which aims to bring back as much of the OpenGL 4.0 functionality to graphics cards that only support OGL3. OpenGL 4.0 is designed for graphics cards that are meant for DirectX 11.0, which basically means AMD’s Radeon HD 5000 series and NVIDIA’s forthcoming GeForce 400 series. OpenGL 3.x on the other-hand is compatible with DirectX 10.0 grade hardware, such as the Radeon HD 4000 series and GeForce 200 series. For those with a newer NVIDIA graphics card, you can now run OpenGL 3.3 applications or games as they have just released a supported driver.
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Applications
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Due to some idle time* a couple of weeks ago, here’s a quick comparison between a few network control tools for Linux.
These tools all give you some sort of network control from the Desktop – a service traditionally provided by daemons and initialisation scripts. The problem with that is roaming – it’s much more common nowadays to have a laptop travel between multiple access points (Ethernet, 802.11, wireless broadband…) and many of the tasks can be automated. So what better way to use a point-and-click approach.
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RedNotebook is a graphical diary and journal helping you keep track of notes and thoughts. It includes calendar navigation, customizable templates, export functionality and word clouds. You also can format, tag and search your entries.
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Monitor ES basically helps computer users save money (and the environment) by reducing the amount of energy their computer systems consumes.
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I am sure most of the people out there are having trouble with their monitor going to sleep or in screen saver mode while they are watching movies or flash videos on sites like hulu.
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Instructionals
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In a recent article (“Greenie Linux: A distribution for all users“) I mentioned a tool (used in Greenie Linux) called Ubuntu Tweak. This tool allows the user to make certain tweaks to your Ubuntu desktop that aren’t readily available in the default Ubuntu desktop. This tool allows you to make both desktop and system configurations – all in one easy to use application. Ubuntu Tweak is an open source application (licensed under the GPL) that is ready for you to use and enjoy.
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Games
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Two days ago they released a new build (0.2.2.0) that now has an experimental support for GNU/Linux 64-bit !
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Announcing Hacker Evolution: Untold for Linux, a new hacking simulation game from exosyphen studios
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Been trying to solve this one for ages – get Quake 2 to run at a custom resolution of 1024 x 600 on my Ubuntu Linux Netbook.
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Desktop Environments
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LXDE Foundation has been accepted as a mentoring organisation for the Google Summer of Code.
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Guarding against inaccurate content, spam, biased material, and unverifiable entries is admirable. The relentless pursuit of deleting content because someone unfamiliar with a topic decides that it’s not “notable” enough is not. The fact that this continues to be a problem even for a project like dwm demonstrates that Wikipedia is still not working well. While the site certainly provides a valuable resource, some portion of its community is ensuring that it is not as valuable as it could be.
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This week was the week of Solutions Linux 2010. A 3-day exhibition held in Paris, gathering companies, LUG and other associations. As always, KDE France was here.
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Wow! Can you believe it? ArchBang website? Really? Thanks to Will and Mike it was possible so fast! A Big thanks to loki for the artwork!
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ALT Linux ( ALT implies ALT Linux Team ) is one of those undiscovered and non-famous Linux distribution from Russia which lacks the “Pomp, glamour and glory” like other mainstream distributions partly because the development team of ALT Linux love to work in shadows and do not consider it important to publically project and advertise their work and also because people outside Russia are not either aware of or interested in what this distribution is about. But this does not undermine the work this team is doing , they are quitely and persistently working on a project which stands proudly on its work. This is a Russian spirit of all times !
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Fedora
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1) Fedora offers the freedom of changing, replacing, modifying each component in the system;
without the concern of the system stability being affected.
2) Fedora has High quality support in the form of User forums, IRCs, Wikis and Official guides.
3) Fedora can be carried on CD or a jumpdrive to use Live on any computer.
4) Fedora provides a set of graphical tools for building a customized, updated Fedora “Spin”.
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Debian Family
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Using the N900 has been an incredible experience. In the two weeks that I’ve had it I feel I’ve barely scratched the surface of what it can do. Though it clearly trumps my N86 in so many way I’m not sure if the N900 could replace because (1) it’s not the type of device you can whip out of a pocket and quickly interact with, and (2) the only available option for a compatible 3G network in Canada has been a colossal disappointment. More on that next week.
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Philip Newborough has announced the development release (Alpha 1) version of CrunchBang Linux 10 code-named “Statler” just moments after the release of Ubuntu 10.04 “Lucid Lynx” Beta 1. For the first time ever, the distro is being built using Debian sources, instead of Ubuntu.
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Ubuntu
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Between Canonical’s web-based syncing service Ubuntu One – unveiled last year – the coming U1 music store, and the new Me Menu, Lucid Lynx is looking less like the stoic Linux desktops of yesteryear and more like like, well, what everyday consumers want in an operating system.
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What’s new in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Beta 1? Well, as everybody already knows… Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Beta 1 has a brand-new look, composed of two new themes (Ambiance and Radiance), one is dark and the other one is light. Click the link above to access a very nice article we created last week, to showcase the new themes, logos, font, boot splash and boot prompt. However, after installing the proprietary Nvidia video drivers, the boot splash screen has been changed to what you see below…
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Canonical has announced the availability of the first Ubuntu 10.04 beta release. The new version of Ubuntu, codenamed Lucid Lynx, is scheduled to arrive in April. It will be a long-term support (LTS) release, which means that updates will be available for three years on the desktop and five years on servers.
Although the Ubuntu developers have largely focused on boosting stability for this release, they have also added a number of noteworthy new features and applications. One of the most visible changes is the introduction of a new theme—a change that is part of a broader rebranding initiative that aims to update Ubuntu’s visual identity.
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Alpha 3 of Kubuntu features the new KDE SC 4.4. For more information about new features in Kubuntu, see https://wiki.kubuntu.org/LucidLynx/Alpha3/Kubuntu.
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The forthcoming version of Ubuntu Linux, Lucid Lynx, has just gone beta, and it’s going to be the most important Ubuntu release in years. I say that not just because it brings numerous important changes to this most popular of Linux distributions, but because Ubuntu 10.04 is the next LTS (Long Term Support) edition and, as such, is going to be supported for paying desktop customers for three years and for corporate server users for five years. In other words, this is the edition that’s going to make or break Ubuntu’s parent company Canonical’s business future.
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The forthcoming Ubuntu release, Lucid Lynx, has a lot of good things going for it but one little change is causing a great deal of angst among users. That change is the switching of the window buttons that enable one to close, maximise or minimise a window from the right to the left.
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Martin Owens makes a comment that Ubuntu is not really a meritocracy. Is that true? Is Ubuntu really democratic? Really meritocratic? Actually a dictatorship (as Mark Shuttleworth’s “SABDFL” title implies)? Does it matter? Which is better for Ubuntu in the long run.
I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with being a dictatorship, as long as the leader is good. The Linux kernel is a reasonable example. OS X might be, too, depending on your stance on Free Software.
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If too many people start doing that, Mark Shuttleworth has two options. Either he creates the perfect distribution for Mark Shuttleworth or he starts asking himself the right questions. A customer lost take twice the effort to reel in than a new one. He’s making money with that, I suppose. I’m not. I only got my vanity to consider..
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If you have been playing around much with the Alpha releases of Ubuntu Lucid Lynx you may have noticed something special that was announced some time ago is actually coming to fruition. Announced soon after the release of 9.10, the Ubuntu Music Store is a new addition to the Ubuntu Linux desktop and promises to extend the capabilities of the Linux desktop further than it has ever been.
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Download the Dropbox Linux client that suits your machine (either 32-bit or 64-bit)
Extract the contents of the downloaded archive to your home folder for easy access
Create a Dropbox account if you don’t already have one
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Variants
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Lubuntu beta 1 sees many improvements since the last Alpha release including a beta version of default file manager PCManFM, a new Plymouth theme and the addition of some new applications.
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The default theme (well, actually style) in Xubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Beta 1 is Albastross and the icons are Xubuntu Elementary (you can see these throughout all the screenshots in this post)…
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Android
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MOTOROLA’S LATEST Roi Android handset gets captured on film by the INQUIRER in an exclusive walk through. The Roi is the world’s first 8-megapixel Google OS powered mobile, which is capable of HD video capture that can also be displayed directly on an HD TV via its built in HDMI port.
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Since we launched Gesture Search on Android Market two weeks ago, I’ve seen quite a bit of feedback. For example, some of you have requested Gesture Search for earlier versions of Android, as well as access to it outside the US.
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Android will, at some point, move past the iPhone and into second place. It will take a large number of different handsets to accomplish this, so it’s safe to say that no single Android smartphone will be a legitimate “iPhone killer.”
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Google has released version 4.1 of Google Maps for Android, adding a constantly-updated map wallpaper, tweaking the way search results are displayed and adding a new Latitude widget for tracking your friends.
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Sub-notebooks
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The One Laptop per Child (OLPC) programme was launched in late 2008 with the aim of providing all primary school children in Rwanda with the important learning tool.
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Tablets
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According to this press release, Marvell is announcing the $99 Moby Tablet for Education. You’ve seen my video of Marvell’s 4.3″ Tablet prototype shown at CES based on the Marvell Armada 600 processor. The Moby tablet is based on the same Armada 600 platform but comes with a larger screen (probably 10″).
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What are some good practices for managing a successful project? “You need to keep an open mind while carefully listening to what others have to say,” advises Curtis Gedak. “Keeping your cool and remaining patient is also essential to understanding a perspective that might differ from your own. And remember to recognize the contributions of individuals, and to provide credit for accomplishments where credit is due.” Those words of wisdom – and some pretty useful software – have propelled the project Gedak manages, GParted, to a spot on the weekly Tops Downloads list on SourceForge.net. GParted’s latest release came out last week.
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7. Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). FOSS and the Internet have a symbiotic relationship. The Internet would not have been possible without FOSS. And the growth of FOSS relies on the Internet to power its peer production and distribution model. Over 270 million people use the Firefox browser. Half of the world’s Web sites, about 112 million, run on Apache Server. A quarter million websites, including this one, run on Drupal, a leading open source content management system.
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Earlier this week, IBM announced a cloud computing program offering development and test services for companies and governments. That doesn’t sound like much, yet on closer inspection it’s a flagstone in the march toward a comprehensive cloud offering at Big Blue. It also demonstrates how operational efficiency is a competitive weapon in our service economy. Let me explain.
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Open source has made its third big move on Wall Street with Bloomberg’s decision to open source its proprietary stock identifiers alongside NYSE-Euronext data streams.
I say third because Marketcetera’s open source trading platform, under the GPL, has been gold for almost a year. A SaaS version of Marketcetera for portfolio management was also released last year. (They must be working hard there — their latest blog post is dated November.)
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What will it take to get Americans to use IPv6 (define)?
For one thing, it will require broadband providers like Comcast (NASDAQ:CMCSA) to help users be fully enabled on IPv6 while still being able to access IPv4 content. That’s where the new open source Address Family Transition Router (AFTR) software comes into play.
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Mickos is staying in the open-source world but jumping on a newer computing trend — cloud computing. Eucalyptus makes an open-source software platform for building private clouds, or data centers in which workloads can be moved around across different systems to maximize efficiency.
The company’s software is used as the cloud platform for the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, a software package that includes Ubuntu’s open-source operating system. It is also designed to work smoothly with Amazon Web Services and other public cloud services.
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Mozilla. Red Hat. MySQL. The list of companies that have built lasting and successful businesses around open-source software is not a long one.
It’s early days still, but Lucid Imagination Inc. CEO Eric Gries may just have a shot at adding the name of his tiny startup, which offers open-source search software to business customers, to that list.
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A while back I announced the creation of a schedule for GIMP 2.8 development. I’ve made sure to keep this schedule up to date, and after a bunch of initial adjustments such as postponing some feature and adding others, the schedule has now stabilized a bit. The estimated date for a release candidate is still in December 2010. Tracking progress with a schedule really helps you to feel in control of development. The 2.4 development cycle which I were around in the end of, and the 2.6 development cycle which I were fully part of, were more chaotic with no commitment to a delivery date. This is perfectly fine for many, but I prefer structured development.
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Audiocasts
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This week Simon Phipps, formerly of Open Source Program Manager at Sun, drops in to chat.
Guest: Simon Phipps.
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OSBC
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Jason Cole, PhD, COO of Remote-Learner, is interested in opening content for education. He works with Moodle, a course management system designed to help educators to create quality online courses. He wants to see the course content be as open as possible.
Howard Dyckoff, news writer and correspondent, Linux Gazette, really likes to use open tools to brainstorm and gather ideas. He finds value in harnessing people’s passion to foster ideas, increase participation, and maintain engagement for some of the projects he’s involved with.
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Several days ago I posted the slides I used at the Open Source Business Conference in PDF form and also provided the SlideShare version. For those who want to see the contents of the slides directly, I’ve included most of it below.
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Browsers
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Google has launched a new project for Chrome that will let the browser run a wider range of 3D graphics content without downloading additional drivers.
The open-source project, called ANGLE (Almost Native Graphics Layer Engine), seeks to let Chromium run WebGL content on Windows computers, wrote product manager Henry Bridge on the Chromium blog.
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To help out the adoption of WebGL, the Khronos-backed API originally started by Mozilla that seeks to let web developers tap into modern graphics processors via the web-browser natively, has caused Google to get into the graphics driver game. WebGL binds to OpenGL ES 2.0, and with the Microsoft graphics drivers being more DirectX-optimized rather than OpenGL, Google’s playing to Microsoft. Google wants more users to be able to use WebGL, particularly when running the Chrome browser, so they have just announced the Almost Native Graphics Layer Engine. The objective of ANGLE is to just take the subset of the OpenGL ES API exposed by WebGL and to translate those extensions into their DirectX 9.0c equivalents.
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has dropped support for version 1.0 of its four-year-old internet app suite, SeaMonkey.
The open source browser maker pushed out a second iteration of SeaMonkey last autumn, so 1.0′s demise was all but inevitable.
Mozilla confirmed yesterday that its modern-day take on Netscape Communicator had moved on significantly enough since it first released the tool in January 2006 for its project developers to discontinue support for SeaMonkey 1.0.
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A Mozilla developer preview of Gecko 1.9.3 has been released. The release comes in the form of a nightly build of Firefox 3.7 alpha 3. The new build introduces several new features including an experimental Direct 2D for the Windows builds of Firefox, JavaScript api improvements, stability and security improvements as well as additional fixes for multi-process plugins.
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Oracle
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There’s a new version of Linux’s grandest office suite, but is it a major step forward or just another humdrum release with little to show? And most importantly, does it finally get the startup time down to an acceptable level? Read on for all the gory details…
Office suites lack glamour. They’re perfunctory, practical and prosaic. They remind us of real work, mundane chores and things that need to be done. But that’s also why they’re essential and why OpenOffice.org is a vital part of the free software ecosystem, whether it innovates or not.
OOo 3.2 is a step in the right direction. Firstly, it’s a lot faster. Version 3.2 of Writer launched more than 50% quicker than 3.1 in our tests, down to 3.4 seconds from around 7 with a fresh reboot. That alone makes a big difference, but the UI also seems to be more responsive. We used Writer exclusively over the last couple of weeks, and there’s an almost imperceptible improvement in the on-screen typing latency, which can really help if you create a lot of words.
[...]
Our verdict: Still the best, most comprehensive office suite available on Linux. 8/10
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CMS
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The annual DrupalCon conference is coming up, April 19th to 21st at San Francisco’s Moscone Center. Drupal, of course, is the increasingly popular open source content management system founded by Dries Buytaert, and OStatic itself runs on the platform. There will be many movers and shakers from the Drupal world at the conference, including representatives from The Commerce Guys, which helps companies and organizations deliver useful Drupal-based e-commerce sites and solutions.
In advance of the conference, we caught up with Ryan Szrama, a developer with The Commerce Guys, and the original developer of Ubercart, an open source e-commerce package. Here are some of his thoughts on where Drupal-based commerce is headed.
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Government
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Berners-Lee promotes data.gov.uk, the UK’s government data portal which launched in January. It aims to get developers interested in creating applications to make better use of the information collected by the government.
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Standards/Consortia
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HTML5 will standardize a lot of things that have been done “ad hoc” over the past ten years, and as such will build a solid base for the web to build on.
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Photographs by Newley Purnell of “red shirt” protestors in Thailand as they gather human blood and store it in large bottles, to pour on the ground in front of the prime minister’s residence in a shocking gesture of condemnation.
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The jobs the Haitians will get are only temporary, in any case. Haitian workers have been through all this before.
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President Nixon declared war on cancer in 1971 and, since then, the National Cancer Institute (part of the NIH) has funded research on prevention, surveillance, and treatments. But, despite the effort, progress has been elusive, leading to press reports in Newsweek, Fortune, and The New York Times suggesting that, at best, cancer is fighting us to a draw. But a new analysis of death rates, performed by staff at the American Cancer Society, indicates that cancer death rates peaked around 1990, and have been declining broadly since. As a result, they’re now below where they started in 1970.
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Science
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Big news from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) overnight. The titanic proton-punisher has once again smashed all records to achieve the most powerful particle beams ever generated by the human race, at energies of 3.5 Tera-electron-volts – the maximum redline power at which the mighty machine can currently be safely run.
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Security
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A total of 31m items will be packed and stacked, including 43,000 military vehicles, 600-odd helicopters, 120,000 containers and 34,000 tonnes of ammunition. Shipping out is estimated to take 240,000 truckloads and 119 shipping freighters.
The withdrawal will leave only 50,000 US troops in Iraq by 30 August, none of them in combat roles, and reduce the number of bases from 290 to fewer than 10. Even with the remaining US presence, the withdrawal will probably be perceived, in Iraq and elsewhere, as the final act of the war.
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The Terror War is not an event, or a campaign, or even a crusade; it is a system. Its purpose is not to eliminate “terrorism” (however this infinitely elastic term is defined) but to perpetuate itself, to do what it does: make war. This system can be immensely rewarding, in many different ways, for those who operate or assist it, whether in government, media, academia, or business. This too is a self-sustaining dynamic, a feedback loop that gives money, power and attention to those who serve the system; this elevated position then allows them to accrue even more money, power and attention, until in the end — as we can plainly see today — any alternative voices and viewpoints are relegated to the margins. They are “unserious.” They are unimportant. They are not allowed to penetrate or alter the operations of the system.
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Early terse reports are that the jury has returned a guilty verdict for Dr Peter Watts, a science fiction writer who was beaten at the US-Canada border when he got out of his car to ask why it was being searched, then charged with assault. Peter faces up to two years in prison. I’ve emailed him for comment and I hope that he’s appealing.
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Environment
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Japan, Canada and scores of developing nations opposed the measure on the grounds that ban would devastate fishing economies
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Crown estate and Scottish government name 10 wave and tide power installations around Orkney islands and Pentland Firth
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Tonight, Hilary Benn, the environment secretary, said the ban would have both financial and environmental benefits. It would cut greenhouse gas emissions from landfill sites and from manufacturing new products such as cans and bottles from virgin materials.
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The UK advertising industry has bravely decided it can continue to accept millions of pounds from the state to create alarming climate advertisements, despite inaccuracies and a storm of complaints from parents. The principled decision, from the admen’s self-regulatory body the ASA, follows 939 complaints about the UK energy ministry DECC’s “Drowning Dog” prime time TV and cinema ad (aka “Bedtime Story”) , which cost £6m, and four related posters.
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Finance
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Picture this: Soon, consumers will be depositing paper checks straight into their bank account by taking a couple of photos with a smartphone.
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A federal grand jury has indicted two computer programmers on fraud and conspiracy charges for developing programs used by Bernard Madoff to cook the books in his billion-dollar ponzi scheme.
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• Auditor Ernst & Young blamed for taking ‘virtually no action’
• Bank accused of laying off Matthew Lee in retaliation
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But, far from biding his time, Kaufman has emerged as one of the Senate’s fiercest critics of Wall Street and a champion of the need to push for a serious rebooting of our financial system.
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A federal judge rejected a decision this week by the Securities and Exchange Commission to relax one of several provisions put in place after the dot-com bubble to prevent collusion between investment bankers and analysts at Wall Street firms.
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A House committee requested that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke turn over documents related to Stephen Friedman’s purchase of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. shares while he was on the boards of both the Wall Street firm and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Friedman bought more than $1 million of Goldman Sachs stock “without notifying the Federal Reserve,” said Representative Edolphus Towns, chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, in a statement today. “This raises serious questions about transparency, fairness and the appearance of a cozy relationship between Wall Street and the government.”
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Economists at Goldman Sachs say if enacted, the health
reform package released in Congress yesterday should have little fiscal effect over the next 2-years, followed by modest restraint from 2012 to 2014.
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The loner with a glass eye, a medical degree and Asperger’s who makes millions betting against the subprime mortgage-bond market is just one of the unlikely heroes in Michael Lewis’s “The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine.
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Lewis is a gifted chronicler and debunker and demystifier of the world of finance. Twenty-odd years ago, in Liar’s Poker, he revealed the crucial story behind the junk bond debacle, turning it into something human-scale for those of us who don’t live and die by the pink sheets.
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As if looting Main Street of its savings, pensions, and that precious thing called trust weren’t enough, now Wall Street paints a target on our backs.
The unease begins with the title of the lead story in The New York Times: “Banks bet Greece defaults on debt they helped hide.” [Read here.]
Uh-oh, my instinct for survival alerts me: Sounds like double-dealing, an invitation to retaliation. I hope American banks aren’t involved. I read on and my fears of double-dealing and American involvement are soon confirmed: Banks — including notably the American mega-bank Goldman Sachs — that for the past decade helped Greece mask its spiraling debt with creative refinancing may now be pushing Greece “closer to the brink” by betting it will default. How? With credit default swaps, the instruments that “nearly toppled” AIG, the mega-insurance company. Why oh why, I wonder, aren’t these ruinous ‘instruments’ outlawed or at least very tightly regulated? Straining to keep its prose grey, the Times writes that these swaps “effectively let banks and hedge funds wager on the financial equivalent of a four-alarm fire.” Effectively? By now my hair effectively catches fire. The story goes on, “If Greece reneges on its debts, traders who own these swaps stand to profit.”
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A Bernard Madoff victim who lost $15 million is suing Goldman Sachs for allegedly failing to tell him in 2004 that he should pull his money out of the Madoff Fund.
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Ok, so a crowd-sourcing request. There’s a lot of coverage on the new Chris Dodd financial reform bill, and most of it is trying to find good things to say about the bill. Trying very hard in fact, with varying degrees of success.
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He received $862,000 in 2009, reflecting his decision to forgo a bonus for 2008, when the firm converted to a bank holding company and accepted $10 billion in government rescue funds.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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World Water Day 2010 is Monday, March 22nd. It is no surprise that corporations have attempted to co-opt this event. One example of greenwashing that SourceWatch has targeted is the Starbucks-run “www.worldwaterday.net,” which many environmentally-minded individuals may mistake for the official UN World Water Day website. Since SourceWatch first identified the misleading page, www.worldwaterday.net now routes viewers to www.waterday.org, where the Starbucks connection is not apparent. (A cached version of the original page’s privacy agreement can still be viewed here).
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* Replaced the word “capitalism” with “free-market system.”
[...]
* Demanded that McCarthyism be defended, because there were some actual communists who were discovered;
* Deleted founding father Thomas Jefferson “from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century,” and replaced him with conservative religious figures St. Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin, and also made changes that called into question the U.S. tradition of the “separation of church and state,” despite efforts of the Framers of the Constitution to ensure that no religious oaths were required by the Constitution among other protections from religious persecution or preferential treatment via the government.
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It’s unclear how close this brings Democrats to having the votes they need, but it appears they’re close. And, perhaps as importantly, it shows that Obama’s personal push has yielded results.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Agents taught how to extract information from social networking sites in US government document obtained by advocacy group
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Italian police successfully used Facebook to track down a Mafia suspect.
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Location services, like Foursquare and Gowalla, are a hot trend among some mobile device users, and are usually based on a check-in model. When you get to a restaurant, party, concert or museum you can choose to broadcast your location, using your smartphone’s GPS capabilities, to other network users as well as to your Twitter or Facebook feeds.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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We reported last week that Ubisoft’s latest anti-piracy measures caused a barrage of complaints. It was revealed that the system forced gamers to login via the publisher’s website in order to play and required users to have a constant Internet connection.
On behalf of Valve and 99.9 per cent of the gaming industry, Newell said he thought that DRM, in its current form, is restrictive and a damaging customer experience.
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Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights
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Copyright-dependent industries risk alienating the public and undermining intellectual property laws with their unregulated and aggressive tactics, according to an historian who has studied nearly 400 years of piracy and intellectual property law.
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Digital Economy Bill
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THE PEOPLE have the chance to rise up and crush the Digital Economy Bill before the UK Government grovels before the entertainment cartels.
Thanks to people power society 38 Degrees and the Open Rights Group, Internet users who object to the threat of disconnection can write to their MPs and prevent the Government from rushing the bill through.
Scottish Parliamentarian Patrick Harvey 04 (2004)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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03.19.10
Posted in News Roundup at 8:13 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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LiMux has a long-term agenda
Yes, LiMux has a long-term agenda. We could have switched to linux clients in just a few months, giving the order to all 21 IT units to set up a linux client until end of 2008. No further specifications, no standardization and no consolidation. I’m pretty sure they would have done this excellent and then I would have published great news in 2007 or 2008 “LiMux done, Munich completely on free software”. But if we would have done this we would have ignored this big opportunity for Munich’s IT as a whole. Quality over time! Not related to free software, but neccessary for cleaning up our IT.
We never ever will be happy slaves again
I won’t excuse me for being clever and adjusting the way to achieve better goals. Digital sustainability is a long-term effort and not only a matter of Linux vs Windows. It’s not a matter for or against Microsoft. There are many vendors trying to lock you in. We learned it and do our homework. We never ever will be happy slaves again. You, too?
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Since the end of last year, test runs have, says Schießl, shown that the Linux client can be fully integrated into these heterogeneous environments. According to Schießl, the pilot projects have been successfully concluded. A total of 3,000 computers are running open source software, twice as many as planned under the new initiative. Converting all computers to the Open Document Format (ODF) standard has overcome dependency on a single office software suite. The team is now getting down to the optimisation phase, aimed at improving efficiency and supporting “digital sustainability”. Schießl is confident that the remainder of the migration will proceed in a similarly smooth and rapid fashion.
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Audiocasts
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This week on the show: Ubuntu’s “Buttongate”, will Novell be asset stripped?, Mozilla is updating the MPL, Microsoft loosing a patent case again, Simon Phipps new OSI director and much more as always…
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Desktop
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I had not heard of that term until I was surprised to see, it even made to a Wikipedia entry! From what I could figure out, PCjacking is an art of messing up with departmental store computers by quietly installing Linux on them to promote Linux. This of-course is an unauthorized install.
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Server
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Yes! The configurations of Linux and server applications are often customized during the installation as well as ongoing maintenance and general troubleshooting. Even servers with very similar functions are often configured differently. A primary goal to protecting a critical Linux server is being able to repair or replace the system and get it back into production quickly.
The best-documented changes can quickly become outdated and often cause errors if not found until the damage has been done. Having a process that will automatically protect the unique configuration information will allow those changes to be applied to a standby or replacement server for rapid recovery.
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Kernel Space
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Through the Phoronix Test Suite we ran the World of Padman, OpenArena, Tremulous, Urban Terror, and VDrift tests. On the next two pages are the results.
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This free software BIOS implementation should now work on these newer AMD-based motherboards and are just the most recent of a growing list of supported chipsets by CoreBoot. AMD had promised this support many months ago but finally they cleared the legal requirements to push this code out to the general public.
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Phoromatic has been a huge success, but today we are announcing that Phoromatic has reached a 1.0 status and additionally we are providing the Ubuntu Linux community with a new performance tracker in collaboration with Canonical.
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Graphics Stack
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Over the past several weeks there have been a number of new Linux graphics features introduced by David Airlie, a Red Hat employee and long-time X.Org contributer. Last month David began on a project rampage by bringing hybrid graphics to Linux via code he called “vga_switcheroo” to switch between ATI/NVIDIA/Intel GPUs without rebooting the system (though restarting the X.Org Server is needed at this time) that that code has now made its way into the mainline Linux kernel.
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Applications
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A few months ago I mentioned mcplay as an alternative to the time-honored but unfortunately departed cplay. mcplay is intended to be a close mimic to the dead program, written in C as opposed to Python. At the time I made no real distinction between the two, since my concern was mostly with function, but as yasen mentioned, I should have.
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Medical Practice Management Software (MPMS) is a type of software that is designed to supervise and support the day-to-day operations of a medical practice. This category of software typically offers functionality such as data entry, scheduling appointments, billing, reporting, records management, the generation of reports, accounting, and capturing patient demographics.
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Audio
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I hope you’ve enjoyed this brief introduction to arpeggiators for Linux. The programs I’ve profiled are valuable additions to the creative Linux musician’s audio armory, you can’t beat the prices, and they are all great fun to explore. For now, I leave you to those explorations, and I’ll return soon with reports on the Behringer BCF2000 and FCB1010 MIDI control devices.
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There hasn’t been much news posted here for a while, so I thought it was appropriate to update subscribers and other supporters of my work on Ardour on what has been going on. Development efforts have ben split (about 60:40) between Ardour 3.0 and continuing work on the 2.X series, both to fix bugs and to support the continuing improvement of Mixbus.
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Proprietary
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I can’t tell you how many emails, phone calls, IMs, and Facebook messages I’ve gotten that asked when or if an application would be ported from Windows to Linux. Or how many times I’ve heard someone say, “I would use Linux, if X were ported to it!” So I decided to put these wishes to good use and list the top applications that should be ported to Linux. Some could be possible. Some are not (for whatever reason), which is a shame because the “not possible” tends to keep people from adopting Linux.
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Instructionals
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In this, our final installment, we will look at the screen terminal multiplexing program. What the heck is a “terminal multiplexing program?” I’m glad you asked.
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Games
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Some company will use LordHavoc’s DarkPlaces engine (DPE) to publish a game on some game console(s). The development team includes “a number of Nexuiz developers, and previous Quake1 community developers”. Nexuiz is a (or rather “the”) FOSS FPS that uses DPE.
As far as I can tell, no assets of Nexuiz will be used. On the other hand, the soundtrack playing on the console-DPE-game homepage sounds like a remix of a Nexuiz track. I will just assume that the composer agreed to this and that the same might happen to other high-quality Nexuiz content and that it will all be legal. Lee Vermeulen (Nexuiz’ lead developer) is no license-n00b after all. Also, the console game will be using Nexuiz’ gameplay, which I assume means “game modes”, “movement/physics” and “weapon functions/balancing”.
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Desktop Environments
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Following the success of last year’s Gran Canaria Desktop Summit (GCDS), Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier, former Community Manager at Novell, has announced that the GNOME Foundation and KDE e.V. boards have decided to once again co-locate their flagship conferences, Akademy and GUADEC, in 2011. In addition to simply co-locating the events, as they did in 2009, GNOME Foundation board Member Vincent Untz says that he hopes that the projects can “actually plan a combined schedule in 2011 so that KDE and GNOME contributors have every opportunity to work with and learn from each other.”
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GNOME Desktop
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Although there’s no official word on when Gnome 3 will become the default desktop environment in Ubuntu, Mark Shuttleworth suggested last summer that the October 2010 release, or Ubuntu 10.10, would be a likely target.
Given my experience with the new Gnome, I’m not convinced that’s a good idea, unless a lot changes on Gnome’s end between now and the fall. But I’ll save my criticism for another post. Below, I’ll focus on what Gnome 2.30/3 actually does, and how it’s so different from its predecessors.
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Mutter, the new window manager designed for GNOME 3.0 integration to replace Metacity 2, has experienced a new development release. Mutter reached version 2.29.0 last month and it integrated the most recent Metacity changes (up to v2.26), improved appearance of scaled down windows using mipmap emulation, new signals and properties, and many other changes. Metacity 2.29.1 that’s been released today doesn’t bring as many changes to the table.
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SimplyMEPIS and antiX, two of the products in the MEPIS family, have been through several iterations of their Beta testing cycle, and now each of them has also released three release candidates (RC), and they are very cloe to release. Each of them has a Version 8.5 RC 3 now available for testing. These can be upgraded to final form by simply using Debian upgrade packaging techniques.
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Debian Family
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Debian Developer Margarita Manterola recently threw her hat into the ring to be the next Debian Project Leader. Surprisingly, she was the first woman ever to do so.
Join me in congratulating her for nominating herself and wishing her Good Luck!
Q: Who are you?
A: My name is Margarita Manterola. I’m a 30-year-old Software Developer from Argentina. I develop mostly in Python, but also in other languages, such as C or PHP. I teach programming at my local university. I’ve been married for five years to Maximiliano Curia, who is a System Administrator and a Debian Developer, like me.
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Ubuntu
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Open-source developers and businesses are focused on the wrong opportunity, according to industry luminary Tim O’Reilly. The future isn’t programming for Linux or MySQL. The future is programming for the “whole Web.”
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Linux systems can be installed in various computer hardware, such as smartphones, laptops, PDA, and so forth. The use of Linux is very prevalent in servers. It is even reported that in 2008, at least 60 percent of web servers worldwide was run on Linux operating systems.
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We tested out this new package with a notebook and netbook to see how it changes the power game for Ubuntu 10.04 along with whether it’s much of an improvement over the current Ubuntu 9.10 release.
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Ubuntu is supposed to be a meritocracy where an elite group of people make decisions based on technical ability. Where is this technical ability that they speak of though? How this process seems to really work is that Mark says “make it so” and his drones say “yes master”. That’s not a meritocracy, not at all.
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The kicker, of course, is something I see way too often in Ubuntu land: people that don’t like it are simply called “trolls” and told to shut up. Often it’s shut up and leave.
What the hell? How exactly are you supposed to get feedback and determine if you have a great success with your user interface if you don’t listen to the users?
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Variants
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So since Canonical does currently not exploit all business potential coming from Kubuntu, the community will probably be responsible for quite some time to come.
This ultimately means that the community will apply the rules and judgment of which they think it is the best available. Since the community is mostly consisting of people contributing in their spare time human time resource is rather limited and thus one must choose the battles carefully. In consequence this means that some things simply cannot be done. Like say Ubuntu One integration, of course it would be nice to have, but currently there are much more important things to work on. Same goes for porting Software Center. Finally it also means that the community gets to decide how much branding gets committed, and currently the opinion is to stick with KDE’s. Not only is their artwork of incredibly high quality, but also are they the biggest contributors to the Kubuntu desktop, so they deserve most credit.
On that last note I would also like to note that Kubuntu’s target was to make the best KDE distribution, not the best Ubuntu flavor, thus deriving from KDE’s artwork and color scheme would not only be in conflict with the fact that Kubuntu’s color palette is almost identical, but also with what Kubuntu is trying to achieve.
In short: Kubuntu is not Ubuntu. Occasionally blogs and news stories and bug reports assume Canonical is responsible for things they are not. In general, me and the other Kubuntu developers are responsible for Kubuntu, please keep this in mind when moaning or praising us.
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Marvell announced its intent to deliver a $100, Android-ready tablet computer built around a 1GHz Armada 600 series processor. Aimed at students, the “Moby” will offer WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, an FM receiver, and Adobe Flash compatibility, the company says.
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Google’s TV Project
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In what may have been Google’s worst kept secret in years, Google, along with its partners, Intel, Logitech and Sony, is on its way to delivering the Web to your television. What will they be using to do this? Why, they’ll be using Google’s Android Linux, of course.
Android is an embedded Linux that Google has already been deploying in phones like its own Nexus One and Motorola’s Devour and Droid. But Android has always been more than just a smartphone operating system; it’s also been used in netbooks and other devices. So taking it to a TV set-top box was an easy move for Google and its hardware friends.
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With Google said to be working with Intel and Sony to develop a way to bring the best of the Internet to television, industry analysts wonder if the time for a smart TV has finally arrived.
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Google has reportedly joined hands with Intel, Sony and Logitech to create Google TV. What is Google TV and why Google is suddenly interested in a new medium: TV?
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YouTube may pay less to be online than you do, a new report on internet connectivity suggests, calling into question a recent analysis arguing Google’s popular video service is bleeding money and demonstrating how the internet has continued to morph to fit user’s behavior.
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Nokia
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Nokia is tapping into the collective wisdom of mobile technology enthusiasts on the Internet as it designs a new smartphone concept device. The handset maker has launched a new project called Design by Community which aims to collect feedback about preferred device characteristics from visitors to the Nokia Conversations blog.
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Tablets
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Apart from Apple, some other companies are bringing some interesting tablets. In contrary to the iTab, those other tablets do run Linux. Some are already available, such as the TouchBook from Always Innovating (AI), and some have supposedly better screens, like the Notion Ink Adam tablet. From the info available from Sola’s blog on the Notion Ink tablet, from the Wikipedia-info on the iPad and AI Touchbook and from the website of the AI touchbook I made a feature table so you can compare features. Apart from that, let’s take a look at the future: What technologies are coming to this market?
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Back in 1999, Vadim Kurland realized he needed a better way to configure a Linux firewall than the then-typical process of issuing cryptic commands or editing a text-based configuration file full of esoteric settings. Fortunately, he had lots of experience with commercial firewalls that he was able to apply to the problem. The result was Firewall Builder, a firewall configuration and management tool that lets administrators build firewall policies using a GUI, then push the configuration to firewall machines. It supports the open source firewall platforms iptables, pf, ipfw, and ipfilter, as well as Cisco ASA (PIX) and IOS access lists, and makes all these very different firewalls appear the same to the administrator.
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SpringSource says they’re expecting the site to be the single go-to-one-stop place for all your Apache Tomcat needs, be it troubleshooting to application server deployment. And that’s kind of a big deal, because, as the press release needs to remind you — Apache Tomact is the “world’s most widely used Java application server…” and “SpringSource employees” are credited with 95% of bux fixes to Apache Tomcat in the last two years. Plus, a good handful of Tomcat problem incidents are noted and fixed by SpringSource before they reach the community. SpringSource says it’s resulted in a 97% renewal rate for Tomcat support. Sounds pretty impressive.
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THE TORTOISE AND THE HARE
The philosophy of Open Source reminds me of a story from ‘Panchtantra’: the tortoise and the hare.
The tortoise and the hare were friends. One day, they decided to race against each other. The hare obviously took the lead; he thought of relaxing and went off to sleep. The tortoise, walking slowly but steadily, overtook the hare and won the race. The moral is,
‘Slow but steady wins the race’.
In recent time, some new chapters have been added to this story.
The hare was perturbed by the defeat. He asked the tortoise to race again. This time he did not take rest and won the race easily. The moral is,
‘It is better to be fast and reliable’.
But, this is not the end of the story.
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Mozilla
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Two things of note:
1. The update offer of Firefox 3.6 to users of Firefox 3 and Firefox 3.5 is the first time we’ve ever done an offer to a .0 release to our user base. We’ve always waited until the .1 release or later. We did this because we were able to measure improvements over 3.5 in terms of performance, reliability and add-ons compatiblity.
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Oracle
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This year (2010) marks the 10th anniversary of a lot of things: Tuvalu’s entry into the United Nations, Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon, and the debut of Windows ME, for example. But much more importantly, 2010 marks OpenOffice.org’s tenth year of existence. To celebrate, here’s a look–literally, because there are a lot of screenshots–at how OOo has evolved throughout the decade.
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OSBC
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Bob Sutor, vice president of open source and Linux for IBM, gave a keynote address in which he enumerated the criteria by which open-source projects should be evaluated. His talk highlighted the problems that can arise when organizations choose the wrong open-source project around which to standardize. He also advocated the creation of a company-wide open-source governance plan.
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I am currently in San Francisco attending the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC). While the conference has been around for awhile, I have never had a desire to attend before since people have told me it is more like the Open Core Business Conference. Also, it was founded my Matt Asay who nurses a strong dislike for OpenNMS (for proof just check out his negative article on us and our BOSSIE last year which is based on quotes that don’t seem to exist in the original article).
We have a standing rule at the OpenNMS Group that we will pay the expenses for any employee who gets a paper accepted at a conference, so I dutifully submitted two talks. The first was my ever evolving “So You Think You Want to Start and Open Source Business?” presentation, but since I was pretty certain that would be shot down, I also suggested another presentation where two of our “Ultra” support customers, Rackspace and New Edge, could talk about how they use the OpenNMS management application platform in their business.
Both were shot down.
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My talk at OSBC centers on the cost savings benefits of open source software and how this drove adoption amid difficult economic conditions. There was also discussion at the conference of the impact of an improving economy. While I don’t believe IT budgets will get fattened up with improving economic conditions, I do believe that this could put more emphasis on some of the other benefits of open source software. Again, we found cost savings was the main driver for customers considering open source. However, after adoption, the top benefit changes to flexibility. In addition, while factors such as vendor lock-in appear to subside after adoption, open source benefits such as reliability and performance grow in significance. I believe this is indicative of where the market, customers and vendors are headed as they contemplate the benefits and rewards of open source. I also believe these ‘other’ non-cost factors all contribute to enabling IT individuals and teams based on open source.
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Over the last couple of years a number of different open source business strategies have evolved. According to the 451 Group, it’s an evolution that includes the broader adoption and usage of open source overall by both open source and proprietary software vendors.
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Releases
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We’re happy to announce a new open source project called Almost Native Graphics Layer Engine, or ANGLE for short. The goal of ANGLE is to layer WebGL’s subset of the OpenGL ES 2.0 API over DirectX 9.0c API calls. We’re open-sourcing ANGLE under the BSD license as an early work-in-progress, but when complete, it will enable browsers like Google Chrome to run WebGL content on Windows computers without having to rely on OpenGL drivers.
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Government
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As an election looms in the UK, copyright, intellectual property and Open Source, are making an appearance on the political stage, both at home and internationally.
The government has been forced to make a number of significant changes to Lord Mandelson’s much-criticised Digital Economy Bill. In response to a petition, the Prime Minister has dropped Mandelson’s plans for a controversial ‘three strikes’ rule forcing ISPs to permanently disconnect those repeatedly accused of illegal file sharing by copyright holders.
Amongst a long list of grievances with the proposed bill, critics had pointed out the potential human rights implications of cutting-off households, particularly school children, from the Internet, based on the behaviour of one individual using a shared connection. However, in a statement on the Number 10 website, the government did not rule out forcing ISPs to enforce bandwidth restrictions, download limits and temporary account suspensions onto customers accused of breeching copyright.
[...]
Meanwhile, Shaddow Chancellor George Osborne has reiterated previous pledges to “create a level playing field for open source IT in government procurement”. The Tories’ new manifesto also promises to publish more information on all government contracts and tendering opportunities, as well as spending by QUANGOs and Local Government, in a bid to “open up government procurement to more SMEs.”
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Countries should be judged on their willingness to open up public data to their citizens, the inventor of the world wide web has told the BBC.
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Openness
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King argues for an open access system via article processing fees, fully paid by the federal government. It is noteworthy that King’s estimate is that this would cost, in a worst-case scenario, an increase of less than 1% of what the U.S. federal government spends on research grants right now. King acknowledges the unlikelihood of this scenario. Average cost-per-article of $1,500 and $2,500 U.S. scenarios are employed; the additional cost for 100% funding of articles would be $427 million (at $1,500 per article) or $712 million (at $2,500 per article). King estimates that academic and special libraries could, together, save an estimate $4.1 billion per year.
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We’ve been trying for some time to find a way to conveniently take a snapshot of our Open Notebooks and all associated raw data files. This could serve as a way to back up all of our work as well as provide a means of finding out the state of knowledge for a project at a given moment in time. There is also a tremendous benefit to confidently using the best of free hosted Web2.0 services out there (e.g. GoogleDocs and Wikispaces) without being concerned with changes in policies or access down the road.
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As is often the case, someone asks for a written answer to a question, but then fails to use the material. The great thing about blogs is that they make it very easy to make sure such content isn’t wasted. So here are some thoughts on the GreenMonk mission and sustainability more broadly.
We set up Greenmonk with the explicit intention of lobbying for open data and open source for better environmental outcomes.
[...]
In the UK, libel law is regularly abused to shut down dissenting voices. Its not just randy footballers that try and abuse the law. Pushing back against the status quo are organisations such as Sense About Science, which is backing the National Petition for Libel Law Reform.
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There have been hundreds of articles in recent years exhorting the strengths and warning of the weaknesses of Open Access through author payment. This article discusses a few of the favorable and unfavorable issues and proposes an approach that takes advantage of the favorable aspects and overcomes some of the unfavorable ones. It requires extensive government support, which may or may not be feasible, but the approach is presented here nevertheless. Some evidence is given for the potential savings that would be achieved by scientists, publishers and libraries in the US.
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Ostrom’s seminal book, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, was published in 1990. But her research on common property goes back to the early 1960s, when she wrote her dissertation on groundwater in California. In 1973 she and her husband, Vincent Ostrom, founded the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University. In the intervening years, the Workshop has produced hundreds of studies of the conditions in which communities self-organize to solve common problems. Ostrom currently serves as professor of political science at Indiana University and senior research director of the Workshop.
Fran Korten: When you first learned that you had won the Nobel Prize in Economics, were you surprised?
Elinor Ostrom: Yes. It was quite surprising. I was both happy and relieved.
Fran: Why relieved?
Elinor: Well, relieved in that I was doing a bunch of research through the years that many people thought was very radical and people didn’t like. As a person who does interdisciplinary work, I didn’t fit anywhere. I was relieved that, after all these years of struggle, someone really thought it did add up. That’s very nice.
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Standards/Consortia
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STANDARDS ADVOCATE the Open Video Alliance has got behind a campaign to enrich Wikipedia articles with video.
Wikipedia walks a lonely path in supporting Theora, an open format which is in contention to be incorporated into HTML5′s video tag. This goes against the popular Flash encoded video ‘standard’ used by sites such as Youtube.
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The Open Video Alliance and the Participatory Culture Foundation have launched a new campaign to encourage people to upload videos to Wikipedia, the free collaborative online encyclopedia.
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The OVA’s members include open video platform company Kaltura, Yale’s Information Society Project, Mozilla, and the Participatory Culture Foundation (PCF). To get the party started, the PCF is making available a new software tool for Windows and Mac OS X that can convert videos into the open Ogg Theora format. The OVA has rolled out a new website with simple instructions that describe how users can download the software and start participating in the campaign.
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All the buzz is that HTML5 will signal the death knell for Adobe Flash. Many would say good riddance, especially Apple’s Steve Jobs, whose steadfast refusal to support the technology has left many iPhone users with a crippled web browsing experience (including this blogger). But Jobs should be careful of what he wishes for. The eventual winner of the HTML5 video standards debate could be an open source standard. This will leave Jobs and his black box, closed system henchman in Cupertino in a bind.
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In a posting on W3C blog, Ian Jacobs, Head of W3C Communications, has taken up Microsoft’s offer and invited the company to create an “Incubator Group” for the specification. Incubator groups do not produce standards, but the W3C community can decide later on whether or not to move the API onto the W3C Recommendation Track.
Jacobs says that “Incubator Groups can smooth the transition from ‘good idea’ to ‘widely deployed standard available Royalty-Free’”. He also pointed out that the invitation was “not just for Microsoft” and that the W3C is interested in data access APIs adding “If you’re working on an API and it has ‘data’ in the name, I encourage you to build community support in a W3C Incubator Group.”
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Canon announced Wednesday it intends to be the first company to say goodbye to .com and buy its own top-level domain, taking advantage of ICANN’s decision to broadly widen the number of top-level names. If — or rather when — this starts happening, web address conventions may never be the same.
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My relationship with Google News has always run hot and cold. No make that cold and tepid. From the very beginning of Google News as an experiment back in 2001, they refused to index my work, which they said was my fault, not theirs (“they” being an algorithm attached to an e-mail box, of course). But new evidence has recently come to light suggesting to me that Google News has an actual blacklist.
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Science
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Commissioning of the LHC continues at a very encouraging rate. In the past few days the protection systems have been qualified such that the beams could be safely accelerated to higher energies. In the early hours of this morning, around 5:30am Geneva time, both beams were successfully ramped to 3.5 TeV, 3 times higher than ever before! Even more encouraging, the beams were extremely stable during this period and had a very long lifetime.
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Security
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According to Hosein, if the upgrades do take place, early adopters will have a hard time swallowing the fact they had paid £30 for a card that had gone out of date in three years or less.
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The Summary Care Records database – which is central to the government’s plans to create health records for 50 million people – contains inaccuracies and omissions that make it difficult for doctors to trust it as a single source of truth, according to a confidential draft report.
The findings by researchers at University College London, are likely to reinforce the concerns of the British Medical Association which has called for a halt to the “rushed” rollout of the “imperfect” Summary Care Record scheme.
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Two U.S. senators met with President Obama on Thursday to push for a national ID card with biometric information such as a fingerprint, hand scan, or iris scan that all employers would be required to verify.
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If you are over 60 and want a bus pass – Pensioners could be forced to carry identity cards to qualify for free bus travel
If you are poor and bank at RBS and Lloyds – Meg Hillier said companies might offer to buy the £30 cards for people who wouldn’t pay for them otherwise
Or if you are just poor – Home Office minister Meg Hillier argues ID cards can provide the foundation for fairer access to services and opportunities
If you work at an airport – All staff who work ‘airside’ are eligible to get a free card as part of the regional roll-out of the ID cards scheme
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A surprise demand to settle an outstanding debt for surveillance cameras in Monmouth could land Monmouth Town Council in the county court, reports Desmond Pugh.
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Halstead’s long-awaited CCTV system faces fresh delays.
Although the four cameras have been installed in the town, they have been fitted with the wrong type of cable boxes.
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By early 2008, top U.S. military officials had become convinced that extremists planning attacks on American forces in Iraq were making use of a Web site set up by the Saudi government and the CIA to uncover terrorist plots in the kingdom.
“We knew we were going to be forced to shut this thing down,” recalled one former civilian official, describing tense internal discussions in which military commanders argued that the site was putting Americans at risk. “CIA resented that,” the former official said.
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Early terse reports are that the jury has returned a guilty verdict for Dr Peter Watts, a science fiction writer who was beaten at the US-Canada border when he got out of his car to ask why it was being searched, then charged with assault. Peter faces up to two years in prison. I’ve emailed him for comment and I hope that he’s appealing.
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The question of registered sex offenders lists is a tricky one — because for those people who really do commit sexually-driven crimes against minors, it’s hard to be even remotely sympathetic to any complaints they have about the punishment they receive. The problem is that so many things are considered sexual offenses these days that many people are put on the list, and must live with it for life, for something that most people may consider a youthful indiscretion, rather than something that automatically should brand them to neighbors as a possible child molester. Things such as kids having sex with each other after only one of the two teens has reached the “legal” limit or even urinating in public can sometimes be classified as a sexual offense.
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Environment
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Prescribed burns in the forests of the western U.S. will prevent larger wildfires and significantly cut the nation’s carbon footprint, according to a new study.
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Nestlé is using palm oil from destroyed Indonesian rainforests and peatlands, in products like Kit Kat, pushing already endangered orang-utans to the brink of extinction and accelerating climate change.
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When these regions are compared in animals like turtles and people and chickens, the genomes reveal signs of purifying selection — that is, mutations here tend to be unsuccessful, and lead to death, failure to propagate, etc., other horrible fates that mean tinkering here is largely unfavorable to fecundity (which makes sense: who wants a mutation expressed in their groinal bits?). In the squamates, the evidence in the genome does not witness to intense selection for their particular arrangement, but instead, of relaxed selection — they are generally more tolerant of variations in the Hox gene complex in this area. What was found in those enlarged intergenic regions is a greater invasion of degenerate DNA sequences: lots of additional retrotransposons, like LINES and SINES, which are all junk DNA.
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Nestlé, maker of Kit Kat, uses palm oil from companies that are trashing Indonesian rainforests, threatening the livelihoods of local people and pushing orang-utans towards extinction.
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An unprecedented effort to use world trade rules to save a species from rampant overfishing has failed. A proposal to ban international trade in bluefin tuna under the Convention on Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) was defeated today at a meeting of the 175 nations that belong to the treaty in Doha, Qatar.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The ability of politicians to spin official statistics to support their own point of view is likely to be severely curtailed – at least if UK Statistics Authority has its way.
While the Reg finds it hard to believe that any government minister would be tempted in this way, the good folk over at the Statistics Authority would appear to be a little more cynical.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Law enforcement agencies are increasingly using social media to fight crime – and some criminals are making that task very easy.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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I wrote a post the other day about Digital Manuscripts, Reading as Writing, and the danger of of “digital rights management” (DRM). The New York Times today provided a lovely follow up in the shape of an article – Turning Green With Literacy – about the Irish role in saving the book after the Roman Empire collapsed.
[...]
DRM is designed to prevent playfulness. But the smartest people in publishing realise that the future will be ludic – George Walkley, who runs digital strategy at Hachette recently told me of the importance of making publishing more “ludic” or game-like.
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Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights
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Now, some will scoff and claims that Grokster was never going to turn into what YouTube is today, but you’re saying that with the gift of hindsight. A large part of Viacom’s motion tries to suggest that the two companies actually were quite similar — but even Viacom is now admitting that YouTube’s business model was able to mature and adapt. Considering that we still don’t have music discovery, promotion and distribution tools as convenient as Napster was back in the day, this can be seen as a real shame. These lawsuits killed off a useful path of exploration for legitimate business models, and that’s not only shameful but a waste of innovative effort. It’s only through the random quirk of a slow court that YouTube may avoid suffering the same fate.
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Then there’s an interview of Dan Bull, known around these parts for his musically brilliant open letters to Lily Allen and Peter Mandelson. In the interview, he discusses his views on the music business and things like file sharing. He notes that he’s mainly “against… enforcing backwards laws in order to cling onto an obsolete business model.”
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This writer is worn out and he wasn’t even at South by Southwest this weekend. So in the interest of keeping things light, here’s something to put into the strange copyright battles file. Dixie Consumer Products and Huhtamaki Americas Inc. have just finished up in federal court over a suit filed by Dixie who said their competitor had copied their cup design.
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Ok. Pick your jaw up off the floor. First, this is stunning in that it’s been the entertainment industry itself that pushed and popularized the term “piracy” for copyright infringement. They did so very deliberately in an attempt to demonize the act of infringement, presenting it as something much worse. That some have since taken that term and embraced it hardly changes that initial fact. Second, she’s wrong about the fact that they’re “talking about a criminal act.” Yes, in some cases copyright infringement may be a criminal act, but in most cases the use of “piracy” these days refers to civil issues between two parties and not criminal acts at all.
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Then in another panel session, Mr. Griffin, the founder of OneHouse, whose company is developing a new model of music and entertainment delivery, probably made the most impassioned argument that content must flow freely (double entendre intended) given its capacity to improve the human condition. He likened the current copyright model to an “old vine we cling to,” unsuited for today’s digital world. His solution is to pay content creators based on an “actuarial” model where groups can share revenue collectively.
What was most inspiring is that these people were openly saying what I was thinking — the current system is ill-suited to the current realities. The answer lies in innovating new ways to compensate content creators such as new compensation structures or new engagement methods that can be monetized. In their personal experiences and outlooks, these content producers effectively laid down the gauntlet to the legal industry — innovate or we may all die.
Maybe that’s why Jim Griffin used this quote as a rallying call: “Copyright law … is not an engine of free expression, but a yoke of innovation.” Maybe that’s why the conference is themed: “The Collision of Ideas.”
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Newspapers are folding, magazines are fading, ad pages are down and angst is up in the serial publishing business as it struggles through a global technological transition and may not survive. But what will be our next New York Times, our new Field & Stream, our improved Playboy? That’s what the big guns of publishing are fighting about with their Kindles and iPads. But I think they may have it all wrong and my friend Anina, the fashion model/girl geek may have it all right.
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The scene at Hailey’s Club on Friday afternoon played like a rumpled, foul-mouthed version of Inside the Actors Studio with James Lipton. Denton musician Scott Porter had notes at the ready for his interview with Chicago-based punk rock musician and recording engineer Steve Albini. The near-capacity crowd in the bar filed in from Mulberry Street.
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ACTA/Digital Economy Bill
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I have restrained myself from writing much about the ICC’s “Building a Digital Economy” report, because I knew it would make me too cross. Fortunately, someone who is rather calmer me than me has done a better job than I would with some careful, rigorous analysis.
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Yesterday, Richard Wray wrote up a piece in the Guardian on a study which has been backed by the TUC and claims that by 2015, losses from piracy will reach £218bn and put 1.2 million jobs in peril.
[...]
What the BPI does publish (repeatedly on its site) is the figure of “some 7.3 million people engaged in unlawful filesharing”, according to Jupiter Research. Assuming these two figures — the number of people sharing and the amount of infringement taking place — are supposed to be consistent with one another, this leaves us with a few problems.
That 7.3m figure was investigated by BBC Radio 4’s “More or Less” programme, and the results were written up by Ars Technica.
[...]
The bottom line here is that the 7.3m figure is essentially meaningless; it’s based on a survey of just over a thousand households and then multiplied up in the same way that the BASCAP report does in its predictions. If — and there’s potentially some wiggle-room here — this (still publicised today) 7.3m figure is related to the 1.1bn “infringements” figure, then it renders the UK music part of the BASCAP report as worthless as an educated guess by a journalist. If this is the quality of the data across the board, then the entire report has little merit at all from a analytics perspective.
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Two weeks is a lifetime in politics – especially in the political life of the backwards digital economy bill, Labour’s gift to the incumbent entertainment industries that government is bent on ramming into law before the election.
In my last column, I bore the bizarre news that the LibDem front-bench Lords had introduced an amendment to the bill that would create a Great Firewall of Britain. This would be a national censorwall to which the record industry could add its least favourite sites, rendering them invisible to Britons (except for those with the nous of a 13-year-old evading her school’s censorware). Over the following days, the story got weirder: the LibDem amendment got amended, to add a figleaf of due process to the untenable proposal.
And then it got weirder still: a leaked memo from the BPI (the UK record industry lobby) showed that the “LibDem amendment” had in fact been written – with minor variances – by the BPI. And the BPI continued to leak: someone sent me the weekly internal status update prepared by Richard Mollet, BPI Director of Public Affairs for the core group of plotters behind the bill (someone should teach Mr Mollet about BCC).
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Translation for non-wonks: Historically, developing countries have asked the UN’s World Intellectual Property Organization for “technical assistance” with their copyright laws. This has usually amounted to “Create copyright laws that will make it easier for rich countries to get richer,” but in the past several of years, WIPO has found itself with a large cadre of public interest activists and now, WIPO is working on a treaty on its “Development Agenda” to figure out a copyright system that serves humanitarian goals, too (for example, by making it legal for archivists and educators to work together to translated and adapt works that have different copyright rules in different countries).
We’ve all known that ACTA is a way of writing copyright treaties without having to let poor countries and human rights advocates into the room. We’ve suspected that poor countries — who aren’t invited to the negotiations — will be strong-armed into signing onto the treate afterwards.
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David Lammy, United Kingdom Minister for Intellectual Property, today said the UK supports the European Union’s position that the text of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) should be made public.
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The European Commission has now admitted in writing what the ACTA negotiations will mean for the Internet. In Europe, it will mean a ‘harmonised’ enforcement
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A simple programming tool is helpful in understanding what’s changed – but we really need some proper internet-enabled means of viewing bills, as MySociety points out
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The more of ACTA that leaks, the worse it seems. KEI has the details on another portion of ACTA that had not leaked yet, which focuses on setting up new institutions that would manage ACTA after it was implemented. Basically, it would be an ongoing organization tasked with continuing to update ACTA’s rules — sort of a parallel organization to WIPO, which already exists, but which has recently committed the mortal sin of actually listening to consumer rights groups.
Scottish Parliamentarian Patrick Harvey 03 (2004)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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03.18.10
Posted in IRC Logs, News Roundup at 9:33 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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In this episode: Gnome’s Guadec and KDE’s Akademy are getting back together in 2011, and they’re looking for a venue, while Canonical unveils a major rebranding for Ubuntu 10.04. We reveal which presenter had the most SUSE Studio downloads and report back on our time spent with Ubuntu 4.10.
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FUD
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I’m very aware of the FUD that was thrown at open source software and especially Linux in the last decade, though I think we’ve gotten the right facts by now. Therefore I’ve tried to be very careful in the tone of the presentation to be constructive while realistic about adopting open source software.
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This morning I gave a keynote called “Asking the Hard Questions about Open Source Software” at the OSBC 2010 conference in San Francisco.
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Bruce Schneier’s blog post about the Mariposa Botnet has an interesting discussion in the comments about how to make a secure system [1]. Note that the threat is considered to be remote attackers, that means viruses and trojan horses – which includes infected files run from USB devices (IE you aren’t safe just because you aren’t on the Internet). The threat we are considering is not people who can replace hardware in the computer (people who have physical access to it which includes people who have access to where it is located or who are employed to repair it). This is the most common case, the risk involved in stealing a typical PC is far greater than the whatever benefit might be obtained from the data on it – a typical computer user is at risk of theft only for the resale value of a second-hand computer.
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The 2010 CWE/SANS Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors is a list of the most widespread and critical programming errors that can lead to serious software vulnerabilities. They are often easy to find, and easy to exploit. They are dangerous because they will frequently allow attackers to completely take over the software, steal data, or prevent the software from working at all.
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Desktop
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Desktop GNU/Linux is happening whether on clients thick or thin or on servers. Repeating the same old drivel that GNU/Linux has no share and never will is tiresome and wrong. It could be that certain niches will stick with M$. It is those who are becoming irrelevant. GNU/Linux is mainstream and growing more rapidly daily on both server and desktop. Last time I looked, that other OS was still losing share in the top server hosting companies.
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Kernel Space
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The story was told by Greg Price on the Ksplice blog just over a week ago. Said tale involves an impending product launch, a list of critical engineering projects, and not enough time.
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Startup companies are always hunting for ways to accomplish as much as possible with what they have available. Last December we realized that we had a growing queue of important engineering projects outside of our core technology that our team didn’t have the time to finish anytime soon. To make matters worse, we wanted the projects completed right away, in time for our planned product launch in early February.
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Applications
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TerminalRun and FoxRunner are two similar Firefox extensions for running a command from a website in a terminal. Because FoxRunner didn’t work for me (but it seems to be working for most people so you can try it if you want), I’ll review TerminalRun.
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That makes Shotwell the only Gnome photo manager which supports exporting photos to all of the 3 services: PicasaWeb, Flickr and Facebook.
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Package installation for Linux distributions has traditionally separated libraries and application binaries into different packages, so that only one version of a library would be installed and it would be shared by applications that use it. Other operating systems (e.g. Windows, MacOS X) often bundle a particular version of a library with each application, which can lead to many copies and versions of the same library co-existing on the system. While each model has its advocates, the Linux method is seen by many as superior because a security fix in a particular commonly-used library doesn’t require updating multiple different applications—not to mention the space savings. But, it would seem that both Mozilla and Google may be causing distributions to switch to library-bundling mode in order to support the Firefox and Chromium web browsers.
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Want to take full control of your email? Tired of the limitations of Webmail, or GUI clients that are designed for users who only get a handful of emails every day. It’s time to bring out the heavy guns and start using Claws.
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Jabber, also known as XMPP, is used by Google Talk, LiveJournal, Portugal Telecom and Facebook also recently allows you to chat using XMPP.
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Snapping a quick screenshot is a capability you get out of the box with most current Linux distributions. Hit the Print Screen function key, and you should see a dialog box pop up with a capture of your entire screen. For GNOME users this typically launches gnome-screenshot while Kde will bring up Ksnapshot. Both tools are similar in functionality and get the basic job accomplished.
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Instructionals
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Games
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I know that there are those who will argue that Linux isn’t worth supporting, but I disagree. It’s been a travesty and grave injustice for Linux to be almost totally locked out of the computer gaming market thanks to Microsoft pushing its proprietary junk and deliberately locking game vendors into Windows, and the laziness of game companies that can’t be bothered to support multiple platforms.
The lack of games for Linux (and also Mac OS X) has worked to Microsoft’s advantage by making Windows the platform for computer gaming. That’s great if you’re a Microsoft shareholder or employee, but it’s very bad if you believe in choice when it comes to computer operating systems.
Gaming companies need to abandon DirectX as quickly as possible and move to OpenGL instead.
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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True story: last night I was thinking about how great a Magical ~/Downloads/ folder would be, so that downloaded PDFs, videos, documents, whatever would automatically get moved into my ~/Documents/ and my ~/Music/ and my other folders. I thought, hmm maybe I’ll make a wish on http://bugs.kde.org/ for something like that. Granted, not everyone wants it as their Downloads/ folder (and not everyone even has that; Iceweasel and Firefox set it up in 3.5 and beyond and I don’t know if Konqueror, ReKonq, or Aurora even use it). But it was an interesting idea.
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Red Hat Family
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The economy may still be in the doldrums, but Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst said pitching the cost savings of open source software doesn’t necessarily seal the deal with enterprise customers as it once may have.
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In fact, the cloud has largely displaced open source as the “next big thing” in the enterprise computing landscape, but it’s important to recognize that open source provides much of the underlying software infrastructure for the majority of commercial public clouds.
In a press meeting Wednesday, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst and vice president of corporate development Mike Evans discussed how open source is at the basis of cloud computing and how an open architecture and layered approach to infrastructure is the best path forward.
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Fedora
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Berry Linux is a Live CD Linux distribution based on Fedora and aimed mostly at the Japanese market. The latest update, Berry Linux 1.01, is based on the latest stable release, Fedora 12, and comes with updated packages, especially the very latest stable versions. It uses a customized KDE 4 environment, the latest version plucked from Fedora 12, KDE 4.4.0. Both Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird are now at the newest versions and the Microsoft Windows networking suite Samba has also been updated.
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Ubuntu
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Canonical’s Jorge Castro recently introduced me to a nifty tool called TestDrive that simplifies the setup process by automatically downloading the ISO and configuring a VM. TestDrive provides a simple command-line tool that allows you to select which ISO image you want to test. It will download the image and then configure and launch a VM. The real win is that it caches the ISO images and uses rsync to update the parts that have changed so that you don’t have to download the whole ISO again every time you want to test a new daily build.
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Want to run WordPress, Drupal, or whip up a DJango instance on Ubuntu without all the hassle of configuring an operating system and support stack? Now you can. BitNami has added the most recent release of Ubuntu to its virtual appliance stacks.
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Variants
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PeterB was right. Greenie Linux is one outstanding distribution. All you have to do is get beyond the language barrier (by simply installing the distro) and you will find a flavor of Linux that has something for just about everyone. Give this distribution a try. You won’t be disappointed.
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Phones
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My blogomaniac buddy Alan Shimel recently posted a piece arguing that Android, the open source darling of the mobile world, looks pretty small against the elephantine overall mobile market whichodence-droid comprises mostly un-smart phones. Despite that, he points out that recently open sourced Symbian “is a major force in the traditional handset OS market.” Substantiating the point, Tony Bradley writes for PC world, “Symbian has nearly as much market share as the rest of its competitors combined–including the iPhone, with more than 330 million Symbian smartphones in use.”
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Google’s attempt to trademark the term “Nexus One” for its Android smartphone has been rejected by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, as it was deemed too similar to a related term.
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Mozilla
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There is an experimental, pre-alpha version of the addon available for download here.
Please be aware that this experimental code. If you are not comfortable with running software that can crash your browser, or cause you lose work, you may want to wait. Please read the Release Notes first.
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Databases
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As Firebird approaches the final 2.5 release, a new campaign is born to help increase Firebird’s visibility and awareness.
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OpenOffice.org
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Recently at OpenOffice.org we have decided to give more highlight to our many native-language communities, who are in charge not just of localization, but also QA, users support, documentation translation and marketing. Each month, we will interview teams, blog about it, include it in the OpenOffice.org, newsletter, etc. This month, we start with the Irish native-language project, lead by Kevin Scannell. You can find more about the Irish language here.
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Since it’s almost Easter Sunday, I will be sharing with you several cool virtual Easter eggs hidden inside some of our favorite software applications. Today, we will take a look at some Easter eggs inside OpenOffice.org so get ready to have fun or be amused.
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Business
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I could reinvent the wheel here, but there’s no point. The best post that I have seen on this comes from my friend, John Henley of Decision Analytics. Henley details some advantages to customizing an application. They include:
* Core competencies
* Your other front/back-office systems require it
* You want additional fields and/or different field sizes
* Regulatory requirements
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FSF/FSFE/GNU
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The Free Software Foundation has always done a great job defending the various free software licences, promoting their use, and asking for Linux to be referred to as GNU/Linux.
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I had the opportunity earlier this week to sit down with Jeff and discuss with him his appointment and learn a little more about the work of W3C and his plans for the coming year. Jeff talked about the importance of W3C’s Royalty-Free Patent Policy and we discussed how the free software community could participate in and follow the work of W3C. He stated that he wanted to “make sure that free software advocates view W3C — which has spearheaded the removal of patent royalties from standards — as a great place to participate.”
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Free software has won: practically all of the biggest and most exciting Web companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter run on it. But it is also in danger of losing, because those same services now represent a huge threat to our freedom as a result of the vast stores of information they hold about us, and the in-depth surveillance that implies.
Better than almost anyone, Eben Moglen knows what’s at stake. He was General Counsel of the Free Software Foundation for 13 years, and helped draft several versions of the GNU GPL. As well as being Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, he is the Founding Director of the Software Freedom Law Center. And he has an ambitious plan to save us from those seductive but freedom-threatening Web service companies. He explained to Glyn Moody what the problem is, and how we can fix it.
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Free software is software that comes with permission for anyone to use, copy, and distribute, either verbatim or with modifications, either gratis or for a fee. In particular, this means that source code must be available. “If it’s not source, it’s not software.”
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Government
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It’s only appropriate then, that during Sunshine Week, the National Security Archive would check on how various agencies have responded to Freedom of Information Act requests in the last year. Sunshine Week, according to the organization’s Web site, is a national initiative established to focus on the importance of open government and the freedom of information.
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One year into its promise of greater government transparency, the Obama administration is more often citing exceptions to the nation’s open records law to withhold federal records even as the number of requests for information declines, according to a review by The Associated Press of agency audits about the Freedom of Information Act.
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Indeed, as ABC’s Nightline revealed much later, both Negroponte and National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden pressured the LA Times to kill the story. And when Klein told his story to CBS’s 60 Minutes, they too eventually killed the story without explanation.
In the end, of course, Klein’s evidence became the backbone of EFF’s lawsuit against AT&T for their complicity in illegal government spying. Originally ignored by Senators and newspapers alike, his evidence was ultimately so damning that it could only be defeated by an unprecedented “telco immunity” law pushed by the Bush White House and passed by the US Congress amidst a massive public controversy. EFF then relied on Klein’s evidence for a case against the government, which has been met with fierce resistance by the Obama Administration.
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“Open source prevents monopolies, helps to share knowledge and increases social innovation”, says Vincent Van Quickenborne, Belgium’s minister for the Simplification of the Administration. He expects that public administrations will increasingly turn to this type of software, in part because it helps to cut costs.
With his talk, minister Van Quickenborne opened a workshop on free software for public administrations, organised by the ministry of Economics in Brussels, on Friday 12 March.
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Openness
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Playing with open map data can be a fun pastime. Creating and editing open data can be not only fun, but also a boost for free data to go along with free software. Whether you want to view open map data or edit it, there’s no shortage of applications that run on Linux and work well with OpenStreetMap (OSM) data. Here’s a look at some useful mapping applications for displaying and editing open map data on the Linux desktop.
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Programming
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According to a new schedule, the next version of the dynamic Ruby 1.9.2 scripting language will probably be released in mid August. While previous plans were for a final release by last December, the developers wanted to ensure that the new version passed the RubySpec tests. Eventually this lead to the release being postponed. Ruby 1.9.2dev has now passed all the relevant tests.
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The Qt developers have announced a technical preview for QT 4.7, the cross platform C++ framework for GUI applications. According to the developers, the pre-release is not suitable for production use, but will give a good idea of how they plan to enhance the framework. According to the developers, the final release of Qt 4.7 will be around the middle of the year.
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Standards/Consortia
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There are several more ideas on the site and ways to support the organizers of the event itself. So, if you’re one of the millions of people who would actually like others to be able to open the documents you send them, visit the Document Freedom Day website for more info and start working on your DFD project. You’ve got two weeks! Feel free to share your DFD ideas below.
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Crime
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Two Muslim men were charged last night in the Irish Republic in connection with an alleged plot to murder Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks, whose artwork outraged many Muslims after he depicted the Prophet Muhammad’s head on the body of a dog in 2007.
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To address the violence, decriminalization has to encompass not just possession for personal use (a policy that Mexico and several U.S. states have adopted in limited ways) but production and distribution as well. During alcohol prohibition—when the U.S. homicide rate rose by 43 percent, peaking the year of repeal—there were no criminal penalties for drinking. Yet by making it illegal to manufacture and sell alcohol, the government invited the likes of Al Capone to vie for control of a lucrative black market, with predictably violent results. Once alcohol was legalized, the business was no longer run by criminals, and liquor suppliers stopped shooting at each other.
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Eduardo Penalver and Sonia Katyal’s Property Outlaws: How Squatters, Pirates, and Protesters Improve the Law of Ownership has been at the top of my discretionary reading pile for months, now ever since the publisher, Yale, sent me a review copy. Unfortunately, it’s been months since I’ve done any substantial discretionary reading and it’ll be months still before I get to do so. So yesterday, I just carved out 45 minutes to give it a good, thorough skim, and while I don’t have enough of the book in me to do an actual review, I can tell you that my suspicions were confirmed.
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Security
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A 25-year-old man was asked to leave a train after staff became concerned when he wrote song titles by bands including The Killers on a piece of paper.
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As many as 85 per cent of teachers have reported the use of CCTV in their schools and one-in-10 said cameras had even been placed in toilets.
According to the study, some schools are also using other techniques such as fingerprinting, metal detectors, electronic identity cards, eye scanners and facial recognition systems.
Research funded by Salford University said that schools were increasingly becoming a “hotbed for surveillance practices” in the UK as children were subjected to checks for often mundane reasons such as borrowing a book from a library or paying for lunch.
But Dr Emmeline Taylor also suggested many schools were collecting CCTV images illegally by failing to inform pupils and visitors that they were being monitored under the Data Protection Act.
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Sussex Police will be the first force in the country to have members of the public monitoring its CCTV.
Twelve independent, fully trained and vetted volunteers will visit each police CCTV monitoring centre in Sussex once a month to look at the usage of more than 400 council-owned cameras.
Currently, 400 cameras stream live to bases in Brighton and Haywards Heath and can be searched from police stations around the county.
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To effectively oversee a massive, complex institution like the US military, you need a massive, hierarchical institution composed of people whose job it is to understand that institution. The military itself has an officer’s corps that performs this function. No other institution, inside or outside the government, has the capacity to understand military operations in anything close to their full detail.
[...]
Similarly, last year the New York Times documented that the “military analysts” you see on cable TV programs tend to have close (and almost always undisclosed) ties to the Pentagon. The tricky thing about this is that it may very well be true that these folks are the most knowledgeable about military strategy. What better way to become an expert than to work in the military for decades? But at the same time, if you want impartial analysis of current policy, you don’t want all of your experts to be people with close ties to the people running that policy.
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Innocent until proven guilty is a founding principle of our criminal justice system. This principle has also been codified in the U.S. Constitution via the 6th Amendment, providing the right to adequate counsel to all individuals accused of a crime. Last week, Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol launched an attack on individuals who undertook the enormously difficult task of upholding justice when they represented Guantanamo detainees. In the advertisement by a new entity named “Keep America Safe,” Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol question the loyalty of Department of Justice (DOJ) lawyers who had previously represented Guantanamo detainees in order to defend U.S. legal obligations under the Constitution and treaties we have ratified.
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Sal Miah, 35, heard a noise in the cellar and when he investigated he saw two teenagers who fled but he pursued them to a park and dragged them back to the restaurant.
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In the last few posts in my Vietnam series, I argued that American foreign policy was crippled by the fact that senior officials were fed a steady stream of misinformation. Positive news about the war flowed easily up the chain of command and reached the Secretary of Defense and the President. Negative information, in contrast, was systematically filtered out by the official reporting channels. As a consequence, senior officials were working with a limited and distorted view of the “facts on the ground.”
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The jingle of the ice cream van tells schoolchildren summer is on the way.
But the traditional treat has been banned by one council, which claims they encourage unhealthy eating.
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Body scan Our position on body scanners has been made clear on this site several times. They’re an intrusive and unnecessary over-reaction to a threat (the Christmas Bomber) which could and should have been picked up using the intelligence available at the time – competent use of existing resources, not throwing money at new ones to be run by the same people whose incompetence led to the problem in the first place.
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I thoroughly recoomend you all opt out of the NHS Summary Care Record Database.
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As if President Barack Obama didn’t have enough on his platter, he’s calling for people accused of crimes to have their DNA samples collected and stored in a national database, whether they’re convicted or not. He’s a brave man to open that can of worms.
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Finance
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Analysts from the world over agree that today’s economic instability and resulting write-downs proved the most serious threat to the financial services organizations, and is by far the most prolonged crisis since the 1930s. The downturn continues to contaminate more sections of the markets, driving most companies to re-evaluate their strategic moves or risk bankruptcy. Equity values have become more volatile. Financial products and services are falling back in its demand amid the accelerating slowdown in the global economy leading to a dip in the business and consumer confidence.
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Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd will unveil financial-regulation legislation that may create a consumer division at the Federal Reserve with power to write rules that could be overturned by a systemic-risk council, according to a Senate aide with knowledge of the plan.
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I have warned my readers about following myths and legends versus reality and facts several times in the past, particularly as it applies to Goldman Sachs and what I have coined “Name Brand Investing”.
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N) has lost its bid to exclude a proposal on executive pay from its upcoming annual proxy filing, according to a response from U.S. securities regulators.
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We agree that he joined Goldman only in January 2002 (this was in our original post). But the latest revelations regarding the Goldman-Greece relationship (on the Senate floor, no less) clearly indicate that Goldman was a lead manager of Greek debt issues in spring 2002, i.e., when Mr. Draghi was on board.
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In its previous response to us, the the Bank of Italy pointed out that Mario Draghi (its current governor) did not join the management of Goldman Sachs until 2002 – hence he was not there when the controversial Greek “debt swaps” were arranged.
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The Sunday Telegraph also reported the European Union (EU) nations were preparing a “bailout package” for Greece that could exceed $34.4 billion as early as Monday the 15th, with Germany and France the main cash backers.
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Two articles in the New York Times today point up the need for financial sector reform and the problems doing it.
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Lehman Brothers executives weren’t the only ones in the building when they were moving billions of dollars in liabilities off their books at the end of each quarter with magic accounting. So were the Feds, The New York Times’s Andrew Ross Sorkin writes in his latest DealBook column.
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Congress Daily reported today that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said it would spend at least $3 million in a multi-state TV ad buy opposing Senate Banking Chairman Christopher Dodd’s (D-CN) bill to revamp the financial regulatory system. David Hirschmann, President of the Chamber’s Center for Capital Markets Competitiveness, said his organization would spend the money as the bill gets ready to be marked up and voted upon in the Senate Banking Committee next week.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Though Google is denying anything about its processes have changed, MSNBC.com reported Tuesday that searches on subjects that had been blocked as objectionable are yielding results. For example, searches on “Tiananmen Square massacre,” “Xinijang independence,” and “Tibet Information Network” all returned results. They would not have returned results before.
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Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has said he plans to introduce legislation by the end of next week that would require ISPs to block a blacklist of “refused classification” websites for all Australians.
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Any town U.S.A. You walk into a store and notice someone you recognize, from Facebook. But you really don’t know the individual; only online have you “met” that person. You have shared a note, or played a game on Facebook, Myspace, or other media website. You can choose to say hello or ignore them. That choice is up to you.
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Last Thursday, the Eleventh Circuit handed down a Fourth Amendment case, Rehberg v. Paulk, that takes a very narrow view of how the Fourth Amendment applies to e-mail. The Eleventh Circuit held that constitutional protection in stored copies of e-mail held by third parties disappears as soon as any copy of the communication is delivered. Under this new decision, if the government wants get your e-mails, the Fourth Amendment lets the government go to your ISP, wait the seconds it normally takes for the e-mail to be delivered, and then run off copies of your messages.
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Wikileaks, a website that aims to boost government transparency and accountability by publishing sensitive documents, has released a classified military counterintelligence analysis report that discusses the “threat posed to the US Army” by Wikileaks itself.
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Citizens United, fresh from its Supreme Court victory giving corporations the right to bankroll election campaigns, has sent a trademark demand letter to the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, complaining that a Facebook page entitled “Citizens United Against Citizens United” infringes its trademark. Apparently, Citizens United is worried that members of the public might come to the page and think that the organization “Citizens United” is attacking Citizens United, the landmark Supreme Court decision that it won.
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An angry Queens accountant has done the math: Craigslist plus an insult equals $1 million.
Leo Kehoe, 43, is suing the online bulletin board for allowing someone to call him a nasty name.
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Reporter Amy Wallace wrote an article late last year for Wired Magazine about the extremely heated and somewhat controversial debate over child vaccinations. In the course of the article, she quotes people from both sides. At one point, when one of the main doctors who supports vaccinations discusses the woman who has become the face (and voice) of the anti-vaccination crew, he responds to some of her claims by noting “she lies.” Apparently, those two words resulted in her filing a defamation lawsuit against the doctor and the reporter, Amy Wallace.
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DRM
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This means you will no longer be able to download replacement Digital Rights Management (DRM) ‘unlock’ licence keys for the WMA files you’ve bought from us is in the past – so you should back up your music and DRM licence keys now.
Any MP3 files you’ve downloaded from BigPond Music will not be affected.
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Gamers have long known that patience is rewarded with cheaper, less-buggy games. But does that adage hold true for the inclusion of digital rights management as well? Not always, but history does show us that time makes even the strictest of DRM less sucky.
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I’ve always thought that in a copyright free world (and de facto that is our online world now – whatever they law may proclaim) DRM had a role to play. Not the role of permanently putting content under lock and key – that isn’t feasible. But it is possible to use DRM on a short-term basis for new releases to give some short-term monopoly power – and this might provide some useful incentive for creation, while being largely self-limiting. By unlocking the content after a brief period of initial sales the incentive to crack the DRM is greatly reduced, while from a revenue point of view, most of the money is from the initial sales anyway.
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Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights
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Much of the talk by the big 6 publishers has been stress over cannibalization of print sales, or the idea of replacement sales, by ebooks. For midlist publishers such as ourselves, I believe we fight against substitution. We capture the “browser” market. If our title is not available or visible, a customer will simply substitute for another one in the genre. Free gave us the visibility that we could not purchase.
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There’s been something of a battle going on in the UK over news aggregators. Obviously, we’ve all heard about the various threats by companies like News Corp. in the US to sue Google over its Google News product, but a lot of this has already been playing out on a smaller scale in the UK. Last year we wrote about newspapers in the UK threatening aggregators like NewsNow, leading some to start blocking NewsNow crawlers. This is silly in the extreme. These aggregators offer links to the news. The “issue” with NewsNow is that it sells this as a service to companies — and the newspapers claim they deserve a cut. Note that NewsNow provides just a link and a headline and the tiniest of blurbs. It’s much less than even Google News provides. The newspapers seem to think that no one can profit from advertising their own stories unless they get a direct cut.
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Albini recently made at a conference about the music business, with a great quote about the focus of so many on royalties:
“Royalties are a means to pay producers in the future — and in perpetuity — based on record sales,” said Albini, who is also a music journalist. “If a band does a show, blows a whole bunch of minds and a bunch of people become fans and go out and buy millions of records, the producer gets paid. I think that’s ethically unsustainable.
“I don’t think you should pay a doctor extra because a patient doesn’t die. I think the doctor should be busting his ass for every patient. I don’t think I should get paid for someone else’s success.”
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As was leaked earlier this week, a study paid for by the International Chamber of Commerce has come out with ridiculously misleading and misguided report about how “piracy” is killing jobs all through Europe. The tagline is that it’s “costing” 1.2 million jobs and about $330 million. And, of course, that sort of report is the kind that the press loves, and so we get a series of headlines:
* Net piracy puts 1.2m EU jobs in peril, study shows
* Internet piracy taking big toll on jobs
* Illegal-file sharing could ‘cost billions’ by 2015
* Piracy threatens Europe’s creative industries
* EU must take ‘urgent’ action on piracy, report warns
And on and on and on and on. Of course, it’s not even close to true. The real story is that for certain companies who refuse to adapt and refuse to embrace what consumers want and what technology allows, modern technology will cause them to fail. However, at the same time, it has already opened up new opportunities and created new jobs while making it easier and more efficient to create, promote, distribute and consume content. Somehow, however, none of that seems to show up in these studies.
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Her current project — recently funded — has been to produce “Minute Memes.” These are short animated films which promote free culture ways of thinking about copyright, specifically intended to counter propaganda from industry copyright maximalists like the MPAA and the RIAA.
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Second, the bill expands the levy to audio recording devices, defined in C-499 as “a device that contains a permanently embedded data storage medium, including solid state or hard disk, designed, manufactured and advertised for the purpose of copying sound recordings, excluding any prescribed kind of recording device.” This covers everything – iPods, iPhones, Blackberries, Androids, iPads, personal computers. While the CPCC (the private copying collective) may not target all of these devices, there is nothing in the bill that prevents them from doing so.
Third, the bill deals solely with sound recordings, but there have already been calls to extend to video and other forms of content. Expanding the levy in this manner without addressing those issues leaves open the prospect of an even bigger levy in the future.
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The reggae artist is outraged over alleged similarities between his 80s song and Gorillaz’ new single, Stylo
[...]
Curious listeners can compare the songs for themselves (see below) – paying particular attention to Stylo’s drowsy three-note synth riff, 40 seconds in. In comments to the NME, Grant suggested Gorillaz’ publishers already visited a musicologist to evaluate this similarity. “[Normally] I would have gotten a call from EMI to say, ‘Damon [Albarn] wants to use Time Warp. What arrangement can you guys come to? Would you claim 100%, would you claim 60%, or 70% of whatever it is?’ That phone call never came. Instead what happened is somebody went straight to a musicologist, implying that there was some kind of pre-knowledge of some kind of infringement.”
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Google Inc accused Viacom Inc of secretly uploading its videos to YouTube even as the media conglomerate publicly denounced the online video site for copyright infringement, according to court documents made public on Thursday.
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For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately “roughed up” the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko’s to upload clips from computers that couldn’t be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt “very strongly” that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.
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Just as Davenport Lyons lawyers are being sent for disciplinary action over the firm’s practice of sending large numbers of “pay up or we sue” pre-settlement letters, ACS:Law, the shady firm that effectively spun out of Davenport Lyons to do the same thing is ramping up its efforts. This isn’t a huge surprise. Late last year, the firm said it was preparing to send out 30,000 letters, despite numerous studies showing that these letters regularly target innocent people, but scare many people into just paying to avoid a lawsuit.
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Mobile firm O2 has stepped into the row over thousands of controversial letters that are being sent to alleged illegal file-sharers in the UK.
It condemned the attempts “by rights holders and their lawyers to bully or threaten our customers”.
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ACTA/Digital Economy Bill
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KEI has learned that the European Union has proposed language in the ACTA negotiations to require criminal penalties for “inciting, aiding and abetting” certain offenses, including “at least in cases of willful trademark counterfeiting and copyright or related rights piracy on a commercial scale.”
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There’s a reason you don’t hear much about international trade agreements. They are kind of dull, and they’re usually not very controversial. But the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is different.
“One feels that you’re almost in a bit of a twilight zone,” says Michael Geist, a law professor at the University of Ottawa. “I mean, we’re talking about a copyright treaty. And it’s being treated as akin to nuclear secrets.”
For several years, the United States and other developed countries have been quietly working on ACTA. Geist has been one of the loudest critics of the proposed pact. He says it’s a counterfeiting agreement in name only, and he thinks the treaty would actually change some of the fundamental rules governing the Internet. But what makes Geist really angry is the way it’s been negotiated.
“Virtually none of it has been open to the public,” Geist says. “Even the early meetings were actually held in secret locations, so no one even knew where they were taking place.”
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We’ve written about the unhealthy secrecy around the ACTA treaty negotiations. As New Zealanders we believe we have a right to know what our government is doing on our behalf.
We wrote to the Ministry of Economic Development and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade to ask them some questions about ACTA under the Official Information Act. We just got our answers back (scanned PDFs of the MED letter – 3MB, MFAT letter – 3MB, and cabinet paper – 6MB) and we have to admit that we weren’t very surprised to see more excuses not to release official information than we saw information.
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The Australian Government has no intention of changing its domestic laws to harmonise with an international treaty on copyright, according to a spokesman for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT).
Scottish Parliamentarian Patrick Harvey 01 (2004)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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Posted in News Roundup at 6:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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· Announced Distro: PCLinuxOS 2010 Beta 1 Has KDE SC 4.4.1 and Plymouth
· Announced Distro: Frugalware 1.2 Comes with KDE 4
· Announced Distro: SME Server 7.5 RC1 and 8.0 Beta 5 Are Ready for Testing
· Announced Distro: Fedora 13 Alpha Released
· Announced Distro: Available Now: VortexBox 1.2
· Announced Distro: PC/OS 10.1 OpenWorkstation Final Released
· Announced Distro: Mandriva Linux 2010.1 Alpha 3 Is Here
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Some of us are still waiting for the year of the Linux desktop. Some think it’s already here. One thing is certain however, Linux does not have a majority desktop market share. By the time we get there, perhaps the entire idea of what a Desktop is will have been re-defined, thanks to “The Cloud”.
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The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world’s premier Linux certification organization (http://www.lpi.org), announced that its affiliate organization LPI-Portugal (http://www.lpi.com.pt) has signed an agreement with UMIC (http://www.umic.pt/), the Knowledge Society Agency of Portugal’s Ministry of Science, Technology and Education to promote training and certification of professional skills in the use of Linux, open source technologies and free software in higher education institutions in Portugal.
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What I do see being good for Linux is the growing size of the Linux community. Eventually, a software vendor will decide to start releasing its software for the Linux platform as well as x86-64 Mac and Win32. A company such as Adobe or Microsoft would then be dictating which distribution became dominant, but you would see other vendors follow that lead, and Linux would come screaming into the mainstream rather quickly, and I would talk to my boss, and I would start recommending Linux machines. I have a feeling that others in my position would do the same. The money to be made would be in keeping these commercial applications running. As an update broke the app, I would be called upon to fix things so that the application would once again run. I can see that being very lucrative indeed. How often is that cry of distress heard by Ubuntu users?
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Health
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Datalux announced an 19-inch panel PC intended for medical applications that runs Ubuntu Linux.
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Are you a practice, clinic or any other health care institution that is using medical open source software in daily routine? And wasn’t it quite hard for you to find the right software, to get it up and running and to finally customize it to your needs without having any experienced users or reference sites at hand?
Even a high number of downloads or a strong ‘activity percentile’ of an open source software project doesn’t tell you anything about the suitability for your purposes and in general about the stability and efficiency that are required for successful clinical practice.
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Desktop
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The HP 2133 Mini-Note PC also features a choice of 4GB SSD (Solid State Drive) flash module with Linux as well as standard hard disk drives for a superior computing experience.
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The library purchased 50 laptops with a Linux operating system. He said library officials are deciding whether the check out duration will be three days, seven days or a month.
“Right now [laptops] go out for four hours and you can’t check them out over night, which is not because we don’t want to, but the campus Microsoft license restricts how it can be used,” Tyckoson said. “Linux is an open source competitor to Microsoft.”
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Server
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SMEStorage, the multi cloud data access provider, have released the third beta of their Linux Cloud Drive which currently enables up to 10 commercial storage providers to be accessed directly from a virtual drive in Linux.
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IBM’s cloud environment includes support for Linux–through Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise from Novell–as well as Java (presumably supported directly by IBM.)
Interestingly, the underlying virtualization is powered by Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, the Red Hat branded and supported KVM offering, as opposed to Xen, which powers much of Amazon. IBM and Red Hat have long been partners, but it’s a huge boost for Red Hat’s virtualization efforts to get IBM on board in such a big way.
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Voxware, Inc., a leading supplier of voice picking software for warehousing operations, announced support for the IBM WebSphere application server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system. A major US retailer has chosen this technology stack for the rollout of their Voxware 3 voice picking solution.
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As one of the early pioneers of VDI based on top of a Linux hypervisor platform, Virtual Bridges has been competing with VMware, Citrix and Microsoft in the emerging VDI market.
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GMO had to consider their primary applications: MySQL, Postgres, and Apache. To define their direction, GMO queried the community to find what they are using for their Linux-based replication needs. With DRBD’s reputation and recent acceptance into the Linux Kernel (2.6.33), LINBIT came with high recommendation from the experts. DRBD’s ease of use, absence of vendor lock-in, simple installation and upgrade path made GMO’s decision a simple one.
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Saw an interesting article today that out of the top 10 supercomputers in the world, 9 of them are running some variant of Linux. On top of this a whopping 85% of the Top 500 supercomputers in the world run some form of the open source OS too.
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Columbus lets mainframe users move legacy data and documents to lower cost z/Linux platform
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Graphics Stack
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While NVIDIA has been working on the 195.xx Linux driver since before last November, they have yet to officially release a stable driver in this series as of yet. Betas have been available and they even had to recall their recent drivers over a fan speed issue that could damage the system, but now they are finally getting ready to push out a stable release.
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Applications
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ABBYY Europe, makers of FineReader OCR software, has announced a command line version of its FineReader Engine 8.0. Previous versions have required use of ABBYY’s SDK version to create applications which make use of the company’s proprietary OCR technology, but the new command line version can be driven from the console or incorporated in shell scripts or web server processing for a simpler integration process. ABBYY have had an OCR offering on Linux since 2003, and brought its FineReader Engine 8.0 SDK to the open source operating system in 2007.
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One month later, it teamed up with Nokia to create Meego, a hybrid of Intel’s own Moblin OS and Nokia’s Maemo. This platform will offer one Linux-based development ecosystem that will give developers one build across phones, netbooks and potentially tablets, e-readers, in-car and more.
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At their heart, note-taking apps perform a very simple function: put letters on the screen. They differ widely, though, in the special features each offers.
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Since our collection of Free and Open Source finance/accounting software for Linux has been quite popular, I would like to add 7 more to that list. As I’ve said before, finance or accounting software will prove valuable for those who have small or medium-sized business as it will allow users to do important tasks like recording and processing accounting transactions within functional modules such as accounts receivable, accounts payable, payroll, and trial balance.
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Exaile music player is released, the n ew release come with many new features and many bugs fixed, now in the new version is including a completely revamped and much more powerful tag editor, an equalizer, Collection panel should now be faster , better support for non-standard filename encodings, standalone lyrics pane plugin, Plugins for DAAP music sharing support, better display of compilation albums.
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The Yorba developers have released version 0.5.0 of their open source Shotwell photo manager for the GNOME desktop. In addition to the usual stability and performance improvements, this major update to the free digital photo organiser includes a number of changes and new features.
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Instructionals
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OpenOffice.org is the greatest open source alternative to Microsoft’s Office suite. Over the years OpenOffice has evolved to become much more than just an alternative to MS Office however. Let’s look at some hacks that will allow you to become more of a power user of OpenOffice, enabling you to be more productive with the software.
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Games
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Here’s the May 15, 2010 release of the TrackMania United Forever / TrackMania Nations Forever dedicated server for Linux.
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It’s not going to happen overnight, games developers will need to become comfortable developing cross-platform titles for release on PC and Mac, and they will have to gain confidence in the ability of both OpenGL to keep up with GPU development, and of Unix GPU drivers to attain the same quality as their windows counterparts, but if by the end of 2010 we have at least a couple of AAA titles released as native Linux versions, such as ID’s Rage, then other developers may look to follow their lead in 2011.
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GNOME Desktop
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We will be launching a survey this week asking GNOME developers who they work for, and whether they have worked for other companies previously – because of the widespread use of gnome.org email addresses in GNOME, unfortunately it has not always been easy to identify companies behind the people. We also want qualitative information on projects you work on, whether you work on GNOME in your free time, and more. We are be breaking down GNOME development by core platform, external dependencies, GNOME desktop, GNOME hosted applications and other GNOME applications. Vanessa will be sending out a very short survey to everyone who has committed to GNOME, and we need your help to make the census as useful as possible to the GNOME project.
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Well, if you follow the active development of GNOME as much as I do, you may have heard of two recent technologies actively being developed. They are Zeitgeist and the GNOME Activity Journal. What are they? Well, Zeitgeist is a little, unobtrusive daemon that ticks quietly away in the background and records every file you access, every image you edit, essentially every event you perform on your computer and keeps a chronological Journal of this information for other applications to use. This is the core engine that runs quietly in the background. The frontend to this is the GNOME Activity Journal – an application that allows you to browse and search through Zeitgeist’s recordings of your activities and interact with that information. One of the developers of the GNOME Activity Journal posted a very handy video showing it in action. I use it myself and it is very handy. I also use Docky2 on my desktop that has Zeitgeist interaction. One of the options when you right-click on a launcher in Docky2 is the Journal entry, that allows you to browse through recent events and files accessed in that particular application. A stroke of genius. Again here’s a handy little video demonstrating Docky2 with Zeitgeist integration.
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There is usually no distribution that will perfectly fit everyones needs. Each one has its own strengths and weaknesses which will vary from person to person. This article covers all the major advantages (and disadvantages) each of these distributions have to offer and will hopefully give you enough information to help guide you in choosing which Linux Distribution is right for your computer.
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The latest release is eBox Platform 1.4-1, the new release fixed a lot of bug and comes with some small improvements since.
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New Releases
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Mandriva has announced the availability of the first point update to version 5 of its Enterprise Server commercial Linux distribution. Mandriva Enterprise Server 5.1 includes all of the distributions previous updates and a number of improvements.
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The GeeXboX developers have announced the availability of the second alpha of version 2.0 of their small embedded Linux distribution aimed at Home Theatre PCs (HTPC) and media centres. The latest development release addresses a number of bugs from last month’s first alpha and includes several changes.
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After the announcements of KDE, KDE64 and Fluxbox editions of the current Linux Mint 8 (Helena) operating system, Clement Lefebvre and the Linux Mint community are once again proud to present today the first release candidate of the upcoming Linux Mint 8 LXDE Community Edition. Being powered by Linux kernel 2.6.31, the new edition includes X.Org 7.4, Openbox 3.4.7.2 and PCManFM 0.5.2. The Linux Mint 8 RC1 LXDE Edition has been created for people who want a fast, lightweight and good-looking operating system, for their antique hardware.
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Berry Linux is a Live CD Linux distribution based on Fedora and aimed mostly at the Japanese market.
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Red Hat Family
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THE SYMBIAN FOUNDATION has turned to the open source outfit Red Hat as the basis for a new private, cloud-based developer website and server.
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Red Hat, Inc. /quotes/comstock/13*!rht/quotes/nls/rht (RHT 30.72, +0.05, +0.16%) , the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that the Symbian Foundation, a global non-profit organization formed to foster an open source community around its mobile device software, has adopted Red Hat Enterprise Linux to provide a scalable, high-performance base for its private, cloud-based developer website and server.
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The company has surprised some commentators with the decision to base the system on virtualisation software from enterprise open source vendor Red Hat, rather than the more commonly used Xen open source hypervisor.
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Red Hat’s implementation of KVM is the virtualization underpinning of the new software test and development service for the IBM Cloud. Red Hat hopes that vote of confidence will persuade enterprises to try KVM in their own IT shops.
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Open source solutions outfit Red Hat will host its third annual EMEA partner summit in Valencia, Spain from May 2nd to 5th 2010. This year’s event will focus on open source middleware, cloud computing and virtualisation, while highlighting the strength of the Red Hat partner ecosystems and its potential for growth in the EMEA market.
“The technology landscape is constantly evolving. With the introduction of cloud computing and virtualisation coupled with a full portfolio of open source middleware, we want to ensure that our partners are equipped with the latest training and information on these offerings to help them deliver better solutions and higher value to their customers,” said Petra Heinrich, senior director, partners and alliances EMEA region at Red Hat. “The Red Hat and JBoss EMEA partner summit will address these current market trends.”
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At the inaugural Open Source Business Conference in 2004, the discussion centered on how to fund open source’s survival. Just six years later, the OSBC conversation has taken a 180-degree shift to focus on whether proprietary software’s shelf life is nearing its end as open-source software economics increasingly drive technology innovation.
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Debian Family
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The Debian project was given a new server from Thomas Krenn AG, Intel and Adaptec for its image building. With the Dual-Xeon computer the build process was reduced from 20 to two hours.
New in Debian’s infrastructure is the SC846 server with a 4-unit height and two Intel Xeon E5540 processors. While the previous five-year-old system took 20 hours for a build, the new one took less than two hours, according to the project and its benefactor, Thomas Krenn AG, in a joint press release.
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MEPIS has released SimplyMEPIS 8.5.00, RC3 of MEPIS 8.5, now available from MEPIS and public mirrors. The ISO files for 32 and 64 bit processors are SimplyMEPIS-CD_8.5.00-rc3_32.iso and SimplyMEPIS-CD_8.5.00-rc3_64.iso respectively. Deltas are also available.
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Ubuntu
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One thing that we have been really keen to facilitate in Ubuntu is an ethos of just do it. I really believe our community should feel engaged to be creative in their ideas and be able to get out there and do it, with plenty of support resources so others can help them achieve their goals. I am keen that we don’t have a bottleneck where creativity is limited. Of course, this happens from time to time, but we are always keen to resolve it where possible.
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I thought Linux in general and Xorg in particular were throwing those of us with “older” Intel video chips under the virtual bus. I couldn’t even get Ubuntu Lucid Lynx (10.04) Alpha 3 to boot on my Intel 830m (aka i830m and in my case Intel 82830 CGC)-equipped laptops, where my old standby of dropping i915.modeset=0 or nomodeset on the boot line would clear things up.
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Variants
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Trent and I were both looking forward to the release of the Linux Mint LXDE Community Edition for various reasons. Luckily for us, Kendall (maintainer of the Linux Mint Fluxbox CE) pointed us to the .iso for RC1, which is what we’re using as the basis for this review. Since we both have feedback on this CE, we’re trying a Trent Says/Joe Says model. Enjoy!
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The installer was the familiar Ubiquity installer used by Ubuntu and Linux Mint alike, which was not an issue on my hardware — though Ubiquity can be an issue if you’re running less than 256 Mb of RAM. While you may scoff at that, some people are looking to lighter weight releases like this one as an option for resurrecting old hardware, so keep that in mind if you’re thinking about giving this or any other distro which uses the Ubiquity installer a try.
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The NYT says the service—with the apropos name ‘Google TV’—is being developed in conjunction with Sony (NYSE: SNE) and Intel; (NSDQ: INTC) the testing, meanwhile, is being done with the Dish Network.
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Measuring at just 2 x 2 x 2.2 inches this is the smallest Desktop PC. And it’s running Linux, one more point for Linux coolness.
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Intel announced a SOHO-oriented network-attached storage (NAS) reference platform based on its D410 and dual-core D510 “Pineview” Atom processors and 82801R I/O controller. NAS vendors LaCie, LG Electronics, Qnap, Synology, and Thecus will incorporate the Linux-compatible platform in upcoming NAS devices, starting with the Blu-ray burner-equipped LG N4B2, says Intel.
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AccessKey IP is shipping a Linux-based IP set-top box (STB) and related secure USB key for viewing encrypted IPTC broadcasts. The AccessKey Home STB offers a security-enabled HD IPTV service that can be combined with digital terrestrial, satellite, or cable reception, while the USB key can bring the same secure IPTV service to PCs, the company says.
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The “6WINDGate SDS” profile is optimized for platforms in which the networking Fast Path runs on dedicated cores without the overhead of a Linux-based Slow Path.
Carmes said 6WINDGate’s architecture removes the complexity of integrating high-performance packet processing with the Linux environment, because it fully synchronizes the Fast Path and Linux, while preserving Linux APIs.
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The MathWorks has announced the latest release of its MATLAB and Simulink product families, writes Richard Wilson, which include new streaming capabilities for signal processing and video processing in MATLAB and nonlinear solvers for standard and large-scale optimisation.
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Wind River announced that its Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) operating system, development tools, and build system now supports HP BladeSystem carrier-grade and enterprise server blades. Wind River Linux 3.0 is the first registered CGL 4.0 distribution supported on HP ProLiant server blades for the HP BladeSystem, claims Intel subsidiary Wind River.
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The CAK-2000 supports Linux, and is available with an optional copy of Freescale’s Vortiqa, a Linux-based software development platform for optimizing firewall, IPSec-VPN, IPS, anti-virus, and anti-spam software for multi-core QorIQ and PowerQUICC SoCs. The network appliance is said to comply with FCC/CE, UL, and RoHS/WEEE.
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If you’re a really hardcore techie, you’ll be able to use the ‘Fun Plug’ system to install apps on your NAS to add functionality. Be warned though, this isn’t a beginner feature and requires at least some technical understanding of Linux.
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Standard controllers for dataplane applications, including one Linux-optimized model. Based on Tensilica’s configurable, 32-bit RISC “Xtensa” architecture, the five upward-compatible processor cores include a Diamond Standard 233L processor with a Linux-optimized MMU, and are claimed to be 15 percent faster and more power efficient than earlier models.
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GE Intelligent Platforms announced a Linux-ready AdvancedTCA single board computer with an option for Intel’s new Xeon 5600 processors. The dual-Xeon A10200 offers up to six cores clocked to 2GHz, plus 12MB of L3 cache per CPU, and offers dual 10 gigabit Ethernet interfaces and four gigabit Ethernet interfaces, says the company.
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Timesys announced that its LinuxLink commercial software development framework for building custom embedded Linux based products now supports the latest networking processor from Wintegra. Now shipping in volume, the dual MIPS 34K core “WinPath 3″ IP packet processor is designed for 2G, 3G, and 4G mobile and fixed wireless base stations, says the company.
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MontaVista
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I had a great interview with the architects of MontaVista Software’s 1-second boot-time real-time Linux. After the interview went to press it occurred to me to ask Alexander Kaliadin a related question. If smart people like him can figure out how to boot a computer in less than a second, is it also possible to turn the computer off in a short time? His answer was that you could possibly just flip the power switch, if the hardware was designed to allow this. His response and elaboration are below.
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I mentioned to Alex that I would like to publish the above comments in my blog and he was nice enough to elaborate on them in the following communication:
In a typical desktop box, the proper Linux shutdown process will involve flushing disk caches, closing multiple files and un-mounting drives (local or networked). Depending on the use case, certain daemons or processes may wait for various operations to complete in order to proceed with the shutdown process.
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MontaVista® Software, LLC, the leader in embedded Linux® commercialization announced it has been elected to the Board of Directors of the GENIVI Alliance, an automotive and consumer electronics industry association driving the development and adoption of an open In-vehicle Infotainment (IVI) reference platform. MontaVista was a Core member of GENIVI in it’s inaugural year, and now assumes a seat on the board as GENIVI enters it’s second year. Dan Cauchy, vice president of Marketing at MontaVista will sit on the GENIVI board.
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NanoNote
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The Qi Hardware 本 NanoNote – also known as the Ben NanoNote, and pictured over on Engadget – is a Linux-based palmtop with QWERTY keyboard designed to be hacked into anything your heart desires: a media player, a note-taking tool, a Wikipedia reader, an RSS aggregator, or whatever you can imagine.
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Phones
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STMicroelectronics announced a design win for its new ARM-based SPEAr 300 SoC, which it says drives the Linux-based Snom 870 VoIP phone. The Snom 870 offers a 4.3-inch color touchscreen, gigabit Ethernet and USB connectivity, plus an integrated XML browser, says Snom.
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Nokia
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Following the release of MeeGo, a software platform resultant from the partnership between Intel and Nokia, and also the successor to the Linux-based Maemo operating system, Nokia seems to be undecided on whether its flagship smartphone N900 will receive the upgrade.
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VoX Communications announced it will resell Nokia’s Maemo Linux-based N900 smartphone with a mobile VoIP plan offering unlimited data and voice service. Meanwhile, Nokia confirmed that the N900 will be the first smartphone to run the Moblin/Maemo mashup, MeeGo, when a preliminary version of the operating system debuts at the end of the month.
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Android
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Google has released an unlocked version of its Android-based Nexus One phone that’s compatible with the 3G networks of AT&T and Roger Wireless. Meanwhile, a Flurry report claims that the Nexus One sold far fewer units in its first two months than the iPhone and the Motorola Droid did in theirs, says eWEEK.
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Google insists its pull-out won’t impact Android, but can we really be certain? Can Google really be certain?
Hassling HTC, quietly putting out the word to others not to support Android, could delay Google considerably. If China wanted it could tell its courts to encourage Apple to file suit there, saying it was only seeking to protect patent rights. It could tell Taiwan that Android is provocative.
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Google expects its Android mobile operating system to “flourish” in China, Google’s chief financial officer said Monday amid a two-month standoff with Beijing over Web censorship and cyberattacks.
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Mobile platforms like Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android have become a key focus for open source developers. And the trend is only increasing, though new research has found that over the course of the last year, there has been a shift in which mobile platform has the most open source development activity.
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And just like that, we now have the date for the official Motorola Droid’s Android 2.1 update. It was just approved today and will be rolled out in batches of 250,000 starting this Thursday, March 18, at high noon (EDT). So if you don’t get it in the first batch, hang on for a little bit. Or, even better, once we have the download link it should be no problem to apply the update manually, just as we did for Android 2.0.1.
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Tablets
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The iPad isn’t even out yet, and a jailbreak is already in the works for its OS version 3.2 by Joshua Hill, member of the Chronic Dev team. According to BlogsDNA, Joshua has tweeted some images of the GreenPois0n (running on Linux) and asked for donations from those who are interested in the iPad jailbreak.
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The Open Source Geospatial Foundation, or OSGeo, is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to support and promote the collaborative development of open geospatial technologies and data. OSGeo also serves as an outreach and advocacy organization for the open source geospatial community, and provides a common forum and shared infrastructure for improving cross-project collaboration.
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WANdisco, a leading provider of infrastructure software for replication, scalability, high availability and commercial sponsor of the Subversion open source project, today announced that Stefan Küng, the lead developer for TortoiseSVN has joined the company. Mr. Küng, who has been working on TortoiseSVN since its inception, will lead WANdisco’s efforts to support and enhance this popular Subversion client for Windows as part of its sponsorship and support of the Subversion open source project.
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So, like investing, one must weigh risk versus monetary reward. Though these- and other- open source software providers can offer many of the same services as the higher priced options, you will likely have to pay something and must make an educated estimate of the level of risk associated with use.
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When I first found out about open source software, I felt the sky was the limit — with the source code, I could do anything now! But after working on open source ERP for the last seven years, I’ve come to realize that customizing software, even open source software, should not be taken lightly. I recently spoke with Phil Simon, long-time enterprise software veteran and author of The Next Wave of Technologies and Why New Systems Fail, and asked him for his thoughts on when you should customize open source software such as ERP and CRM.
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Google
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Google Code, an online resource for developers, has announced the launch of a new Subversion server to celebrate its fifth birthday.
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Google March 12 launched its extensions for Google Wave, a move to boost the open-source, real-time collaboration platform’s functionality with the help of outside application developers. New extensions include trip app Trippy; Mind Map, to let users build visual workflows; Waffle, a time management tool; and Poll, a gadget for taking polls. These apps should come in handy for regular Wave users, who are using Wave for very different purposes, but all in the name of real-time collaboration.
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Servers
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This Enterprise-level solution will provide an open source, direct-to-consumer (D2C) web infrastructure for music recording labels and other media segments that need to accelerate content delivery online, scale rapidly to respond to fan demand, and create new revenue streams.
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This past week, we had 93 people respond to the question:
‘Is There A Place For Open-Source in the Data Center?” The respondents were pretty much in full support of the open approach. Of the 93 people who responded, 83 said, yes, there is a place for open-source. But we wonder what it will take to get such a movement to a pace of note. We do have faith in the open-source way but how will this effort transfer to the data center?
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By the end of April, Standing Cloud will be offering its “community edition” which will allow you to install and operate open source apps permanently for a very reasonable fee. Standing Cloud will be offering other cloud based, open source packages throughout the year.
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Education
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A computing device for every teacher and student so they can access the Internet at school or at home? That, along with an embrace of cloud computing, Creative Commons, and open-source technologies is part of a new set of recommendations from the U.S. Department of Education.
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We have long complained that Becta’s very public conversion to the virtues of Open Source software is a little longer on words than it is on action.
The suspicion is that they are playing ‘lip-service’ to FOSS while the edu-world continues to spend millions of pounds of money they no longer have (sacking staff as a result..oh the crocodile tears) on expensive proprietary products… exactly as before.
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Events
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Welcome to the Flourish 2010 Open Source Conference site! Our goal is to promote the use of open source and provide a gathering place for open source enthusiasts in the Chicagoland area. This will be our fourth Flourish Conference, and although times are tough, this year we’re working even harder to make this conference the best one yet!
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The CE Linux Forum (CELF) is once again sponsoring a free technical demonstration room for embedded open source projects at this year’s Embedded Linux Conference (ELC) on Apr. 13 in San Francisco. Demonstrations should cover embedded technology that offers software available under GPL or LGPL compatible licenses, says CELF.
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rSmart, the provider of enterprise support for open source application software in education, today announced its participation in The Chair Academy’s 19th Annual International Conference for Post-Secondary Leaders being held this March 15-18, 2010 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
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The workshop will include three hands-on breakout sessions, one aimed at new users interested in starting a hub with the open source release, as well as current users who want to learn more about the hub technology. The other two breakout sessions will focus on research software developers and on Web developers working with hubs.
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Ingres Vice President Deb Woods to Discuss How Appliances are Changing the Face of Software and Technical Account Manager Tyler McGraw to Shed Light on New Partnership
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Open-Xchange
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Now, Open-Xchange, the open source email specialist, is making a similar move. Open-Xchange expects more than 15 million users to run its software by the end of 2010. At the same time, Open-Xchange is partnering up with 4PSA to introduce a unified communications bundle.
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Open-source collaboration software vendor Open-Xchange has integrated VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) and social networking sites in the latest version of its e-mail server and client.
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Open-Xchange, a provider of business-class open source collaboration software, today announced enhancements that give users telephone and fax integrated with e-mail, contacts, calendar and task information.
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Open-source e-mail and collaboration software vendor Open-Xchange has done a little collaborating itself to offer an enhanced unified communications product set that includes telephone and fax integrated with e-mail, contacts, calendar and task information.
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Mozilla
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Firefox Logo Mozilla has confirmed that version 3.0 of its popular open source Firefox web browser is approaching its end-of-life (EOL).
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If it were not for Mozilla and its numerous open source projects that saved us from the IE Dark Ages, the browser market today would definitely be very different. In 2010, the Firefox browser is facing some pretty tough competition from the likes of Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 8 (v9 is actually good), Safari and Opera, all modern and feature-packed web browsers. With Windows’ new ballot screen, things might become even more interesting.
The Web Browser is evolving at a mind-bogglingly rapid pace, and the changes it went through in 2009 only are incredible. That is why I was really happy for a chance to talk to Asa Dotzler, community coordinator for Firefox marketing projects, who has been with Mozilla for 12 years. This is my first interview and I hope you’ll enjoy reading Mr Dotzler’s answers as much as I did. We cover Firefox, Mozilla and the new Web. Don’t forget to check out Asa’s blog for even more on the topic.
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Currently Mozilla has a Firefox 3.7 developer preview available, testing all kinds of new features including out-of-process plugins (something that IE 9 isn’t currently testing). It’s a real browser with back button, tabs and address bar and it resembles the real world modern browser. It enables developers to actually see how the browser will work and doesn’t try to hide its flaws by limiting critical functions.
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Databases
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Dealing with the terabytes of data generated by users online and serving up relationships tied to that data quickly are forcing web-scale sites like Twitter, Reddit and Facebook to investigate a variety of home-built, open sourced and hardware solutions, and reject as many closed-source software (such as Oracle) and specialized hardware solutions as possible.
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Sun
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OpenSSO is one of the best (if it isn’t the best one) open source web Single Sign On projects out there. Sun Microsystems on 2008 open-sourced one of their products called Access Manager, and rebranded it as OpenSSO. But it’s sad to see how Oracle after Sun acquisition, is slowly shutting down this amazing open source project, marking it as “not strategic” and dismembering the few parts they think are worth for their own SSO product. They started on December by freezing the next express release, and during the last few weeks they have slowly started to remove all the open source downloads from OpenSSO website. Last but not least, they have also started to remove content from the wiki. Now, the only download available is the enterprise version, which is buried very deeply at Oracle’s website (it took me like 15 minutes to find it, it isn’t even listed as an Oracle product),and the patch sets that also were free to download, are now only available to paying customers with a valid support contract.
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But here it comes the awesomeness of the open source community: A Norwegian company called ForgeRock has stepped up to give OpenSSO a new home and continue developing OpenSSO under a new name: OpenAM (because of copyright issues with the name). They claim they will conitnue with Sun’s original roadmap for the product, and they have started to make available again all of the express builds, including agents, that were removed from OpenSSO’s site, and a new wiki with all the content that once was available at dev.java.net.
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Last week was a really big week — perhaps the biggest ever — for open source simplified sign-Ope on in general and OpenID in particular.
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Not quite as momentous, and having nothing to do with OpenID, another SSO service was released into the wild as open source. I was really amazed by MetaPass SSO when I saw it two years ago (“MetaPass’ single sign-on package enables administrators to create scripts visually”) and now it’s open source. Windows, Mac, and Linux executables and source-code of MetaPass SSO are available for download on the MetaPass Web site and on major open source Web sites (such as SourceForge). MetaPass is definitely an enterprise (not a consumer, or “user-centric”) SSO solution. If you are friendly with “roll your own” software for your organization it’s definitely worth a look.
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With the news last month that Oracle would be shutting down development resources for Project Wonderland, the open-source virtual world platform originally supported by Sun Microsystems, associated developers began looking for alternatives. Last week saw the launch of the Open Wonderland Foundation, a non-profit devoted to providing a free and open-source platform for virtual worlds based on Project Wonderland.
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CMS
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I chose WordPress as my general-purpose framework, even though it’s theoretically a blogging platform, for a number of reasons. First of all, it’s backed by a company, yet still has a large number of independent contributors. This is probably the best way of keeping code up to date and viable commercially, while still using the Open Source model. New features, bug fixes, and security patches are thus released relatively often, and it doesn’t hurt that you can now update WordPress with a single click. Secondly, there are a phenomenal number of freely available, high quality themes and plugins that allow you to easily customize not only the look and feel, but also the functionality of your WordPress site. Finally, the total interoperability of WordPress with other platforms is second to none, so your site will be able to handle everything from Google Maps to SEO to AdSense to iPhone capability from day one. Don’t believe it? That’s why I’m here to teach you how to do it all.
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As an open source project, WordPress is licensed under the General Public License (GPL). The code for WordPress is created both by Automattic developers as well as a community of hundreds of third-party developers. The open source nature of the product means it can be used by anyone and for anything without paying a licence fee.
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A little later Matt Mullenweg took to the stage. Matt is the charismatic and high-profile founder of Automattic Inc and WordPress, the world’s most successful open-source blogging software, powering over 200 million websites.
He chatted intimately with the audience about the founding of his company and the driving philosophies behind its success. He also shared his views on the future of blogging and open-source software development. One interesting story was that he founded Automattic with three other people from around the world, including another Irish developer. These four people had never met physically but knew each other via their web-based interactions. This created enough of a bond for them to start a company together, one that has been very successful.
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We also use open source throughout our production and testing environments. The Verical Marketplace is deployed on servers running the Linux operating system. This open source operating system is of high-quality and performs better than most of the operating systems available for purchase. In addition, we were able to use commodity hardware that further reduces our cost of deployment. Testing is aided using open source products including JUnit and Apache JMeter.
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The service, called Drupal Gardens, is in beta testing now with a “couple of thousand” users, said Dries Buytaert, who created Drupal and cofounded Acquia to build a commercial business around it. The service will be based on Drupal 7, an upgrade to the CMS software that will be released at about the same time, Buytaert said at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco on Wednesday.
Drupal is a software platform for publishing Web sites and managing text, images and other content on those sites. It has been used by individuals to publish blogs and by larger organizations, including the White House and NASA, to run their Web sites.
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Funding
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Magento currently has over 60,000 merchants using its software, which was downloaded about 1.5 million times as of January 2010. The company also says they’ve registered over $15 billion in transactions to date. The roadmap for the future is apparently paved with additional products, with a number of “Mobile Commerce, Saas offering and other products/services” coming later this year.
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Security
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For many people network security starts and stops with firewalls. The foundational technology of perimeter based security, firewalls have grown more complex and sophisticated over the years. Today keeping your firewall rule set tuned and managing complex firewall configurations is a job often best left to experts. A new open source tool, Flint offers help though.
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Open-source security infrastructure can be taken to the next step by augmenting it with commercial solutions, according to Gabriel Mizrahi, vice president technologies at Commtouch.
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The UTM (unified threat management) offering, called Ubiq-Freedom, is available under an open-source license, and includes popular open-source software such as Squid caching proxy for the Web and IP tables for the firewall, said Debasheesh Bagchi [CQ], Wep’s program head for Ubiq-Freedom.
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Releases
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Harvard University has released Profiles Research Networking Software, a form of social networking and expertise mining technology, to the open source community. Developed with the support of Harvard Catalyst | The Harvard Clinical and Translational Science Center, the software is now broadly available to institutions seeking a web-based means of facilitating collaboration among their academic researchers.
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To date, opentaps has had over 500,000 downloads from SourceForge.net and has been used by companies ranging from Fortune 500 to midsize manufacturers, retailers, and online retailers to small startups.
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Terracotta is offering its first major update to Ehcache in its 2.0 version since the firm acquired the open source product last fall.
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Government
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At least on paper, thanks to CaroCandidato, Free Software may have a voice this year in many of the regional councils assisting the governors. As of March 17th, the 2010 edition of the campaign has already enlisted more than 100 candidates from all parties. Citizens visiting the website can easily find, sorted by party or electoral district, which regional candidates have signed the Pact for these elections.
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Licensing
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You DO NOT need permission to access it, modify it and/or distribute it. However, depends on the open source license, commercializing it may or may not be restricted.
Without a defining open source license that the government can slap on each software project, there is no option but to revert back to the old ways of protecting intellectual property.
The problem is this – the government can claim that the software source code is freely available to the public, but you need permission. Here’s the twist, there is NO guarantee that permission will be granted.
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Openness
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Some of that is already going on. In a follow-up, Torkington links to a few posts from the Open Knowledge Foundation, which has come up with a Open Knowledge Definition (OKD) taken from the Open Source Initiative’s Open Source Definition. This includes everything from content like movies and books to government info, and sets 11 criteria that a work has to meet to be considered “open.”
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That’s the viewpoint of Peter Semmelhack, founder and CEO of Bug Labs, whose modular, open source hardware company aims to fix that shortcoming by making it easier for people and companies to create their own electronics products using a Linux processor module, a camera module, a touchscreen LCD module and so on.
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Probably the best known open-source software is the Linux operating system but this is only one example. The mountain of software that open-source developers have created is robust enough to be used by big corporations and cutting-edge enough to have become incorporated into the latest mobile phones and laptops. But importantly, it has saved on development costs. It has been estimated that producing the open-source software we have today, using traditional means, would cost $387 billion and take 2.1 million people-years of development.
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Programming
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The above results show that as a Python web developer we have lots of different methods to deploy our applications. Some of these seem to perform better than others but by focussing only on server performance I will not justify most of the tested servers as they differ greatly in functionality. Also, if you are going to take some stock web framework and won’t do any optimizations or caching the performance of your webserver is not going to matter as this will not be the bottleneck. If there is one thing which made this benchmark clear is that most Python Web servers offer great performance and if you feel things are slow the first thing to look at is really your own application.
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TV bosses in the US have apologised after preview clips of the Playboy channel were accidentally played out on two children’s channels.
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Science
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China supplies most of the rare earth minerals found in technologies such as hybrid cars, wind turbines, computer hard drives and cell phones, but the U.S. has its own largely untapped reserves that could safeguard future tech innovation.
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Giant filaments of cold dust stretching through our Galaxy are revealed in a new image from ESA’s Planck satellite. Analysing these structures could help to determine the forces that shape our Galaxy and trigger star formation.
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In a surprising discovery about where higher life can thrive, scientists for the first time found a shrimp-like creature and a jellyfish frolicking beneath a massive Antarctic ice sheet.
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Security
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Encrypt or create a hidden OS with TrueCrypt
Even if Windows is password protected, thieves can still access all your files, for example, with a Linux-based LiveCD. To protect your documents and privacy, you can encrypt your data. TrueCrypt is a great open source solution.
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The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit Tuesday demanding that the government disclose the legal basis for its use of unmanned drones to conduct targeted killings overseas.
In particular, the lawsuit asks for information on when, where and against whom drone strikes can be authorized, the number and rate of civilian casualties and other basic information essential for assessing the wisdom and legality of using armed drones to conduct targeted killings.
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More than 100 drivers in Austin, Texas found their cars disabled or the horns honking out of control, after an intruder ran amok in a web-based vehicle-immobilization system normally used to get the attention of consumers delinquent in their auto payments.
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Environment
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Ten sites on the seabed off the north coast of Scotland have been leased out to power companies in an effort to generate wave and tidal energy.
In the first project of its kind in the world, areas in the Pentland Firth and around Orkney have been leased to seven companies by the Crown Estate.
Jim Gettys, HP computer scientist (2004)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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