Posted in Europe, Microsoft at 12:02 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Reasonable suspicion that Microsoft paid to remove Freedom software from Dutch schools
THIS WEB site has a unique archive of EDGI exhibits. These are antitrust items that Microsoft paid to hide — court exhibits which show quite clearly how Microsoft abuses its monopoly power to pretty much bribe its way into deals and detail prospective deals of the competition, notably Free/open source and GNU/Linux. We would like to draw attention to the following couple of links from this week:
In 1944/1945 my father risked his life to liberate The Netherlands from tyranny and now the Ministry of Education has submitted the school system to another tyranny, M$’s lock-in, without a fight. The Netherlands has been very friendly to FLOSS. Why this turnabout? Has EDGI been at work?
Dutch education authorities have decided to throw out their government’s open standards policy and instead lock in to Microsoft proprietary software for years to come, according to open-source advocates.
Marja Bijsterveldt, the Netherlands’ secretary of education, said that she was unwilling to force open standards on educational institutions, sparking an outcry from open-source advocates who say that Dutch students using free software or devices without Silverlight-support will find themselves locked out of schools’ online systems.
The open standards policy was approved by the Dutch Parliament in 2007, but has not been fully implemented. Now, free software advocates are starting a new battle to make the use of open standards mandatory for all publicly funded institutions.
Clearly we’ve a long way to go before The Linux Foundation or RMS can put their stamp of approval on our revue — all our media files use proprietary codecs and file formats; likewise, our audio and video cues are executed from the booth on proprietary software rather than FOSS alternatives.
Even so, I’d wager that a lot of people in my local comedy racket would think they’d need a Mac or Windows laptop to play such a critical part in a show like this. They’d be wrong.
One measure of GNU/Linux’s success in mindshare is how it is perceived by the public. A whole generation of kids who watch TV are seeing Tux the penguin, mascot of Linux, on commercials for Fruit Loops breakfast cereal. What do you make of this?
Much has been written about how the Internet has revolutionized collaboration and made it possible for your brilliant ideas to make a difference no matter where you live on the planet. Bill Gates is famously quoted in Nick Kristoff’s “The World is Flat” that “… so many people can plug and play from anywhere, natural talent has started to trump geography.” This is of course true, but even with the Internet, there is no replacement for face-to-face interaction. The tribe, it seems, still needs to gather around the fire to have a talk now and then.
Job seekers with Linux smarts have the upper hand in the Linux job market right now, but the right combination of technical and people skills are still required.
“When we look to hire Linux system administrators, there are a few key aspects that get our attention,” says Peter Baer Galvin, Chief Technologist for Corporate Technologies. “Natural curiosity is one. Is the candidate interested in technology, finding solutions to problems, inventing new solutions, and experimenting? We find those attributes to be a good indicator of whether the admin will be able to improvise, learn, and determine the best course of action.”
Obviously, no Linux admin can have all the skills every employer will want. But as Galvin says, natural curiosity can help make you stand out as a job candidate.
Back in September I provided the most comprehensive AMD Radeon Linux graphics comparison that took 28 graphics cards from all supported ATI/AMD Radeon product families and tested them under Linux using the latest Catalyst driver as well as the open-source Mesa/Gallium3D driver. In this article is a similar comparison on the NVIDIA side as I take most of the GeForce graphics cards at my disposal and try them under the NVIDIA binary Linux driver and the community-developed open-source “Nouveau” driver. Not only is the OpenGL performance looked at for multiple generations of NVIDIA hardware, but the thermal and power consumption is compared too. In certain OpenGL workloads, the open-source Linux driver is now faster than NVIDIA’s own driver for select graphics cards in a fair comparison, but overall the NVIDIA blob still reigns supreme.
When it comes to a file syncing, there are quite a few options that are available on Linux as well as Windows. Dropbox is probably the most widely used such program. Users of Ubuntu can use Ubuntu One to sync files between Windows and smartphones. You also have lesser known but very good programs like Wuala and the upcoming Sparkleshare.
Over the last couple of years it has become almost a tradition to have a Gluon sprint prior to Qt Developer Days in Munich. This year was not different. Through much effort, a sprint was pulled together for the Gluon team, in part commemorating the first of these sprints two years ago, where the Gluon Vision was first laid down, and in part to assist in the work towards the next release.
GNOME 3 has become something of a polarising moment for the popular Linux desktop. In chasing visions of tablets, touchscreens and the mythical “everyday user”, the GNOME 3 Shell has left many Linux power users scratching their heads, wondering why the GNOME developers decided to fix a desktop that wasn’t broken.
The problem for those that dislike the new GNOME is not so much the underlying GNOME 3, which is in many ways a step up from its predecessor, but the GNOME Shell specifically, which looks and behaves like something much more suited for a tablet than a 30 inch desktop monitor.
The Gentoo project today announced the official Gentoo Wiki. This step has been a long time coming. When disaster took out most of the volunteer wiki several years ago, a big hole was left. This hole has now been filled by a “herd of proper Gentoo developers.”
The Gentoo project runs on its documentation. The Gentoo Handbook is indispensable for getting Gentoo up and running properly, but for issues beyond what’s covered in the Handbook a well stocked wiki is ideal. Documentation at the Gentoo Wiki is still a bit sparse right now, but volunteers are invited to contribute.
Red Hat Inc. began a program for Israeli startups designed to boost use of its open-source software and increase sales as more companies migrate to cloud computing.
“Our goal is for next-generation Internet service providers to build on our platform,” Chief Executive Officer Jim Whitehurst told reporters in Tel Aviv. “As they grow, their customers will buy our software.”
Seven Israeli early stage technology companies with revenue of less than $1.5 million each were chosen to get free access to Red Hat enterprise software. The program will be expanded in Israel before being extended to other nations, Whitehurst said. Red Hat, based in Raleigh, North Carolina, will offer its software at a declining discount as the companies’ sales grow.
Fedora, the free, open-source Linux operating system distribution from the Fedora Project, has been updated to version 16. Fedora is sponsored by Red Hat.
Fedora 16 offers a range of enhancements to its virtualization and cloud computing capabilities, along with numerous package upgrades and usability improvements.
Fedora’s latest release, Verne, features several cloud and virtualization enhancements and capabilities designed to make it easier to build large cloud deployments.
The new virtualization and cloud features in Fedora 16 allow administrators and users to launch, run and manage cloud environments, according to the project announcement on Nov. 8 from Red Hat sponsors The Fedora Project, which is a community version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
However, Fedora developers tend to include latest cutting-edge technologies into Fedora, long before they are included in RHEL or other distributions.
The Red Hat-sponsored Fedora Project released Fedora 16 (“Verne”), featuring the GNOME 3.2 desktop environment and virtualization and cloud enhancements — including support for the Aeolus and OpenStack Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platforms. Version 16 upgrades the techie-focused Linux distribution to Linux 3.1, and moves up to the GRUB2 bootloader and Firefox 7.0.1, while offering enhanced contact and document management apps.
Fedora Utils is a “post installation” script for Fedora which lets you easily install applications that are not available in the main Fedora repositories and tweak various settings.
Though I’ve used Ubuntu since 2005 and it has been my Linux distro of choice, I prefer to use Debian GNU/Linux for running web server on my VPS or a server at work. Why? because:
* Debian is quicker to install
* Debian is lightweight / uses less memory / feels faster
* Debian doesn’t install XWindows by default
* Debian feels more ‘hands-on’
* Debian has the largest software repository
The new version of the graphical “Y PPA Manager” can now be used under KDE, as the developers have integrated code to support kdesudo, a component that allows programs to be executed at root privilege level.
It was just a few weeks ago that planning began on Ubuntu 12.04, or “Precise Pangolin,” but already key details about the upcoming version of Canonical’s popular Linux distribution are beginning to emerge.
In the Ubuntu world (and I am sure in other distributions as well), the choice of what apps we ship in the default install has always garnered much debate and discussion. With each UDS there is a default apps discussion, and the following few weeks usually involves some debate over whether the decisions reached made sense. In the past this has involved the addition of TomBoy and other Mono apps, the removal of GIMP from the default install, the addition of PiTiVi, the removal of PiTiVi, the Rhythmbox to Banshee move, and now the move from Banshee back to Rhythmbox.
One of the fundamental kernel changes that was decided upon during the Ubuntu 12.04 Developer Summit by Canonical’s kernel team is to drop support for the non-PAE 32-bit Linux kernel. However, it seems there is growing resistance towards this move.
Physical Address Extensions (PAE) is a feature found on most 32-bit x86 CPUs that allow addressing system memory greater than 4GB. Vanilla 32-bit kernels without PAE can’t address more than 4GB of RAM, but most processors still in use today support the CPU feature. Running the 32-bit PAE kernel on systems with less than 4GB of physical memory is not an issue, as long as your CPU supports PAE. Since nearly all hardware that will be touching the 32-bit Ubuntu 12.04 LTS release supports PAE, Canonical wants to drop support for the non-PAE kernel. (64-bit users don’t need to worry about PAE.)
I was going to test Linux Mint in a virtual machine. After reading that, I won’t bother. It’s obviously an organization intent on building revenue and restricting freedom rather than allowing users to do what they want, use information technology freely. Further, while free software licences do allow one to run software with little restriction, this organization is merely following the letter of the licences and not the spirit of sharing. We should move on to better things.
Obviously Linux Mint has some good features/policies but it is still a small distribution despite recent popularity and it may grow into something beautiful or something horrible. It has a long way to go on the evolutionary trail of distros.
In the last few weeks, I’ve heard through at least three channels about a new lightweight Linux, Bodhi Linux. With system requirements of a 300 MHz CPU, 128 MB of RAM, and 1.5 GB of hard disk, it sounds perfect for a few systems I have awaiting refurbishing. The downside, according to TechRepublic’s Jack Wallen, is that it needs some additional work after installation.
With Firefox only available for Android and Maemo, Mozilla hasn’t made many inroads on the mobile front, but that doesn’t mean it’s sitting still. The open source organization has been working on a project called Boot to Gecko, or B2G, with the goal of building a standalone OS allowing web developers to build apps that are equal “in every way” to native apps built for iOS, Android, or Windows Phone. To that end, B2G is creating new web APIs that safely expose capabilities like the phone, camera, Bluetooth, and SMS to web pages and applications. The goal is to boot the OS on an Android-compatible device, as well as port or build new apps.
Mozilla is releasing a major update for Firefox (Firefox 8) today, so let’s give a look at what we are getting in this release cycle.
Some releases ago, Firefox introduced a feature so that when you are restoring a previous Firefox session, the current tab is loaded first while the others are loaded afterwards in the background or as soon as you switch to another. If this is not the behavior you want, there is now an option in the Options (Preferences) window, to load all tabs at once as before.
Thunderbird 8, made available for download on Tuesday, is built using the Gecko 8 browser engine used in Firefox 8, also released the same day. Notably, the new version of the email software is accompanied by Lightning 1.0. The add-on, which has been under development at Mozilla for years, gives Thunderbird a calendar module.
A couple of weeks ago I posted the first part of an interview with Brendan Eich, who is Mozilla’s CTO. That covered the early years of browsers at Netscape, and the origin of Mozilla. Somewhat belatedly, here’s the second part of that interview, which picks up the story at the beginning of this millennium, and reveals the complex sequence of events that led to the creation of Mozilla Firefox.
One of the key people in this tale is Dave Hyatt, the main architect of tabbed browsing at Mozilla, and now at Apple. Eich explains: “he was getting fed up with Netscape management.” Perhaps as a result of that frustration, he was also writing new browsers, one of which became the popular Mac OS X browser Camino.
“Dave quit Netscape to go to Apple,” Eich recalls. “This was a real feather in Apple’s cap – Hyatt knew all about Web compatibility – the team at Apple was very talented, but they didn’t know about Web compatibility. He wasn’t working on Mozilla at that point, except in his spare time. Inside Apple he was working on a fork of KHTML which led to the whole Webkit story.”
It’s a big week for Mozilla, as Firefox celebrates its seventh birthday and Firefox 8 hits the interwebs.
In recent years, Firefox has lost ground to browsers such as Google Chrome. Yet Firefox remains a significant and important part of the browsing landscape.
The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 3.4.4, an improved version of the award-winning free office suite for Windows, Mac and Linux. LibreOffice has recently won InfoWorld’s BOSSIE Award 2011 as Best of Open Source Software, and the Open World Forum Experiment Award of Most-Popular Software.
Much has been written today about the enterprise and cloud features of Oracle Solaris 11, which was launched today, but what’s new for those of us who just like to have the robustness and security of Solaris on our desktop machines? Here are a few of the Solaris 11 desktop highlights:…
A group of Internet activists gathered last week in an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel to begin planning an ambitious project—they hope to overcome electronic surveillance and censorship by creating a whole new Internet. The group, which coordinates its efforts through the Reddit social networking site, calls its endeavor The Darknet Project (TDP).
Adobe’s love affair with its Flash format has come to an end. Oh sure, Adobe said they were just killing development on mobile browser Flash in favor of HTML5, but seriously, do you think, that they’ll keep working on Flash on the desktop for much longer? If you do, I have a nice, lightly-used bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you. No, the end of Flash is in sight and HTML5 is now the one true future for Internet video.
In Adobe’s official announcement, Danny Winokur, Adobe’s VP and general manager of interactive development, wrote, “HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively. This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms. We are excited about this, and will continue our work with key players in the HTML community, including Google, Apple, Microsoft and RIM, to drive HTML5 innovation they can use to advance their mobile browsers.”
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. could face as much as $2.6 billion in legal losses, largely on mortgage-related lawsuits and probes, the securities firm said in a regulatory filing Wednesday.
New York-based Goldman also reported trading losses on 21 days in the third quarter, a period in which Goldman posted just its second quarterly loss in a dozen years as a public company. That was its highest number since the bank’s fiscal fourth quarter in 2008, which saw the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and Goldman’s previous quarterly loss.
The Public Safety Minister and various police folks are arguing that telecom operators should have to hand over any and all of the following information without a warrant and without an underlying criminal investigation: name, address, telephone number and electronic mail address, Internet protocol address, mobile identification number, electronic serial number, local service provider identifier, international mobile equipment identity number, international mobile subscriber identity number and subscriber identity module card number that are associated with the subscriber’s service and equipment.
The enforcement of Canada’s net neutrality rules, which govern how Internet providers manage their networks, was in the spotlight earlier this year when documents obtained under the Access to Information Act revealed virtually all major Canadian ISPs have been the target of complaints, but there have been few, if any, consequences arising from the complaints process.
The documents painted a discouraging picture, with multiple complaints against Rogers Communications due to the throttling of online games going seemingly nowhere, while a complaint against satellite Internet provider Xplorenet languished for months until the Commission threatened to launch a public proceeding.
According to the agenda, the Committee on International Trade will discuss ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) behind closed doors on 23 November. [1] We object to this discussion being held behind closed doors. Since the publication of the ACTA text, discussions have to take place in public.
ACTA’s predecessor, the TRIPS agreement, killed millions of people. 500 Million Europeans, and billions abroad, are entitled to full transparency.
Linux and open source software are spreading out — cloud computing, mobile computing, supercomputing — and an increasing number of use cases large and small. One area where Linux and open source have history and continue to remain strong is banking and financial services, highlighted by the latest open source messaging technology in the space: the new OpenMAMA middleware messaging project and the AMQP messaging standard, recently released in version 1.0.
This strength of open source software, similar to what we’ve seen in cloud computing, bodes well for Linux and open source in a number of other key verticals, as well.
So it’s been two weeks since 3.1, and you know how it works by now.
I have to say, this wasn’t my favorite merge window ever. I really
wanted to take only things that had been in -next, but verifying it
was fairly painful, since a lot of the trees had been rebased, and the
ones that hadn’t been rebased often had some extra patches that still
showed up when I did my “git log linux-next..FETCH_HEAD” thing.
On the whole, most of it was all good, and I didn’t really end up
complaining to people. I’m pretty sure that there were trees I
shouldn’t have let through, but the majority really had been in -next.
We met Linus Torvalds at LinuxCon Europe 2011 and did a long interview. We covered sevaral topics including his stand on Secure Boot, Patents and Copyrights. What he thinks of Apple without Steve Jobs and how influencial Steve Jobs was in Apple. He also talks about his differences with FSF and GNU GPL v3. We also talked about Android and the contribution of Amazon and Google. The lighter topics included what is his primary language, what his kids use at home — Windows or Linux.
Azul Systems have today announced Zing 5.0, eliminating their previous requirement for a hypervisor, and therefore bringing their pauseless JVM to unmodified 64-bit Linux for the first time.
Matrox Graphics is pleased to announce the latest generation of Extio F2208 and Extio F2408 KVM extenders and Extio F2408E Expander units now support a broader range of Linux operating systems and showcase a new degree of remote multi-display flexibility using a minimum of fiber-optic cabling. The Matrox Extio product line, which extends keyboard, mouse, USB, audio, and multi-monitor functionality from the host computer by up to one kilometer (3280 feet) enables new capabilities including cloning, stretched desktops, multi-GPU, and multi-unit support.
Compositing window management in 4.8 can be built with support for OpenGL ES. This means hardware acceleration using a more modern revision of OpenGL and one that is supported on mobile devices.
During development of this feature, Martin Gräßlin did a lot of clean up to the existing code bringing performance enhancements to how effects are handled and windows are painted. The blur implementation also received a significant improvement to its performance thanks to improved caching written by Philipp Knechtges; this provides quite noticeable results on many systems. In all, many fewer cycles are spent rendering and displaying the beauty that is the Plasma Desktop.
My first thought was to give Arch Linux a whirl. The amount of noise and adulation people generate about it borders on the cultish. They consider themselves “advanced”, which is nice. They seem to consider themselves advanced because it takes a certain amount of tinkering to successfully run and maintain Arch. Interestingly, many Arch users also claim Arch is easy. C’est la vie, and I’ve learned it almost always takes getting naked and swimming for yourself before you make any judgments.
Now available Elastix 2.2 and the elastixWorld 2011 attendees were the first to witness the improvements in this new Elastix stable version. In this version you will enjoy a new and improved interface and the upgrading of Asterisk among other additions such as:
It’s already been four years since IPFire 2 was released for the first time. There has been huge progress until today, the release of version 2.11.
As in every single IPFire release we have made so far, there have been updates that brought new features and despite of that kept the systems always up to date.
With the recent release of Fedora 16 it’s time to release a new version of VortexBox based on it. VortexBox 2.0 is based on Fedora 16 and also includes the new Logitech Media Server 7.7.0. We have added some other fixes and updates as well including new versions of MPD and our built in DLNA server.
Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced a collaboration with Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) (NYSE: SAI), to demonstrate and deliver innovative solutions that maximize the use of open source cloud computing technologies.
The new Fedora has an updated set of components as well as improvements in the areas of virtualisation and cloud computing. Fedora now uses different technologies to partition hard disks and when booting.
In its release note, Fedora team has dedicated this version to Dennis Ritchie — the co-inventor of Unix and the C language. He also co-authored The C Programming Language, a book that taught many programmers just at the time personal computing was exploding. Without Ritchie computing would be nothing like it is today.
One of the big problems that any company faces when it decides to get into the GNU/Linux business is how to deal with users, a group who have an extraordinary sense of entitlement.
Mark Shuttleworth recently announced his plans to take Ubuntu beyond desktops and servers. The news recieved appreciation from seasoned bloggers. What leaves on wonder how Ubuntu Unity will look like on tablets and smartphones.
One week after the end of the Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2011, we are pleased to release the videos of all talks that took place during this event. We would like to thank the Linux Foundation for allowing us to record those talks and to share freely the resulting videos on-line, and also thank the Clarion Congress Hotel technical staff for helping us with technical details related to video recording.
That message came from Google’s chairman Eric Schmidt, who is taking a bit of a tour and making a lot of comments along the way.
Earlier while roaming South Korea, Schmidt said that Google’s upcoming acquisition of Motorola would not make it a favourite amongst its Android partners, and he criticised Microsoft’s litigation against phone makers that are using Android. Today in Taipei, he has gone further.
“We tell our partners, including the ones here in Taiwan, we will support them. For example we have been supporting HTC in its dispute with Apple because we think that the Apple thing is not correct,” Schmidt told reporters during his first visit to Taipei, according to Reuters.
Republic Wireless announced a contract-free cellular plan that offers unlimited text, data, and voice for $19/month. The service requires a customized LG Optimus Android 2.3 phone ($199 with one free month of service) that switches automatically to Wi-Fi connectivity whenever it’s available, according to the company.
Idolian.com announced a seven-inch Android 2.3 tablet for a temporarily discounted price of $149. The MiniTurbo T8 is equipped with a seven-inch, 800 x 480 capacitive display, a 1.2GHz Telechips processor, 512MB of RAM, 4GB of storage, an HDMI port, and Android Market access, says the company.
Samsung Series 5 Chromebook is a new notebook powered by Google’s Chrome OS, a Linux-based Operating System geared towards mobility and cloud applications. The Series 5 Chromebook comes in a Slick Arctic White or Titan Silver, and offers a 3G or Wifi Model. The design of the Series 5 is smooth and rounded, with a thin form-factor.
That said, it is my belief some within Microsoft are embracing open source in a genuine way–but only as far as they can influence the projects in question to their benefit.
Mozilla is one of the open source players which is seeking to replicate PC-based success by creating a mobile platform. Earlier this year, the Foundation talked about its plan to develop one of the new breed of browser operating systems, rather like Google’s Chrome OS, with its ‘Boot to Gecko’ project. Now it has published a timeline and published the first images of its planned user interface, with developers able to test the new system as early as December.
Mozilla announced more details and a project roadmap for its Android-based, web-centric Boot to Gecko (BTG) mobile operating system, including plans to release a version in the second quarter of 2012. It also announced an updated Firefox 8 web browser for desktop and mobile devices, featuring improved HTML5 support, Twitter integration, and an enhanced password function for Android.
It is wrong to believe that open source software is implicitly insecure, according to the government’s main official on the subject.
Qamar Yunus, assistant director in the Cabinet Office ICT policy team, made the assertion in outlining the guidance the organisation has produced on the subject at the EHI Live event in Birmingham.
“There was a myth being circulated around the SIs, saying you can’t use open source software in government as it’s not secure,” Yunus told the conference, referring to the systems integrators that account for large amounts of government ICT spending.
To counter this, the Cabinet Office asked CESG, the National Technical Authority for Information Assurance, to produce guidance on the subject. The result is already available to users of the Government Secure intranet, and will be published on the Cabinet Office website in the next couple of weeks.
“That document clearly states there is no difference between open source and proprietary software. That’s one myth busted,” Yunus said.
He told the audience that the government is not in favour of open source in all cases, but wants to see a “level playing field” with proprietary software based on total cost of ownership over its lifetime. “I do not believe it is always the best value for money,” he said, but added that he wants government ICT buyers – including systems integrators planning technology refreshes – always to consider open source as an option. This should involve software procurements stating an outcome rather than a brand.
Yunus said that he has carried out extensive research with both departments and integrators. “There was a realisation that neither really understood open source,” he said. As a result, the Cabinet Office has established a Government Open Solutions online forum, a model to assess the total cost of ownership of the two types of software, a catalogue of case studies and an asset register of government ICT that will indicate whether a project uses open source.
Wikimedia UK – the chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation that covers the United Kingdom – has been registered as a charity by the Charity Commission. Charity law specialists Stone King LLP, who advised Wikimedia UK on the application, described this decision as “a milestone in the development of charity law in England and Wales” as it marks “a significant step toward the updating of charity law to reflect developments in modern communications and the evolution of user-generated content”.
The Eclipse Foundation has quietly launched a new language, Xtend, which it says is designed to address shortcomings of Java without replacing it.
The aim of Xtend is to create more readable code, to add features that Java needs but doesn’t have, and to offer “a convenient alternative in situations where Java doesn’t shine”.
ava runtime maker Azul Systems released a new Java Virtual Machine (JVM) today specifically architected and optimized for the Linux operating system and x86-based servers. The company is billing Zing 5.0, now available, as the most scalable JVM for enterprise Java workloads.
“Java is the most popular language in the enterprise,” said Azul co-founder and CEO Scott Sellers, “and Linux is the most popular operating system. Instead of trying to create a JVM that does all things for all operating environments, as Oracle (and previously, Sun) has done, we decided to get laser focused on developing the best JVM for Linux.”
The Center for Media and Democracy filed a letter this week requesting that the Internal Revenue Service investigate Prosperity USA, a charity founded by Herman Cain’s Chief of Staff Mark Block, for potentially violating the Internal Revenue Code by fronting tens of thousands of dollars worth of Mr. Cain’s campaign travel expenses. But Prosperity USA is only one node in a network of charities and nonprofit organizations associated with Mr. Block, the former head of the Wisconsin arm of the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity.
A new film from the Brave New Foundation outlines the role of the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council in new voter suppression tactics; the Center for Media and Democracy is one of the voices featured in the film.
Through the corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), global corporations and state politicians vote behind closed doors to try to rewrite state and federal laws that govern your rights. The so-called “model bills” of this corporate bill mill–which has been funded by Koch profits and other corporations–reach into almost every area of American life, including the right to vote.
Unfortunately Osgoode Hall is heavily involved on the Corporate side of copyright. This is not surprising, most copyright lawyers are employed by large companies like Warner Music Canada. After the Federal Copyright Consultation a lawyer from Stikeman Elliot wrote an article at IPOsgoode complaining about the consultation. Some of you may remember my satirical answer to him.
The big obstacle to IT in Africa is that networks and electrical power are concentrated in cities and large numbers of people live in rural areas with no network and no power. Solar power, ARMed smart thingies and wireless meshes seem to meet the requirements. Solar power may be very important in the locations off the grid. Schools need good GNU/Linux terminal servers and thin clients. Africa needs Internet access, wikis and the like so that Africa can unleash its talent to develop and support IT systems. Fortunately, there’s no time like the present to bridge the digital divide. IT has never been more easy and quick to implement thanks to ARMed devices and GNU/Linux and Android/Linux.
While the knock-down drag-out debate over the great leap in desktop environment “developments” has raged over the last several months, Clement Lefebvre and the team over at Linux Mint have been taking a more sane and sound approach — mostly under the radar — to the whole desktop interface hubbub.
This post is part of our ReadWriteCloud channel, which is dedicated to covering virtualization and cloud computing. The channel is sponsored by Intel and VMware. Read the case study about how Intel Xeon processors and VMware deliver unprecedented reliability in the face of RAM errors.
* Web servers – 65% of the million busiest sites (out of 525 million active web sites) use Apache on GNU/Linux
* Android/Linux helps Samsung replace Apple as the most popular seller of smart phones
* GNU/Linux runs an awful lot of embedded smart devices
* 91% of the top 500 supercomputers run GNU/Linux
Linux 3.2 includes support for Hexagon CPUs, enhancements to the TCP stack, an upbeat SHA1 implementation and dozens of new and revised drivers. And Linux now has a Google+ page.
When users talk about the latest generations of Linux desktops, almost always they report general impressions. They say that GNOME 3 seems needlessly complex, or that Unity seems too basic, but they’re vague on the specifics. In the past, I’ve been guilty of dealing with impressions myself.
But what, I wonder, is the real story? In the hopes of providing some substance, I’ve to compare GNOME 2 and 3, KDE, and Ubuntu’s Unity, using seven basic tasks that anyone using a desktop is likely to do. The comparison is not just a matter of mouse-clicks — although that metric is sometimes revealing — but, in some cases, a matter of design as well.
f you’ve been introduced to the world of Linux, it probably didn’t take too long to notice that it doesn’t have a single “face”. Linux can sport all kinds of desktop environments, or none at all. That alone is one of the great benefits of Linux among many more.
But while that’s impressive, it leaves a very important question for you to decide: What desktop environment should you choose? In this article, we’re going to break down what makes up each desktop environment so you will know what’s best for you and your system.
For people who prefer the KDE 3.5-style desktop, a new version of the Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE) has been released. Trinity is a continuation of the KDE 3.5 Desktop Environment with ongoing updates and new features. Trinity Desktop Environment 3.5.13 source code is available and the project also provides packages for Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora. Read on for an overview of what is new in Trinity 3.5.13!
The K Desktop Environment (KDE) has more menu styles than any other desktop environment available. There is the Classical type, the Kickoff style (which most users dislike), Lancelot (better than Kickoff, but with a few shortcomings), the ROSA Launcher (for Mandriva Desktop 2011), and the Takeoff Launcher.
I have already written about the Lancelot menu and the ROSA Launcher. In this article, you will get to see screenshots of Takeoff Launcher. Now that I have used all five menu styles, I can say with confidence that the Takeoff Launcher is best of breed. I think it is what Mandriva developers had in mind when they started working on ROSA Launcher.
If you’re in love with Arch Linux but are tired of the painstaking installation process, ArchBang is the perfect distribution for you. It has everything you love about Arch, but installs in just a few minutes with everything you need.
The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the November 2011 issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editor Meemaw. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.
Red Hat, Inc. the world’s leading open source solutions provider, today announced that the JBoss User and Developers’ Conference (JUDCon) will be held for the first time in the APAC region, at the NIMHANS Convention Center in Bengaluru, India on January 24-25, 2012.
Shares of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) ended the trading session lower by $0.01 or -0.02% from its previous close. Red Hat’s price action in today’s session formed what is considered to be a Hammer, where bears drove prices lower intraday. However, the strong finish indicates that bulls regained control forming a trend reversal.
Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) develops and provides open source software and services, including the Red Hat Linux operating system.
The open source leaders do a deal with SAIC to provide cloud computing for the federal government.
Red Hat today announced a deal with the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) to provide cloud computing technologies to the US Department of Defence.
Cloud computing may be the future, but it appears to be one fraught with unpredictable downtime and security breaches. In other words, it’s very much like the bad ol’ days of corporate data centres, except that this time Amazon, Salesforce and other cloud providers get the blame when things go wrong – rather than one’s local IT folks.
Today’s the big day for the Fedora Project. After six months of hard work (give or take a few days for schedule slips) the Fedora 16 release is out the door. To get the “behind the scenes” look at this release, we touched base with Fedora Project Leader Jared Smith.
If you want to see the future of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), you need only no farther than Red Hat’s community Linux distribution, Fedora. In its brand new release, Fedora 16, Verne, Fedora comes with multiple cloud and virtualization improvements.
Of course, what most Fedora users, as opposed to RHEL system administrators, will be interested in is that Fedora now supports GNOME 3.2 as its default desktop. Good luck with that. For me, GNOME 3.2, like GNOME 3.0 before it, is a failed interface. I’m not the only one who doesn’t care for the GNOME 3.x line. Linus Torvalds, Linux’s founder, finds GNOME 3.x unusable as well.
When you have installed Debian GNU/Linux to your hard drive or SSD drive, simply use apt-get to add the rest. You can use the list of packages I obtained with dpkg –get-selections or make up your own. For mine, use cat package.list_.mp3|dpkg –set-selections. (Note that this is a text file, not an .mp3 file. WP objected to text/something.) Also, note that I installed only the video driver for Cirrus which was used in my virtual machine. You could change “xserver-xorg-video-cirrus” to what you need (lspci can show that) or you could install them all by changing to “xserver-xorg-video-all”. apt-cache search xserver-xorg-video will show you what’s available. My list is 833 packages some of which are already installed in the basic system. Still, it’s 4.1gB, a lot of good stuff. The software not on the CD or USB drive will be downloaded from the web as usual so you should have a local repository or a fast Internet connection.
Ubuntu 11.10, code named Oneiric Ocelot, is now available. It has loads of new functions, which puts other operating systems to shame! Here are a few cool features of this new release.
The Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) is where decisions on what features will and will not make it into the next release of Ubuntu, in this case, version 12.04, code-named “Precise Pangolin”. Although many things were discussed, some issues are left open for further research.
For a lot of us, the process is pretty straightforward — take a Microsoft Windows-powered system, do some research, download a Linux distribution and install it. If all goes well, you’ll have a new OS that is configured well and ready to roll. There are times, of course, when all does not go smoothly, leaving the operator to figure out how to configure hardware, why graphical glitches are present, etc. Bear in mind that communities spring up around Linux distros and those are full of people willing to help folks struggling with various problems. Those groups are a wealth of information and anyone dealing with Linux should get acquainted with a forum or two.
AFTER tweaking my new Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) desktop system, I’ve finally got it to a point where it is almost perfect. I’m a little obsessive, which explains why I’ve been at this for a week (and I’m still going), but I do like putting things where I expect them, and the newest release of Ubuntu moved things around quite a bit.
Ramesh Jha on the SUDOBits blog offered some good advice on 10 things to do after installing Ubuntu 11.10. This is my take on the same topic. Unless otherwise stated, most of the extra software can be installed using Ubuntu Software Center.
There’s a popular misconception about open source: that it’s democratic, that all users have a vote over its direction and development or even the running of the community around it.
The users of Ubuntu, arguably the world’s most popular Linux distro these days, are currently discovering that this is not how it works. The result is making a lot of people very angry, but it might result in some interesting new developments for Linux – as well as maybe pointing the way towards the UIs of the next generation of PC.
It appears that Mark Shuttleworth, father of the Ubuntu project, gave an interview to Amber Graner, an Ubuntu contributor involved in the community since February 2009.
In the interview, Mark Shuttleworth talks about the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS codename and how he came up with the idea for Precise Pangolin.
Regular readers already know I’m not really happy with the direction Gnome and Ubuntu have taken with Gnome 3 (Gnome Shell) and Unity respectively. I think both of these are mobile interfaces poorly scaled to the desktop. I understand that mobile is the future, and that’s fine, but it’s really premature to be pushing half-baked interfaces clearly intended for the tablets and phones of the future onto the desktops of today. I still have work to do and I would like to be able to keep doing it without the interface getting in the way. And I’m not alone. Even Linus Torvalds feels the same way, and when the Big Guy of Linux himself calls your new interface “an unholy mess,” something’s wrong. Torvalds called for someone to fork Gnome 2, and once that happened, I knew sooner or later someone might actually do it.
I don’t like reviewing alpha versions of distros. I try to pretend they don’t exist. They frustrate me. They’re not finished, and I tend to get hung up on the problems. I blame them for not being ready, when of course that’s the point of an alpha release. The issue is not with the alpha, it’s with me for irrationally expecting it to be smooth and polished. So I’ve pretty much sworn off even downloading alpha versions – and beta versions too, mostly. I try to avoid everything earlier than the release candidate.
Yesterday we published about Linux Mint’s secret project for Gnome users and Clem’s claims that soon they will overtake Ubuntu. Seems like he spoke too late. Today Linux Mint has broken the 6 year old record and replaced Ubuntu as the most popular Linux-based distribution on Distro Watch. Linux Mint sits on top with 2199 and Ubuntu slides to the second spot with 2011 rating.
Five months ago I did a post announcing that we are working to bring Bodhi to ARM devices. I’ve been rather quiet about this part of our project since then. We are still finalizing the direction this part of our project is headed in, but for now we have landed on the choice of Debian Stable as our core. Our repository is currently online and you can easily install our Enlightenment packages on top of your Debian Stable ARM install by following these steps:
The forthcoming release of Linux Mint will see it shift to the Gnome 3 desktop for the first time, but it will continue to support Gnome 2 users with a separate root, and has a shell to ease the transition between the platforms.
The Linux Mint team does see Gnome 3 as the way forward, it explained in a blog post, but recognizes it’s a big shift to make. Gnome 3 has received heavy criticism, not least from Uncle Linus, mainly because it changes the traditional way of doing things. In particular, Linux Mint members cite poor multitasking and a shift from an application-centric to a task-centric model.
Distrowatch.com displays a popularity list of all Linux distributions by measuring the number of hits per page on their site. This ranking system is considered to be one of the most reliable around. Even if it is only a measurement of one website’s traffic. Lately Linux Mint has been making a run at first place.
Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt is set to visit Taiwan on November 9 to have a conference with Taiwan-based PC vendors and promote its Android operating system, according to sources from PC players.
It will be four to six months before Android 4.0 (“Ice Cream Sandwich”) is widely available on handsets, a Motorola Mobility executive has warned. Motorola does not even have the operating system’s source code yet, Ruth Hennigar, the company’s vice president of software product management, reportedly added.
HTC announced that at least seven of its smartphones will receive upgrades to Android 4.0 (“Ice Cream Sandwich”). They’re the internationally available Evo 3D Sensation, Sensation XL, and Sensation XE, as well as the U.S.-only Rezound, Design 4G, and Amaze 4G, according to the company — whose CEO also told Reuters it will release one or more additional tablets next year.
The HTC Edge is set for a launch in the first half of next year and will have an Nvidia Tegra 3 Kal-el quad-core processor, according to Pocketnow. The handset looks similar to the Titan but will run Android instead of Windows Phone 7.5 Mango.
The iconic mobile phone brand has come back to life today as the latest incarnation of the Motorola Razr. Consumers can get their hands on the super-thin smartphone for £454 SIM-free after a delay of just over a week.
SMARTPHONE SOFTWARE DEVELOPER Google will continue to offer its Android operating system for free, according to the firm’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt.
Schmidt said at a press conference today, “We will run (Motorola) sufficiently independently so it will not violate the openness of Android.”
According to the Wall Street Journal, during his tour of South Korea, Schmidt said that Google’s upcoming acquisition of Motorola will not have an impact on its other Android partners.
HTC has confirmed it plans to take another stab at the tablet market in 2012 after officially announcing a new fondleslab with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich early next year.
HTC will be bringing Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich to four of its handsets early next year in what it described today as “the first wave of HTC phones that will receive upgrades”.
Panasonic unveiled a rugged, 10.1-inch Android 3.2 tablet for the enterprise market with extended temperature, drop, and ingress resistance. The Toughpad FZ-A1 is equipped with a dual-core 1.2GHz Marvell processor, 1GB of RAM, 16GB of storage, a full range of wireless features, a security co-processor, and an anti-glare, 500-nit display with 1024 x 768 pixels and an active digitizing pen.
Barnes & Noble announced a $249 Android tablet featuring a seven-inch IPS (in-plane switching) display, a dual-core, 1GHz processor from Texas Instruments, 1GB of RAM, and 16GB of internal storage. The new “Nook Tablet” was joined by enhancements and a $50 price drop for the existing Nook Color, plus a new $99 price for the monochrome Simple Touch.
Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Opera, or Apple Safari: Which of the most popular Web browsers is really the best?
With Firefox 8’s early arrival, and new major updates to three of the other major Web browsers, Chrome 15; Opera 11.5, and Safari 5.1.1 it’s high time to take another look at our current generation of Internet Web browsers and see what’s what. Only Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) 9 hasn’t seen a significant improvement in the last few months.
Why did I choose these browsers? The answer is simple. These are the most popular Web browsers out there. While Internet Explorer has dropped below 50% of the total Web browser market, it’s still the most popular Web browser. In most of the world, IE is followed by Mozilla Firefox, although in some places, such as much of Latin America, number three, Google’s Chrome, has already moved up to second place. After that Apple’s Safari, which owns the mobile Web browser market, comes in number four, and Opera hangs out to the fifth spot.
While many Firefox users are still working with version 7, Mozilla has now made version 8 available, and this version is definitely the next major iteration of the browser. Although Mozilla’s official release date is November 8, you can get Windows, Mac and Linux versions here. Version 8, is, of course, yet another iteration in Mozilla’s new rapid release cycle for its browser, but it also has a lot of new features. Here are some of the additions worth noting.
Mozilla has been experimenting with an interesting idea called Boot 2 Gecko. Essentially, B2G (as it’s called) is a mobile operating system based on the Web, as opposed to what the project’s wiki calls “proprietary, single-vendor stacks”. Mozilla has something there–open Web technologies indeed increasingly provide an intriguing platform for lots of things, mobile and otherwise.
In late September Mozilla released version 7 of its Firefox browser, and as part of the company’s new fast release cycle we noted a few days after the release that a beta of Firefox 8 had already been seeded to developers. In the article, we noted Mozilla promised Firefox 8 would deliver better tab management, deeper Twitter integration, and new features for web developers.
Uploaded to the company’s FTP servers a few days ago, Firefox 8 has been officially released today, with a blog post from Mozilla outlining the differences from the previous version. As with the Firefox 8 beta, Firefox 8 final comes with an option in the Preferences to load existing tabs (the pages you left open the last time you quit the browser) only when they’re selected. This should improve the browser’s startup times, as it’s no longer forced to reload all tabs upon launch.
Cloudera, the startup that commercially distributes and services Apache Hadoop based data management software and services, has raised $40 million in new funding led by Ignition Partners, Greylock, Accel, Meritech Capital Partners, and In-Q-Tel. Cloudera previously raised $36 million from Accel Partners, Diane Greene, Qi Lu, Jeff Weiner, Marten Mickos, Gideon Yu, Caterina Fake, Greylock Partners, Meritech Capital Partners, and In-Q-Tel. The startup actually just raised $25 million last Fall.
Is it FUD, a hoax or a real complaint about MongoDB? That is the question being asked by many after an anonymous posting on Pastebin called “Don’t use MongoDB” created a flurry of controversy around the open source NoSQL database. The posting, alledgedly by an ex-user of the database, claimed that MongoDB loses data in various situations, including deleting the entire dataset, and that 10gen, the company behind MongoDB, was not prioritising reliability and instead chasing benchmarks. The eight part list also included complaints about performance on busy servers, recovery from database corruption and issues with replication stopping.
What’s it like to teach using free and open source GIS? Kurt Menke runs his own GIS consulting business in Albuquerque, New Mexico and also teaches at Central New Mexico Community College. He has developed a course called “Introduction to Open Source GIS and Web Mapping.” In this article, he describes the impetus behind the course development, details the course content and offers some of the lessons he’s learned in the process.
Here I sit, watching a freshly installed FreeBSD box run through cvsup on all ports, to be closely followed by a new kernel compilation. As the output flies by in the xterm, I find myself wondering why I don’t run into more FreeBSD in the world.
The truth is that I’ve been using some form of BSD since 1993 or so (the days of BSD/386). A foundational server that I’ve run since 1995 used BSDi initially, transitioning to FreeBSD back in the 3.0 release days. I can’t contemplate using any other OS for this box and the myriad tasks it performs. We’re not talking about a system that sits idle most of the time; this box generally deals with 250,000 to 300,000 emails a day (mostly spam, which produces a heavier load than actual mail delivery), and it serves up DNS, Web, and SMTP/POP/IMAP services for dozens of domains. It generally hovers at a load of 0.50 with the occasional spike.
Version 1.0 of the Apache Tika metadata and structured text content detector and extractor has been released. The project began as a sub-project of Apache Lucene in 2007 and became a top level project in May last year.
Version 4.1.6 of VirtualBox has been released. The third maintenance update to the 4.1.x branch of the open source desktop virtualisation application for x86 hardware improves its overall stability and addresses several issues found in previous builds.
Ten years ago, IBM first presented the Eclipse development environment to a global audience as open source software. Wherever such figures may originate from: the estimated $40 million that the donated code including marketing efforts was said to be worth at the time in 2001 have turned into more than $800 million today, estimates Eclipse Foundation Executive Director Mike Milinkovich; the Eclipse Foundation was founded in 2004.
Node.js, or Node for short, has become rather popular with web developers in the last year as a platform for their web applications. No one is talking about replacing the entire world of web servers with Node.js based systems, but Node is flexible enough to be able to take on a wide range of tasks. So what makes Node different to preceding web frameworks and platforms? Two words, event-based JavaScript.
Mozilla has announced the launch of version 1.0 of Popcorn, a new HTML5 media toolkit from the non-profit organisation. The Popcorn.js library is a event framework for HTML5 media that combines HTML and JavaScript; “Think jQuery for video” says the project’s site.
Using Popcorn.js, developers can create interactive time-based media content using video and audio assets, combined with web content including real-time social media, news and visualisations. “Popcorn allows web filmmakers to amp up interactivity around their movies, harnessing the web to expand their creations in new ways,” said Mozilla Executive Director Mark Surman.
On Monday, several US and UK ISPs, including Time Warner Cable, Research in Motion, Eclipse Internet, Easynet and Merula, reported a range of errors and problems on the Level 3 backbone. Level 3 has now confirmed the reports. The cause of the problems appears to have been a bug in Juniper’s Junos router operating system affecting the border gateway protocol (BGP).
The EU-China High Level Political Parties & Groups Forum, initiated in May 2010 in Beijing, gathers politicians from the European political families, together with Chinese representatives from the International department Central Committee of CPC and other institutions. It provides a tool for dialogue between politicians from China and from the EU.
Well, Goldman Sachs, since “deferred prosecution” is the vogue nowadays and really means that no one in your bank, whether CEO, COO or CFO, no one will be prosecuted for their responsibility for the financial meltdown or, if by some miracle or two someone is found responsible, the bank will just pay a fine and carry on.
That act is the remarkable indictment of the US justice system: Goldman Sachs commits accounting control fraud that makes it billions and billions of fraudulent dollars and then, when it is found out, it just pays a few millions and carries on.
Madison — Today, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) filed a letter requesting that the Internal Revenue Service investigate a charity operated by Wisconsin political veteran Mark Block that spent over $40,000 of tax-exempt donations to pay for private jets, travel, and computers for Herman Cain’s presidential bid. CMD also requested an examination of other Mark Block-related groups sharing the same address or other commonalities. Mr. Cain, who has denied knowing who paid for his various travels, is not the target of these requests to the IRS.
These requests follow an October 30 story by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel’s Dan Bice revealing that “Prosperity USA,” which was created by Mr. Block, had footed the bill for expenses related to Mr. Cain’s bid for the White House. Prosperity USA’s financial records show the charity expected to get reimbursed. Tax-exempt charities are prohibited from intervening in the political campaign for any candidate for public office, no matter the post.
Charles and David Koch, each worth about $25 billion, could be the most influential duo in the United States. These brothers have accumulated their fortune through Koch industries — an oil refining, chemical, paper products and financial services company with revenues of some $100 billion per year. A new documentary by Bob Abeshouse on the Kochs illustrates how these brothers use their billions to manipulate some in the public into voting for their right-wing agenda and to push policies that strip protections for people’s health.
In short, I cannot find any single event in the news that would correlate with this move in adoption. Is it a shift in the way Net Applications counts? Is it the collective will of the world to use FLOSS? I don’t know, but it seems real.
Here, we’ll discover some free and open router projects, covering those suitable for small businesses, medium-sized, and even enterprise-level comparable to Cisco and Juniper.
By now many of you have likely heard that AMD is laying off around 10% of its workforce by next year in a restructuring attempt to lower its operating costs, but will their open-source and Linux efforts be hampered by this move?
Initial indications are that AMD’s Linux and open-source efforts will not be severely hit as AMD lets go of around 1400 employees worldwide.
The pull request for the Btrfs file-system in the Linux 3.2 kernel has finally come in this Sunday. It brings some fairly significant changes for this up-and-coming Linux file-system.
Chris Mason, the Oracle engineer and lead Btrfs developer, began his Btrfs pull request for the Linux 3.2 kernel by saying, “This pull request is pretty beefy, it ended up merging a number of long running projects and cleanup queues.”
While all major development work is now happening on X.Org Server 1.12, the 1.11 series is still being maintained with bug-fixes and other minor work. This is important since the X.Org Server 1.11 series is likely what will end up being used by Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. Among the distributions shipping with X.Org Server 1.11, which was originally released in August, is the soon-to-be-released Fedora 16.
While Samsung has its Exynos 4210 DRM merged into the Linux 3.2 kernel as the first DRM driver for ARM in the mainline kernel, they haven’t stopped there. More patches have been floating around from Samsung in the past few days.
Recently, all Vim lovers wished it on its twentieth year. Twenty years is a long time, but it is not long enough. Let us talk about something bigger. Vi, the predecessor to Vim, grew even older with this. Very few people use vi anymore, and using it will be CUI overkill. However, it is worth a mention. Vim is ‘Vi improved’. Bram Moolenaar did a great job by ‘improving’ Vi, but the credit goes to Bill Joy, for creating this wonderful piece of software.
Welcome everybody again to a new Let’s Play! This time, i want to talk about P-UAE. What’s P-UAE? P-UAE is a Commodore Amiga emulator for Linux. It’s easy to use, free, and highly customizable. Well… Let’s go!
Another way to characterize desktop environments (or DEs) that are striving for simplicity is this: get out the way and let the user do their thing.
It’s a pretty compelling argument, really. Why should the user spend time interacting with the OS at all? Why should they have to customize things? Just make it as minimal and intuitive as possible, then let the user actually USE the programs they want.
We have a perfect example of this view taken to its logical conclusion in the form of Chromium OS. For all intents and purposes there IS no desktop, since the desktop consists of a single, full screen program. There’s a few other goodies tacked on, but for the most part that is what you get. You can’t change your desktop background because there is none. You can’t add a panel widget because there is no panel. It’s just … the Chromium browser. Nothing else.
Other DEs have gone in this direction, but not nearly so far as Google did. Gnome released Gnome 3 to mixed reviews, largely because they tried to reinvent the desktop. And by reinvent I mean get rid of most of the desktop. Customization is at a minimum because EVERYTHING is at a minimum. No widgets or applets or any kind of -ets. When 3.0 came out there wasn’t even a plugin framework (still isn’t really, though it is in the pipeline) because, well, there was very little to plug in to. Ubuntu’s Unity struck a very similar chord, trying to keep the OS to a minimum. Reviews for Unity were about as enthusiastic.
The big question is: is this desirable? Is it OK for a certain group to make design decisions that influence a huge number of users? Luckily in Linux, if you don’t like it you don’t have to stick with it, which leads us to the other side of the coin.
It has been a while since I posted here. The last few months have been very busy and frantic. I have managed to fix up my Plasma Widgets for the OBS, and am busy packaging it, and testing it. They are running well on my laptop, but I have not been able to test it so far on another machine. Styling of the content displayed on the plasmoids remain on the TODO list. Packaging it is also proving to be a headache, even with the OBS (ironically…). I need to spend more time on IRC with packagers.
Executives find valuable to become part of a common network that allow them to open their organizations to new markets, more opportunities in current markets, new products, services and talent. KDE can offer them such a worldwide network formed by many organizations.
Early last month, we had a GNOME-FR annual general meeting. It was a while since the last GNOME-FR meeting, and it felt good to get things moving forward again! For those who don’t know, GNOME-FR is the french-speaking non-profit organization (association loi de 1901, to be exact), and while it’s not the most active organization, it’s quite useful to help organize the GNOME presence at events — usually french-speaking events, but also international events (like FOSDEM, for which GNOME-FR handles the t-shirts and more, since a bootstrapping fund given by the GNOME Foundation a few years ago)
The Unity interface’s ‘Files and Folders’ option relies on Zeitgeist—(zeit in German is time, and geist is ghost). My first experience of using Unity was very disturbing—it found nothing! Zeitgeist keeps track of various activities on files—provided the application you are using informs it. ‘Files and Folders’ searches for files within your activities. Obviously, there are no activities after a fresh install, and so nothing is shown as ‘found’—even though the home directory may be full of files from the previous version of Ubuntu. Its utility increases over time.
In the GNOME environment, you will need to install gnome-activity-journal, which will also install Zeitgeist. After installation, you will find ‘Activity Journal’ in the Accessories menu on Fedora 15. The application aborts at start-up. Fedora’s Bugzilla had numerous entries for this problem—most likely via abrt—but no solution. You need to comment a few lines of code that cause the crash; this is to ensure that you have a recent version of Zeitgeist!
As reported on Thursday, GNOME Shell / Mutter no longer requires OpenGL-accelerated hardware drivers. It’s possible to run this GNOME3 desktop with a software back-end via Gallium3D’s LLVMpipe.
Reaching this milestone can be attributed to Red Hat, Google’s Chrome/Chromium OS developers, and others working on the Mesa / Gallium3D software stack. Just recently LLVMpipe gained support for GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap, the GLX extension that’s required by many Linux compositing window managers. These improvements allow the desktop effects to all be done on the CPU without any dependence on any GPU hardware driver. GNOME Shell on the VESA driver or within a KVM/QEMU guest is fair game.
I had several colleagues, friends and people asking me whether they should run Arch Linux on their desktops or laptops. I even read someone’s blog today on his impression on Arch Linux and Ubuntu. It’s time for me to jump in and clarify what you should expect with Arch Linux as a desktop on a daily basis.
Arch Linux is a rolling release system. What this means is that you do not get releases at specific intervals in time, like you do with Ubuntu, OpenSuse or Fedora. Instead there is a constant stream of updates that are uploaded on the distribution servers and that you can pull almost everyday. These updates are uploaded after a testing period by the Arch Linux testing community (you can switch to the testing mirrors if you wish) and it is up to you to choose if you want to install them or not.
AgiliaLinux is a fork of MOPSLinux, a defunct Linux distribution that was based on Slackware. Now, AgiliaLinux is an independent, multi-purpose distribution with development roots in the Russia Federation (MOPSLinux was also a Russian distribution).
AgiliaLinux 8, the latest release, was made available for public download on October 3 2011. With this release, AgiliaLinux’s development model was changed to a rolling release model, that is, AgiliaLinux is a rolling release distribution, with stable snapshot releases every three months.
According to the GLDT project, the Linux environment has grown by 10 new distributions over the past two months and more than 50 over the past six months. Among the new entries between September and October are candidates such as AtheOS, DreamStudio, Garuda or Syllable. Debian remains the most populated Linux branch with 114 different choices – among them flavors such Knoppix and Ubuntu. Redhat is the next largest branch, followed by Slackware and smaller branches such as Arch, Enoch, or Sorcerer.
The ability to customize Linux to run on various types of hardware and to suit specific user needs means there are more flavors of Linux-based operating systems available than Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream. While administrators generally stick with the well-known ones, such as Canonical’s Ubuntu, Attachmate’s Novell SUSE and Red Hat Enterprise Linux for their servers and desktops, they are beginning to see other flavors sneaking into the enterprise. A recent Dell KACE study found that IT departments are supporting more operating systems than the company standard because employees are increasingly using personal laptops and devices to access enterprise applications and resources. “No single device is used dramatically more than others, meaning that IT must be aware of a wide range of operating systems and devices that connect to their systems,” Dell KACE researchers wrote in the report. Approximately 14 percent of personal laptops being used in the enterprise run a Linux distribution. In addition, 23 percent of personal tablets and over half of the personal smartphones in the enterprise run Android, according to the report. In this slide show, eWEEK lists some of the Linux-based operating systems and distributions that every IT manager should be familiar with.
Sabayon’s slogan, which appears when the distribution is booting, is “open your source, open your mind”. It’s catchy, it’s simple and maybe even inspiring. However, were I to choose an alternative slogan it would probably be “There’s an edition for that.” A quick look at the project’s download area reveals six different editions (GNOME, Xfce, KDE, Server Base, Spin Base and Core), each of them available in 32-bit and 64-bit builds. And, indeed, the project lists its number one feature as “variety”. Judging by the editions which eventually appeared for Sabayon 6 we’ll probably see future editions of Sabayon 7 featuring LXDE and Enlightenment.
For now though let’s focus on the Xfce edition, which is what I decided to download. There wasn’t any particular motivation for the choice, except when in doubt Xfce is usually a safe option. Speaking of options, booting off the 1.2 GB DVD brings up a menu which allows us to try the distribution in live mode, perform a graphical install, perform a text install or boot into a console. I decided to go for the graphical install. Sabayon uses the tried-and-true Anaconda installer, which Fedora and Red Hat users will recognize.
A technical college in Dakshina Kannada is the venue for an ongoing meet on Debian, a Linux-based operating system. The college has no “direct contributor” or developers in Debian. That precisely is the reason why one alumnus thought the locale for a three-day meet on the subject, titled Mini DebConf Mangalore, should be the NMAM Institute of Technology (NMAMIT) in Nitte, Karkala, about 60 km from Mangalore.
Vasudev Kamath, an alumnus of the college, who now works on the Debian platform in a company in Bangalore, said he helped organise the event in his alma mater as he wanted developers to come together and spread awareness on Debian among students who had not had any exposure to it.
Dissatisfaction continues over Ubuntu’s choice of the Unity Interface as default and, in the most recent release, no obvious way to return to the old Gnome desktop.
Long time Ubuntu users have been complaining loudly about Unity’s lack of stability, limited options and an overall unfinished feel. Distros that have watched Ubuntu gobbling up the Linux mind-share are suddenly getting a second look by unhappy Ubuntu users seeking alternatives to Unity.
Ubuntu started life as a simplified Debian with an emphasis on desktop usability. Recent Ubuntu releases seem focused on blazing their own trail toward a touchscreen, cloud enabled, widget driven environment. This may prove to be a very forward thinking plan, but it leaves traditional Gnome users hungering for their familiar desktop environment.
* Updated Debian: 6.0.3 and 5.0.9 released
* DebConf12 official dates
* Debian Installer localisation
* Feedback after DebConf11
* Uses of Emdebian
* Bits from the DPL
* New Member process
* Further interviews
* Other news
* New Debian Contributors
* Important Debian Security Advisories
* New and noteworthy packages
* Work-needing packages
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CrunchBang Linux is a power-user oriented, minimalistic distribution focused on clear, simple elegance of the Openbox desktop, with a low memory footprint, a robust behavior, and a spartan set of programs. Not one to fawn over you, it’s the other way around, although, based on the facts and figures, it should not be too difficult to setup.
Developers at the Ubuntu Developer Summit have acknowledged the boot speed problem in Ubuntu 11.10 and are looking to improve the time it takes to boot Ubuntu Linux for the 12.04 release.
One of the issues in Ubuntu 11.10 that I have made widely known is that it’s booting slower. Since the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS release each succeeding release has largely been regressing when it comes to the boot performance, among other areas. I have found the boot performance to be an issue on a wide-range of hardware and an obvious regression from the ten second boot time focus in Lucid Lynx.
For those that were concerned about Fedora 17 being codenamed the Beefy Miracle, fear not as Ubuntu has your back… At least Canonical’s community manager, Jono Bacon, is in support of this next-generation Fedora codename.
Jono is in support of Fedora 17′s Beefy Miracle so much that he decided to dress up as the friendly competitor’s mascot for the Halloween party during the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando, Florida.
Canonical is now hiring a web browser engineers. Not just one but three positions have opened. The first of these is specifically targeted at improving Webkit and V8 features. WebKit and V8 are key parts of the Chrome/Chromium web browser. This alone doesn’t indicate a shift to chromium as Webkit has be used in other applications to render content. The second position is a interesting in that it focuses on developing both Chrome/Chromium and Firefox plugins. But the last position is rather telling: a specific Webkit/Chromium Engineer. According to the posting this position is responsible for both developing WebKit and Chromium features.
Recently, at UDS, it was announced that Ubuntu would soon be coming to tablets, and smartphones, and other devices. Come 2014, Ubuntu, the most mainstream Linux distribution around, will be battling major players like Android, iOS, and Windows for the mobile OS market share.
As exciting as it may sound to any Linux fan, it seems that this is simply one of the worst decisions Canonical has taken recently. Even though Ubuntu is struggling to cross the 1% desktop market share, Canonical is running around in multiple directions when they should focus on their core product, that is the desktop.
I’m not a new Linux user. Actually, I’m about as far away from being a new Linux user as you can get. I’m perfectly comfortable getting down as low as you want to go, rolling in the grease, re-routing the pipes and wiring, or smashing about in the subatomic.
So you Arch Linux cutie dilettantes, you go have your fun running your scripts and googling for what someone else did to fix something, and feel all big about yourselves. That’s wonderful. It’s good to learn. Maybe you’ll be solving some problems some day too, that other people will benefit from. But don’t think I need to hear anything about how wonderful Arch Linux is.
If there was ever any doubt as to Canonical’s true intentions with its touch-enabled Unity interface, those doubts were laid to rest last week.
Unity has often been described as a “mobile-inspired” interface, and voila! Canonical has finally admitted that it plans to bring Ubuntu onto mobile devices. At last, it all makes sense!
While few have questioned the reasons behind Canonical’s move in this so-called “post-PC” era, the timing is another matter. Plans call for Ubuntu to arrive on mobile shores no sooner than 2014, causing more than a few furrowed brows last week in the Linux blogosphere.
With the Ubuntu developers summit wrapping up last Friday, there is some news of what to expect for the upcoming release of version 12.04, Precise Pangolin (a scaly anteater). Keep in mind that this is a LTS (long term support) release, so there isn’t going to be anything Earth shattering in the announcements due to the fact that Canonical and the Ubuntu development team will spend five years supporting Precise Pangolin in an effort to clean up as many bugs and functionality issues as possible. That being said, there was still some interesting news and features discussed during the week long event that will interest devotees of the open platform.
The Ubuntu Developer Summit for the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS “Precise Pangolin” release has now ended in Orlando, Florida. Here is a brief summary of some of the interesting news and discussions that took place for this leading Linux desktop distribution.
Extraordinary changes will be included to the upcoming release Lisa the code name of Linux Mint 12. Clement Lefebvre Linux Mint project leader just revealed Linux Mint 12 preview features Gnome 3 along with Mint Gnome Shell Extensions “MGSE” and many improvements.
Linux Mint 12 ‘Lisa’ will come with its own customized desktop and it will be based on Gnome 3. The core desktop will be based on a series of Gnome Shell extensions called “MGSE” (Mint Gnome Shell Extensions) that will provide a layer on top of Gnome 3.
Let me set the stage for my recent migration to Xubuntu. On one of my machines — my main machine actually — I upgraded to Ubuntu 11.10 only to find the desktop starting to randomly lock up. So I did what any one would do: I migrated my other test machine to Bodhi Linux, installed Dropbox to sync all of my work, and then began the process of re-installing Ubuntu 11.10 onto the new machine. Thing is, although I think Ubuntu Unity has come a long way, it’s just not the desktop for me. So, with that in mind, I installed GNOME 3 (aka Gnome Shell). What did that do? Brought my little machine to a screeching halt. This behavior was partially expected, but not welcome.
My next step in the test was to try a different distribution sporting GNOME 3 — Fedora. Throwing caution to the wind (as I am wont to do) I downloaded the 64 bit beta ISO and installed. It looked as if everything was going to work out just perfectly. Oh, how looks can be so deceiving. When the installation completed, I attempted to log in — only to find that the Nouveau drivers are still, well, bad.
According to a new LinuxMint blog post, Linux Mint 12 will use GNOME 3 with GNOME Shell by default. For those who prefer the classic GNOME 2.3x desktop, MATE (a GNOME 2.3x fork) will probably be included on the DVD edition.
We just learned that Linux Mint is doing something which was expected from a project like this, yet we never thought of it – a way to embrace newer technologies without having the user to relearn everything or to lose some features or functionality.
Clement Lefebvre, father of the Linux Mint project, proudly announced on his blog that the upcoming Linux Mint 12 operating system will feature a new desktop interface built on top of the GNOME 3 desktop environment.
The Raspberry Pi, a $25 working computer the size of a credit card, is almost ready for public consumption. But questions remain.
The device was first revealed in May, with the brainchild behind it, former games developer David Braben, revealing the specs as a 700MHz ARM11 processor, 128Mb of RAM, OpenGL ES 2.0, USB 2.0, HDMI and Composite outputs, an SD/MMC/SDIO memory card slot, and open source software including Ubuntu, Iceweasel, KOffice, and Python. In August we saw a demo of the Raspberry Pi working, with it impressively managing to run Quake III.
New comScore data on mobile usage shows the number of smart phones continues to grow rapidly, increasing 12% from June of 2011 to 87.4 million in Sept. of 2011, and that the Android platforms continues to grain market share, hitting 44.8%.
The Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet was announced on Monday as the bookseller’s answer to the coming Amazon Kindle Fire and Kobo Vox tablets.
The Nook Tablet is now on pre-order and will ship to Barnes & Noble stores and other retailers (Target, Staples, Wal-Mart, Office Max and many others) late next week at a price of $249 — about $50 more than the Kindle Fire.
But for the extra $50, the Nook Tablet offers beefier specs than the Kindle Fire that, Chief Executive William Lynch argued in unveiling the new Barnes & Noble device will add up to a faster, smoother experience when reading books, playing games or watching movies.
Thomas is a busy guy. A father of two, he and his wife live in a small town in Ontario Canada. He holds his college degree in Network Engineering and currently works as a software developer for one of the leading vinyl siding manufacturers in the world.
Sounds like a fairly well grounded guy huh?
Don’t bet on it.
While Thomas goes about his business in this world, acting all normal and everything, he also dwells in a world where Evil Warlord Wizards cast mayhem and misery on the land. But all things in balance, Good battles evil, sometimes with ambiguous results.
AJ and me today went to Zentrifuge again where we had the openSUSE Conference 2011 a couple of weeks ago. We were invited for a coffee and had a feedback session about the conference event. It was a success for both openSUSE and the Zentrifuge.
A Firefox developer just posted some revealing information about a process of how Chrome users could be converted into Firefox users. The good news may be that there is now a reasonable hint why Mozilla may not be able to gain users once they have become Chrome users. The bad news is that Firefox, in its current form, is not equipped with a critical feature to lure influential Chrome users.
To survive the battle with IE and Chrome, Mozilla will have to find more compelling reasons for people to use Firefox – or reasons to draw people back to Firefox. Nicholas Nethercote, who works on memory improvements in Firefox, described why getting users back from Chrome may nearly be impossible, and the reason why casual users may steer clear of Firefox.
It would be hard to overstate the contribution of Richard Stallman to the digital world. The founding of the GNU project and the creation of the GNU General Public License laid the foundations for a wide range of free software that permeates computing from smartphones to supercomputers. Free software has also directly inspired like-minded movements based around sharing, such as open access and open content (Wikipedia, notably).
At the heart of everything Stallman does lies a desire to promote freedom, specifically the freedom of the software user, by constraining the freedom of the developer in the way the code is distributed. That’s in contrast to BSD-style licenses, say, where the developer is free to place additional restrictions on the code, thus reducing the freedom of the user.
[...]
As with software licenses, the question once more comes down to: whose freedom are we talking about here? The freedom for creators to decide how their creations are to be used, or the freedom of users to do with those creations as they wish? The fact that Stallman straddles this divide shows there are no easy answers.
Years ago I hung out with a friend who had a prosthetic hand. It was a stiff plastic hand, like a store mannequin hand, that could open and close in a simple grip. It didn’t have much functionality, but it had a bit of fun factor — my friend liked to remove it to scratch his back. In public, of course, with a freaked-out audience. Americans seem to have a hard time looking at these sorts of things.
The Eclipse Foundation has quietly launched a new language, Xtend, which it says is designed to address shortcomings of Java without replacing it.
The aim of Xtend is to create more readable code, to add features that Java needs but doesn’t have, and to offer “a convenient alternative in situations where Java doesn’t shine”.
For a company praised for such great design, Apple sure seems troubled getting out an iPhone that works right. Death Grip — and its signal stifling capability — marred iPhone 4 from Day One. Consumer Reports still won’t recommend the handset, even after giving it a high rating. Successor 4S comes along and, uh-oh, suffers from heap, big battery-life problems. The story is everywhere — even Apple apologist blogs report it. Perhaps the company should invest more resources in functional design than appearance.
We recently mentioned the latest round of Microsoft’s antitrust fight, dating back to some of its actions around Windows 95. To be clear, I think the action against Microsoft is pretty silly. It’s pretty clear that the market is quite capable of dealing with any perceived Microsoft “monopoly” and routing around it. That said, one thing that is quite stunning in all of this is the sheer hypocrisy from Microsoft in discussing this case, as compared to Microsoft’s own efforts to drag Google into an antitrust battle as well. Now, some will shrug and say that this is basic self-interest on Microsoft’s part. It’s always going to favor things that help Microsoft. But it certainly seems to weaken the validity and credibility of Microsoft’s arguments.
Back in March, we noted just how ridiculous this was, when Microsoft complained about Google to the European Union, whining that Google made it difficult for Microsoft’s platforms (mainly the Bing search engine and Microsoft’s mobile platform) to access YouTube video data. At the time Microsoft’s General Counsel sure seemed to insist that Google had a duty to engineer its platform to make life easier for its competitors.
On Tuesday, Unisys plans to announce that it has won a contract to move the employees to Google Apps for Government, a suite of services that includes Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Sites.
Ok, you’ve heard this rant before, so I’ll keep it short… I picked up a new netbook yesterday (more on that in the next day or two, when I have had a chance to try it out and load a few Linux distributions on it). It is VERY new, pretty much fresh off the production line, evidenced by the latsest AMD C-60 CPU for example. So, first I fire up Windows 7 Stupor Edition, and let it go through 30 minutes or so of “Initial Setup and Configuration”. Then I go to Windows Update, which says there are 25 “Important” updates, of which 24 have been selected for installation. No hint as to why that last lonely update didn’t get selected, nothing in the pitiful descriptions of the updates which indicates incompatibility of that one with any of the others. Never mind, let it install those 24, reboot, go back to Windows Update and select that last lonely one for installation, run that… SURPRISE! When that one has finished, a new one has now appeared. Grrr. Ok, select that one, install it (of course, each of these select/install updates causes a “Windows Recovery Point” to be created). Hmmm. Installing just that one new update is taking 15 minutes or so, thrashing around on the disk, not giving any status information other than “Update 1 of 1 is being installed…”. Ok, that one is done, now it wants to reboot, so let it do that. Finally, updates are done… or not…. GRRRR! Now there is one “Optional Update” that has suddenly materialized in the list… Ok, select that one, and install it – creating yet another “Recovery Point” in the process. Gee, this at least provides ample proof for my description of Windows as “The world’s only automatically self-destroying operating system”. When that “optional update” has finally installed, reboot one more time just to be sure, and check Windows Update again. Oh my God. OH MY GOD!!!! Suddenly there are EIGHT MORE *IMPORTANT” UPDATES to be installed! Where the HELL did those come from?!?!?!
The United States should be more open about its development of offensive cyber weapons and spell out when it will use them as it grapples with an increasing barrage of attacks by foreign hackers, the former No. 2 uniformed officer in the U.S. military said.
In the latest round of demonstrations calling for corporate accountability, 16 Occupy Wall Street protesters were arrested in front of the global headquarters of Goldman Sachs in lower Manhattan.
A New York Police Department spokesperson confirmed that nine men and seven women were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.
He set out to create a mini-Goldman Sachs. In the end, he built a mini-Lehman Brothers.
Former New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine’s resignation Friday from the securities firm he led capped a week of high drama and swift failure.
MF Global collapsed into bankruptcy Monday, and Corzine has since hired a criminal defense attorney amid an FBI investigation into the disappearance of hundreds of millions of dollars in client money.
President Barack Obama told us Jon Corzine was looking out for the little guy.
Never mind Mr. Corzine’s 1% pedigree as a former Goldman Sachs chairman. Never mind how Mr. Corzine essentially bought himself a U.S. Senate seat, spending his personal Goldman Sachs loot in one of the most expensive senatorial races ever. Never mind the dough Mr. Corzine stuffed in Mr. Obama’s pocket.
Here’s what Mr. Obama said in October 2009 while stumping for Mr. Corzine’s re-election bid as the Democratic governor of New Jersey:
A look at some of the latest spin and the latest shaming courtesy of the patent microcosm, which behaves so poorly that one has to wonder if its objective is to alienate everyone
In defiance of common sense and everything that public officials or academics keep saying (European, Australian, American), China's SIPO and Europe's EPO want us to believe that when it comes to patents it's "the more, the merrier"
The problem associated with Battistelli's strategy of increasing so-called 'production' by granting in haste everything on the shelf is quickly being grasped by patent professionals (outside EPO), not just patent examiners (inside EPO)
Free/Open Source software in the currency and trading world promised to emancipate us from the yoke of banking conglomerates, but a gold rush for software patents threatens to jeopardise any meaningful change or progress
To nobody's surprise, the past half a decade saw accelerating demise in quality of European Patents (EPs) and it is the fault of Battistelli's notorious policies
New trouble for Željko Topić in Strasbourg, making it yet another EPO Vice-President who is on shaky grounds and paving the way to managerial collapse/avalanche at the EPO
The utter lack of participation, involvement or even intervention by German authorities serve to confirm that the government of Germany is very much complicit in the EPO's abuses, by refusing to do anything to stop them
Another example of UPC promotion from within the EPO (a committee dedicated to UPC promotion), in spite of everything we know about opposition to the UPC from small businesses (not the imaginary ones which Team UPC claims to speak 'on behalf' of)
Uploaded by SUEPO earlier today was the above video, which shows how last year's party (actually 2015) was spoiled for Battistelli by the French State Secretary for Digital Economy, Axelle Lemaire, echoing the French government's concern about union busting etc. at the EPO (only to be rudely censored by Battistelli's 'media partner')
In violation of international labour laws, Team Battistelli marches on and engages in a union-busting race against the clock, relying on immunity to keep this gravy train rolling before an inevitable crash
A new year's reminder that the EPO has only one legitimate union, the Staff Union of the EPO (SUEPO), whereas FFPE-EPO serves virtually no purpose other than to attack SUEPO, more so after signing a deal with the devil (Battistelli)
Orwellian misuse of terms by the EPO, which keeps using the term "social democracy" whilst actually pushing further and further towards a totalitarian regime led by 'King' Battistelli
The paradigm of totalitarian control, inability to admit mistakes and tendency to lie all the time is backfiring on the EPO rather than making it stronger
An outline of recent stories about patents, where patent quality is key, reflecting upon the population's interests rather than the interests of few very powerful corporations
The role played by Heiko Maas in the UPC, which would harm businesses and people all across Europe, is becoming clearer and hence his motivation/desire to keep Team Battistelli in tact, in spite of endless abuses on German soil
The latest facts and figures about software patents, compared to the spinmeisters' creed which they profit from (because they are in the litigation business)
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