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06.24.10

Links 24/6/2010: Cisco-Red Hat Tag Team, Nokia Elevates Linux

Posted in News Roundup at 4:20 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Africa

    • Implementing A Cost-effective Distance (Online) Learning Program At The University of Liberia

      MOODLE is the acronym for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment. It is an Open Source Learning Management System (LMS) or a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). MOODLE is provided freely as an Open Source Software under the GPL (GNU Public License).

    • Linux Professional Institute and Government of Tunisia to certify IT graduates

      The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world’s premier Linux certification organization (http://www.lpi.org), announced with the Ministry of Communication Technologies of Tunisia (http://www.mincom.tn) a program to train and certify young graduates in Linux and Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). The program was announced during the signing of a partnership agreement in Tunis, Tunisia with Ministry officials and LPI’s affiliate in the region: LPI-Maghreb (http://www.lpi-maghreb.net).

  • Dell

    • Dell backs down on Linux praise

      What is interesting however is that Dell did not kill off the fatal phrase.

      It seems that Dell remains committed to Ubuntu Linux on its laptops and netbooks and will not allow itself to be bullied too much.

      Perhaps Dell sees life in Android, Chrome and Linux after all.

    • Dell hops on Google Chrome OS bandwagon

      Amit Midha, Dell’s president for Greater China and South Asia, told Reuters Monday that Dell wants to be a leader in the “unique innovations” that are coming to market in the next two to three years. Dell is working with Google to see where Chrome and Android fit with the “new form of computing,” he said.

    • Google’s Chrome OS Ventures Into Windows’ Turf

      At this point, though, that’s a big if. “I think Dell is using this mostly as leverage against Microsoft to gain a more favorable OEM contract rather than gearing up to sell a small number of systems to the Microsoft haters of the world,” said Piland.

      Dell wants to be a leader in the “unique innovations” that are coming to market and it’s working with Google to see where Chrome OS and Android fit with the “new form of computing,” Amit Midha, president of Dell’s Greater China and South Asia business, told Reuters Monday.

  • Server

  • Graphics Stack

    • Nvidia Releases a Much Improved Video Driver for Linux

      After many months of hard work, Nvidia finally announced on June 22nd the final and stable version of the 256.x proprietary driver for Nvidia graphics cards. Nvidia 256.35 incorporates lots of fixes and improvements, over previous releases. Unofficial GLX support was also added for a few OpenGL extensions, as well as Thermal Settings reporting improvements, Compiz fixes, many VDPAU improvements, and many more.

  • Instructionals

  • Games

  • Distributions

    • Reviews

      • Slackware Linux 13.1

        The fun doesn’t stop there, though. Go back to the login screen, click the list button at the bottom left of the login window, and you begin to see the advantage of having accepted the defaults on installation, and thus installed almost everything… You can now choose your session type from KDE, Xfce, Fluxbox, Blackbox, FVWM, TWM and more. As I said, if you want to learn about Linux, this is an excellent distribution to use.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Fog Computing

      • Results

        • Red Hat Q1: Revenue, EPS Both Up 20%
        • Red Hat’s JBoss adds to earnings increase

          Red Hat’s JBoss middleware is landing big greenfield deals as well successes with established outfits like the NYSE Euronext. Red Hat has said its Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 will be its most ambitious release and designed for virtual, cloud and physical IT environments.

        • Red Hat growth gathering pace again

          As the graph below demonstrates, Red Hat has grown significantly faster than the industry average (as measured by the Information Age index, which collates the revenue growth rates of the sector’s largest suppliers), but like most businesses it saw a severe deceleration in growth during the past two years – from a height of 52% at the start of 2007 down to a low of 11% at the start of last year.

      • Cisco

      • Virtualisation

        • Red Hat combines desktop and server virtualisation

          Red Hat has released a new version of its Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation that integrates desktop and server virtualisation into a single platform, simplifying the management of virtual infrastructures in a single end-to-end solution, according to the firm.

        • Red Hat turns the crank of KVM enterprise virt

          Cloud infrastructure wannabe and Linux juggernaut Red Hat has announced the next rev of its Enterprise Virtualization commercial-grade KVM hypervisor, saying it has qualified it to scale further and also adding the ability to support desktop images as well as server images.

      • Other

        • Executive Spotlight: Gunnar Hellekson of Red Hat U.S. Public Sector

          Like many other IT professionals, Gunnar Hellekson’s interest in computers was born at an early age, but it was not until college he received formal training in the field. While taking engineering classes, Hellekson put his skills and his entrepreneurial side to use and worked as a systems administrator to make some money. Not long after, he took the step to start up a number of Internet companies, doing business-to-business work and web development, eventually leading to the founding of a consulting company focused on helping small and medium-size arts and nonprofits in New York City. About four or five years ago, he traded the Big Apple for the nation’s capital and ended up working at Red Hat U.S. Public Sector as a chief technology strategist.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu: Harder to Use, or Just Harder to Spell?

        Now, for many FOSS aficionados, the post serves as a bright spot of comic relief in a world otherwise dominated by all-too-real, anti-Linux FUD.

        ” Hahha,” wrote one anonymous reader in the comments on Hoogland’s blog, for example. “One of the most hilarious article on Ubuntu ever.”

        Some were even inspired to continue in the same sarcastic vein: “Ubuntu; why would anyone want to use that?” wrote another anonymous commenter. “Any fool could see that Windows is the best choice. Expensive, proprietary and restrictive is always better than free as in freedom.”

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Next Generation Virtual Platform Simulator Released by Imperas and OVP Initiative Extends Simulation Speed Advantage By 50 Percent

      Highlights of this June 2010 release are the virtual platform simulator OVPsim, which has improved its industry leading performance by 50 percent; fast models of PowerPC processors, and a MIPS-based reference platform under SystemC/TLM-2.0 which boots both Linux and Mentor Graphic’s Nucleus RTOS.

    • MontaVista Software Delivers First Commercial Linux for ARM Cortex(TM)-A9 Processors

      MontaVista(R) Software, LLC, a leader in embedded Linux(R) commercialization, announced the availability of the first commercial Linux distribution and toolchain optimized for the ARM Cortex(TM)-A9 processor. Based on the revolutionary MontaVista Linux 6 (MVL6) approach, it provides a market specific distribution (MSD) and toolchain designed specifically for the Cortex-A9 architecture and provides the perfect starting point for new product designs using the low power, high performance characteristics of the ARM Cortex-A9 processor.

    • Virage Logic Releases Major Update of the Open Source GNU and Linux Toolchains for Its ARC Processor Cores

      Virage Logic Corporation, the semiconductor industry’s trusted IP partner, today announced it is investing in its ARC processor product portfolio by releasing the ARC GNU 2.3 Toolchain for its complete range of ARC processor cores and the ARC Linux 1.3 Operating System for its ARC® 750D processor. The suite contains the ARC Linux 2.6.30 kernel for the ARC 750D processor, and a GCC 4.2.1 based ARC GNU Toolchain for Virage Logic’s complete range of ARC processor cores. Virage Logic is committed to release regular updates of the ARC Open Source Tool Suites to keep the ARC GNU and Linux tools up to date with the current standards. All of the ARC Open Source tools are available for free download at www.SourceForge.com.

    • Nokia/MeeGo

    • Android

      • Android 2.2 hits Nexus One — so who’s next?

        Numerous Nexus One users started receiving Google’s Android 2.2 upgrade over-the-air on their devices Wednesday night. Gauging by users’ reports, the updates appear to be hitting phones all throughout America, on both T-Mobile and AT&T, and on carriers in other countries as well. Users who were not part of the original Nexus One Froyo test group have received the software.

      • Motorola Droid X (Verizon Wireless)
      • Droid X Arrives, and Froyo Goes Open Source!

        The Verizon/Motorola event has kicked off, and the Droid X has been announced. We already knew the Droid X had a 4.3″ display, recorded video at 720p, and had HDMI out capabilities.

      • Google publishes Android 2.2 source code

        In a brief blog post, Google has announced that it has released the entirety of the source code for Froyo, better known as Android 2.2, under an open-source license. The open-source aspect of the release isn’t new — all previous platform iterations have been open-sourced too — but there are a few extra modules in Froyo that have been opened up that had previously been closed-source.

      • Exercising Our Remote Application Removal Feature

        Every now and then, we remove applications from Android Market due to violations of our Android Market Developer Distribution Agreement or Content Policy. In cases where users may have installed a malicious application that poses a threat, we’ve also developed technologies and processes to remotely remove an installed application from devices. If an application is removed in this way, users will receive a notification on their phone.

      • Google Can Remotely Remove Apps From Your Phone
      • Mobile Developer Survey, June 2010

        Apple and Google are now playing chess while everyone else plays catch up. The surge in popularity for developing tablet applications on the two leading OSes, coupled with second tier platforms seeing flat to declining interest, suggests that Google and Apple are moving the battle from phones to a broader, more long-term platform shootout for “anywhere computing.”

        [...]

        Why this is significant: Developers see Apple dominating in every category related to its devices and app store. Yet Android takes top honors for OS capabilities, openness, and, long-term outlook. Despite all of Apple‟s success, developers see that the winner long-term will be the mobile operating system that has the most capabilities and flexibility in scenarios beyond phones.

    • Tablets

      • Linux Tablets to Be Headed in the Near Future

        As a matter of fact, word is that some Linux tablets are headed our way in the near future but they ain’t here yet. And while I think that Linux tablets will do well, it also drives me to expect a lot from them.

        According to Jim Zemlin, the head of the Linux Foundation, it is necessary for mobile Linux vendors to increase their technical investments in order users could benefit Linux devices.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Web culture inspires success in ‘real world’

    Online, open source is a movement, and has resulted in wholesale changes to the way in which software is developed.

  • The American Numismatic Society Partners with ByWater Solutions for Koha Support
  • Open Source Jousting
  • Celebrating the best of open-source

    Dr Koray Atalag, the inaugural holder of a fellowship also endowed by the Bedogni family, says while it’s likely the winner will be working in free or open-source software, the term “open systems” was used to take in people who may be working on components of open standards.

    “The spirit of this thing is open source, but it leaves the door open for people in the non-open source world,” Atalag says.

  • [IBM:] Why is Open Computing So Important In The Public Sector?

    Open Computing is already being widely used and saving money. The French Gendarmarie’s migration to an open source desktop has saved millions of Euros. In Italy, children’s hospitals in Tuscany are saving an estimated 1,000 Euros per PC by moving to open source. And the Spanish autonomous region of Extremadura has moved entirely to open standards and open source resulting in claimed savings of 18 million Euros.

  • High-End Visualization the Open Source Way
  • Richard Branson on open source, Twitter and entrepreneurship: The Memeburn interview

    MB: What is your view on the open source movement (free software and web services). Is it anti-business as Microsoft’s Bill Gates has suggested?

    RB: No, it’s not anti-business – it’s actually very pro-business. It’s enabling. It allows more people direct access to the tools and resources they need to succeed, and also gives everyone a sense of ownership as a whole community. As opposed to one corporate body retaining strict ownership and distribution rights which is more crippling to people at the coal face, particularly in times when we all face budget and resource restrictions.

  • Events

    • TransferSummit Conference

      The event will highlight, discuss and explain advantages and issues in open innovation and using Open Source software.

    • TransferSummit – How open changes everything

      Many organisations are beginning to embrace more open and collaborative approaches to innovation. Inspired by the success of open source products such as the Apache web server and the Firefox browser, many multinational companies such as Procter and Gamble, Orange and IBM have made ‘open innovation’ – the sharing of the risks and rewards of the product development process with partners – a top strategic priority.

  • Web Browsers

  • Fog Computing

    • Let’s Deep-Six Facebook and Do Open Source Social Networking Instead – Pro: Evan Prodromou

      In November 2008, Evan Prodromou — founder of identi.ca and CEO and lead developer of StatusNet — published a blog post on autonomo.us in which he argued that we need a distributed model for social networking sites.

    • Eucalyptus (and Fake ‘Open Source’)

      • Open core is not open source

        So let me try to make one thing clear: Open core may be a good business model, but open core is not open source!

      • The Road to Closed Source Software, Eucalyptus

        I can remember the morning of the first keynotes for the MySQL Conference after Sun had acquired MySQL. You have Jonathan Swartz and Rich Green delivering keynotes where the underlying message was “we continue to allow MySQL to run its own business”.

        Why was this?

        Because Marten was going to announce the close sourcing of part of the MySQL Server. For years there were conversations around “if we did XYZ could we take out a critical…”. These conversations were always met with a dead silence. The codebase was neither modular, nor did any of the developers resonate with the message. The backup code had never been designed to be a standalone component so the entire message of “we are close sourcing it” was a delusion. We had no ability to do it.

      • Multi-Tenancy in Cloud Will Dominate, Change Open Source

  • Databases

    • Open-sourced Membase Joins NoSQL Party

      Membase is a simple, fast and elastic data store that is optimized for demanding web applications. The software is based on Memcached, a very popular in-memory caching system. NorthScale was started by the leaders of the Memcached open source project. NorthScale also today announced the availability of the beta version of its NorthScale Membase Server.

    • Membase, a new open source NoSQL database, launched

  • Education

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • New Ground on Terminology Debate?

      Furthermore, I try to have faith in our community’s intelligence. Regardless of how people get drawn into FLOSS: be it from the moral software freedom arguments or the technical-advantage-only open source ones, I don’t think people stop listening immediately upon their arrival in our community. I know this even from my own adoption of software freedom: I came for the Free as in Price, but I stayed for the Free as in Freedom. It’s only because I couldn’t afford a SCO Unix license in 1992 that I installed GNU/Linux. But, I learned within just a year why the software freedom was what mattered most.

      Surely, others have a similar introduction to the community: either drawn in by zero-cost availability or the technical benefits first, but still very interested to learn about software freedom. My goal is to reach those who have arrived in the community. I therefore try to speak almost constantly about software freedom, why it’s a moral issue, and why I work every day to help either reduce the amount of proprietary software, or increase the amount of Free Software in the world. My hope is that newer community members will hear my arguments, see my actions, and be convinced that a moral and ethical commitment to software freedom is the long lasting principle worth undertaking. In essence, I seek to lead by example as much as possible.

  • Project Releases

    • Typo3 version 4.4 is now available

      Today the TYPO3 Association released the newest version of their Open Source project TYPO3. TYPO3 has been downloaded over 4.6 million times – making it one of the world’s leading Enterprise Open Source projects.

    • VLC Player 1.1

  • Government

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Why Share-Alike Licenses are Open but Non-Commercial Ones Aren’t

      It is sometimes suggested that there isn’t a real difference in terms of “openness” between share-alike (SA) and non-commercial (NC) clauses — both being some restriction on what the user of that material can do, and, as such, a step away from openness.

      This is not true. A meaningful distinction can be drawn between share-alike and non-commercial clauses (or any other clause that discriminates against a particular type of person or field of endeavour), with the former being “open” and the latter being not “open”.

    • The Sharing Industry Keeps Growing with Weeels, Closest Closet

      We at Shareable.net harbor the belief that the growth of the Internet and mobile technology has made sharing more practical–and that this trend has the potential to minimize consumption, by redefining wealth as access to stuff instead of the accumulation of stuff. We’re working on testing this hypothesis, by launching a series of studies with the research consultancy Latitude.

    • Open Data

      • OpenStreetMap: 2010 State of the Map conference

        The OpenStreetMap (OSM) Project has announced that this year’s State of the Map conference will take place from the 9th to the 11th of July in Girona, Spain. OpenStreetMap is an open source project that is building free online maps, not based on any copyright or licensed map data. Founded by Steve Coast in August of 2004 and run by the OpenStreetMap Foundation, to date the project has nearly 270,000 users worldwide that make more than 7,000 edits every hour.

    • Open Hardware

  • Eclipse

Leftovers

  • UK News Sites Hit Record Traffic In Election Month

    Unique browsers to the five national newspaper websites and groups which file monthly ABCe figures hit a record 131.8 million in May.

  • Science

  • Environment

    • Unpredictable fishery economics guide ocean’s populations

      The way the ocean is fished is less predictable than we thought, according to a paper published in PNAS this week. Researchers thought that commercial interests usually fished “down the food web,” targeting species high in the food chain and moving downwards. But the new study shows that price indexes of fish play a large role and don’t always correlate with food chain position, which will make the ecosystem impact of fishing difficult to predict.

    • Oil spills: Legacy of the Torrey Canyon

      On the morning of Saturday 18 March 1967, the Torrey Canyon ran aground on Pollard’s Rock between Land’s End and the Isles of Scilly. Over the following days, every drop of the 119,328 tonnes of crude oil borne by this 300m-long supertanker seeped into the Atlantic. Thousands of tonnes despoiled the beaches of Cornwall – and thousands more were propelled by winds and currents across the channel towards France.

    • BP ‘burning sea turtles alive’

      A rare and endangered species of sea turtle is being burned alive in BP’s controlled burns of the oil swirling around the Gulf of Mexico, and a boat captain tasked with saving them says the company has blocked rescue efforts.

      Mike Ellis, a boat captain involved in a three-week effort to rescue as many sea turtles from unfolding disaster as possible, says BP effectively shut down the operation by preventing boats from coming out to rescue the turtles.

    • Tony Blair for BP chairman?

      I was interviewed on British radio today and was asked about this idea. Seemed hard to believe: Blair has become a climate activist (see “Tony Blair, Climate Group, and CAP call for strong technology deployment policy driven by a carbon price, innovative financing, and serious technology standards“) — and this is a no-win, resume-destroying job.

      But some British pundits are actually proposing this radical solution to BP’s PR woes (see “Tony Blair is the right man to be BP chairman” and “Tony Blair’s Hiring Is Step One in a BP Comeback: Matthew Lynn.”

    • Moratorium Won’t Stop Unprecedented BP Project in the Arctic

      The Obama administration’s six-month moratorium has put a freeze on new offshore drilling permits, but three miles off the coast of Alaska, there’s one unprecedented drilling project by BP that’s still moving forward regardless.

      That’s according to two investigations this week—one in today’s New York Times and the other published online by Rolling Stone on Tuesday.

    • Tibetan environmentalist says Chinese jailers tortured him

      A jailed Tibetan environmentalist used the opening of his trial today to accuse Chinese captors of beatings, sleep deprivation and other maltreatment, his wife told reporters.

      Karma Samdrup – a prominent businessman and award-winning conservationist – issued a statement in court detailing the brutal interrogation methods, including drugs that made his ears bleed, used on him since his detention on 3 January.

      “If not for his voice, I would not have recognised him,” his wife Zhenga Cuomao told the Associated Press.

      She said Samdrup appeared gaunt when he appeared at the Yangqi county courthouse in Xinjiang, the mountainous province neighbouring Tibet.

  • Finance

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

    • Ofcom opens debate on net neutrality

      Ofcom today published a discussion paper on the practice of internet traffic management – a technique used by network operators and internet service providers (ISPs) to stem or accelerate the flow of traffic over the web.

      This practice may allow network operators and ISPs to handle traffic more efficiently, to prioritise traffic by type, to guarantee bandwidth or to block or degrade the quality of certain content.

  • Copyrights

    • ASCAP raising money to fight Free Culture

      Fred says:

      Memehacker, and composer Mike Rugnetta just received a note from the collecting society ASCAP soliciting funds to fight Creative Commons, Public Knowledge, and the EFF. According to ASCAP, these organizations are mobilizing to undermine ASCAP members’ copyrights because they want all music to be free. Which, if you know anything about the kind of nuanced reform work these organizations do, is a pretty gross exaggeration. The letter reads like a McCarty-era scaremongering pitch to solicit funds from composers and musicians bewildered by the current pace of music industry evolution. Read part 1 of the letter here, and part 2 here.

      Blogger Molly Sheridan wrote a post asking ASCAP members how it sits with them, so if you’re a current ASCAP member, chime in. Or better yet, take a minute to donate to Creative Commons, Public Knowledge, and the EFF.

    • Could Accessing Your Own Data On Facebook Make You Criminally Liable?

      We’ve been following the rather bizarre and dangerous lawsuit filed by Facebook against Power.com, an online service that tries to let users aggregate various social networking activity into a single service. All Power.com does is let a willing user have Power.com’s tools log into Facebook and reuse/reformat the data within its own framework. From a user’s perspective, this could be quite useful. From Facebook’s perspective this is both a violation of copyright law and a violation of computer hacking laws. Why? Because Facebook says so.

    • US Tries to Block Progress on Treaty for Blind and Other Disabilities

      Today a UN body is trying to reach an agreement on work on copyright exceptions for persons who are blind or have other disabilities. The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is aggressively trying to block adoption of a work program that would include the possibility of a treaty. Officially, the USPTO is proposing an alternative approach that could be a step toward a treaty. Privately, the USPTO and other federal agencies are putting enormous pressure on countries to abandon a binding treaty in favor of a very weak and even harmful resolution.

    • New Zealand Media Claiming That Huge Local Film Success Story Is Being Harmed… By 200 Downloaders?

  • ACTA

    • Digital legislation a threat to creative industry

      Doctoral research into media education and media literacy at the University of Leicester has highlighted how increased legislative control on use of digital content could stifle future creativity.

      The Digital Economy Act 2010 alongside further domestic and global legislation, not least the ongoing ‘Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA)’, combines to constitute a very hard line against any form of perceived copyright infringement.

    • The Copyright Debate’s Missing Element

      There is certainly no lack of debate about copyright, and whether it promotes or hinders creativity. But in one important respect, that debate has been badly skewed, since it has largely discussed creativity in terms of pre-digital technologies. And even when digital methods are mentioned, there is precious little independent research to draw upon.

    • Leak: EU pushes for criminalizing non-commercial usages in ACTA

      A document leaked from the Presidency of the EU reveals that Member States are pushing for new criminal sanctions into the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), a few days ahead of the next negotiation round. The proposal stated in this document reveals how illegitimate and dangerous the whole ACTA process is, while exposing the scary position of the EU calling for more repression of non-for-profit usages… and their incitation.

    • Those that Live by the DMCA….

      …content owners have to specify precisely which files they claim are infringing. They can’t just say: “everyone can see there’s infringement on your site, find it and deal with it.” If upheld, that’s very good news, because it means that anyone that sets up a mechanism for carrying out DMCA requests doesn’t need to go through their entire holdings looking for possibly infringing materials (obviously impossible for a site like YouTube.)

  • Digital Economy Bill

    • NUJ vows to support court challenges against Digital Economy Act

      The National Union of Journalists (NUJ) will support legal challenges to the recently passed Digital Economy Act, according to a new national policy.

      The new policy, which was signed off by the NUJ’s National Executive Council in May, raises concern from other industry groups that the Act’s measures could be used against sites that publish material of public interest without permission, such as the whistleblowing site Wikileaks.

      The union policy calls for the Act to be implemented in a way that “fully protects freedom of information and expression”.

      Originally, NUJ members focused their campaigning on the controversial clause 43 on orphan works. This was later dropped before the Bill was passed into law in the “wash-up” at the end of the last government.

Clip of the Day

CLUG Talk – 22 Apr 2008 – Further C Notes (2008)


Links 24/6/2010: Linux T-Shirt Contest Ends, GIMP 2.6.9 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 3:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Rethinking Windows security: Will Google’s move spur others to drop Microsoft?

    In fact, many find that even when the vast majority of an organization’s IT infrastructure is made up of non-Microsoft based systems, Microsoft Windows systems make up the majority of maintenance resource expenditures, both for security management and more mundane system administration and troubleshooting. Thanks in part to the nature of Google’s business and the size and influence of the corporation, it is even likely to be well insulated against any need for compatibility with Microsoft-specific ways of doing things, both internally and externally.

  • Smoke Screens and Linux

    Why aren’t people buying these things so easily anymore? I have the theory that, while the success of Windows was the ignorance of the user, Linux communities teach their users and this knowledge empowers people. After all, in the 21st Century, more computer users are awakening. Little by little, we are breaking this shell of fear and gullibility and we are beginning to see through the smoke generated to make us stumble. We read. We check. We double-check. We participate in forums and get informed.

    Above all, beginner Linux users are abandoning herd mentality.

  • Desktop

    • Another One Bites the Dust

      The machine is a middle to low end machine from a few years back (2001?): AMD Athlon XP 1800 (1.5gHz). 256 MB DDR266, 40 MB Hard Drive.

      [...]

      I installed a raft of games, vlc, xawtv, sound-juicer, childsplay, gcompris, ktouch and google-chrome as well as the default stuff for an XFCE4 desktop. A webcam from Logitech worked and I left a self-portrait on the desktop… I expect the owner will change that quickly.

  • Audiocasts

  • Ballnux

    • HP spins a netbook just for schools

      HP announced a netbook for students that includes a metal-hinged case, carrying handle, and worldwide V.92 modem. Available in bulk orders only, the Mini 100e includes a 10.1-inch display, customizable case, network activity light, and a 1.66GHz Atom N455 processor with DDR3 RAM, the company says.

      [...]

      Customization also extends to the Mini 100e’s operating system: In addition to Windows 7 Starter Edition, the device will be offered with SuSE Linux Enterprise 11 and Windows XP Home Edition, HP says.

    • KMail’s Akonadi migration in openSUSE

      In openSUSE’s KDE team, we’ve recently planned the migration to Akonadi, the groupware caching solution that will be the base of upcoming KDE PIM versions, notably KDE’s address book, email client and calendar app.

  • Kernel Space

    • T-Shirt Design Contest Winner Announced

      With 57 percent (4,501) of the vote, the winner of the Linux.com T-Shirt Design Contest is “The People’s Product”, designed by Mr. Said Hassan who is a marketing consultant as SADAF Information Technology in Gaza in Palestine. “This design represents that the Linux system is the collective work of people and it was done so that others can enjoy a reliable, suitable operating system away from a monopoly. So, it’s like a celebration of our efforts: Linux is our product.”

    • Linux: the people’s product

      The Linux Foundation ran a t-shirt design contest back in March to kick off the grand opening of the new Linux.com store. More than 100 designs were submitted, and of these six were selected as finalists. Almost eight thousand votes were tallied, and the community-selected winner, with 57% of the votes, is Mr. Said Hassan from the Gaza Strip, who designed “The People’s Product.” Shirts with this winning design are being produced now, and will be available for purchase at the Linux.com store soon-ish.

    • Testing Out Btrfs In Ubuntu 10.10

      The performance of Btrfs has certainly improved a great deal since it was first introduced in the mainline kernel back with the Linux 2.6.29 release in early 2009. Today’s tests show that even with old hardware both when it comes to the processor and disk drive that even still Btrfs manages to perform well both with its default mount options and then again when taking advantage of the transparent compression support. Beyond the quantitative disk results, Btrfs also provides other advantages like with the system rollback support as being worked on in Fedora and solid state drive (SSD) optimizations. We are also exploring Btrfs in other ways at Phoronix to tie it into Phoromatic for some rather unique and interesting test capabilities.

      It is good to see Canonical now pushing the Btrfs installation support into Ubuntu 10.10 after it has been available as an option in Fedora for more than a year now and is even the default file-system with MeeGo. For those interested in trying out this file-system, we certainly would recommend it and we look forward to its continued adoption.

    • Graphics Stack

      • How The ATI Catalyst Driver Has Matured Since The RV770 Launch

        It has been two years since the ATI Radeon HD 4800 (RV770) series launched so we have gone back since that monumental hardware launch and have re-tested each Catalyst driver release since then to see how the performance has changed for the ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics card. The Catalyst driver has certainly matured over the course of two years in speeding up the OpenGL performance with this hardware along with bringing new features to their proprietary driver, but it is not exactly smooth sailing.

      • [NVIDIA] 256.35 for Linux x86/x86_64 released

        * Fixed a regression in 256.29 where Performance Level clock frequencies were reported incorrectly in nvidia-settings.
        * Fixed a 3D Vision Stereo bug that caused the stereo glasses to not toggle when the flat panel was not running at its native mode timings.
        * Fixed a bug that caused nvidia-settings to crash when rendering its thermal gauge widget if the range of valid values for the thermal sensor was empty.

        The 256.35 NVIDIA Accelerated Linux Graphics Driver

      • A CUDA Back-End For Intel’s Open-Source Driver?

        While there is the “Clover” branch of Mesa started by Zack Rusin for providing an OpenCL state tracker that can be used by Gallium3D hardware drivers, it hasn’t yet amounted to much. The OpenCL state tracker is not yet working, hasn’t been touched in months, and has yet to be integrated in the mainline Mesa code-base. However, as another GPGPU alternative, it looks like a CUDA back-end that’s specific to Intel’s open-source driver may end up being worked on.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

      • Linux’s old KDE 3 desktop lives!?

        For now, the Pearson site continues to be dark, but there are reports that the group has managed to deliver KDE 3.5.11 for Ubuntu. The main Trinity development site is live and on Launchpad, Canonical’s, the company behind Ubuntu, Web-based collaborative software development Website.

      • Who’s Driving the Bus?

        Others, though, are driving the bus of KDE and have chosen to “improve” the desktop. Others, who feel as I do are trying to preserve the look and feel of the 3.5 version. Whether the group doing the work can sustain an independent branch of KDE is a question. KDE is large and complex and the libraries it depends upon changed, causing some of the development of the 4 branch.

  • Distributions

    • Most popular Linux distros

      Which Linux distributions top the popularity charts?

    • Reviews

      • WattOS — a lightweight, low-power Linux

        A lightweight Linux distribution often seems to require making sacrifices — using a UI which many users would find unfamiliar and using software which is heavily cut down in functionality.

        WattOS is a really interesting lightweight Linux distribution that is based on Ubuntu 10.04 (as of WattOS R2). As the name might suggest, it is also focused on low power usage and is said to work well with older and less powerful hardware.

        [...]

        If you are looking for a lightweight Linux, WattOS is most definitely worth a look.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Let’s Lift the Red Hat and Look Inside

        The numbers we did get to see weren’t too shabby, either. Revenue increased by 20% year over year to $209 million, and a whopping $179 million of that business came from subscription fees. And like I said, Red Hat has a lot of guaranteed business in its internal books that won’t show up anywhere in the income statement until those customers start paying their subscription bills.

      • Stocks Hitting 52-Week Highs: RHT, VRX
      • Topping Leaders Bode Badly For Market

        Red Hat (RHT), which went public in August, jumped 123% from a breakout in late November to an intraday high only 10 sessions later.

      • Irrefutable Proof That GNU/Linux Costs Less on the Desktop

        Why does RedHat still provide tools for GNU/Linux on the desktop in individual installations or huge roll-outs? Their customers demand it. If RedHat did not provide the service, then someone else would and might siphon off the lucrative server/services/training business… Ah! There’s the thing. GNU/Linux on the desktop is not a huge money maker for them but it does work for the customer and RedHat gets money for consultation/setup.

      • Linux as a catalyst for a smarter planet

        In this morning’s Red Hat Summit sessions, Jean Staten Healy and Bob Sutor of IBM presented on the solutions that communities around the world are implementing using Linux as a catalyst for a smarter planet.

        The IT industry exists to solve problems. And you can solve them at a micro level, or you can look problems that are so huge, they affect countries, or the entire world. The range is huge, and complexity varies tremendously. Smarter Planet is about a macro approach. It’s meant for those really significant problems and to answer how IT can help solve those problems.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu One good enough to convert a Dropbox user?

        I like the way Ubuntu One will sync up databases. This is a great feature for developers, and I hope more will take advantage of it. Apart from that one feature though Dropbox is the better product. It is easy to install and use, pricing is better, it works across operating systems, and is something you could recommend to your technically challenged friends.

      • Why I’m using Ubuntu now

        Well, the main reason is because trying out different Linux distributions is so much fun, isn’t it? There was nothing really wrong with Fedora, in fact it did a lot of things right, but I wanted to configure my file server with a lightweight environment and then leave it alone. I’ve spent too much time on that thing already.

        Firstly, I replaced Ubuntu with Arch and LXDE, to see if I could get it working with anything else than Ubuntu. I’ve installed Arch probably 50 times before, but this time I couldn’t get the keyboard layout right in X. Hal should take care of that, and yet it didn’t. Also, the screen resolution was way off, and I couldn’t get the nouveau drivers configured, while the chipset was too old for the regular nvidia driver. Exit Arch.

        [...]

        As always, installing and using Ubuntu is a very agreeable experience. As with Fedora, all hardware worked out of the box, and installing extra codecs and suchlike was a bit easier. It doesn’t look as sleek as Fedora, but it doesn’t look bad either. A bit heavy for a theme called “Light”, but otherwise okay. I do think the focus on looks is a good thing, and I must admit that picture of a PC that runs Ubuntu looks very good.

      • Ubuntu Won’t Become A Rolling Release Distro

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Ultimate Edition gives SourceForge the ultimate compliment

          Developer Glenn “TheeMahn” Cady created the antecedent to Ultimate Edition in 2006, a version of Ubuntu with a Christmas theme that he called Ubuntu Christmas Edition. Its successor, Ubuntu Ultimate, drew an e-mail from Canonical, the organization behind Ubuntu, asking Cady not to use the Ubuntu name or logo because of trademark issues, so he changed the name to Ultimate Edition. Over time the distribution has grown in scope and power. While it caters to new users, it also bundles powerful tools for programming, as well as software called Ultamatix that allows users to easily install additional software and games.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Better Readability Today won’t save E-Readers Tomorrow

      Here’s the problem I have with this electrophoretic technology: it’s only black and white. While that doesn’t matter with novels, having color sure does make a difference for many technical books. As my friend Carla Schroder, writer and editor of Linux Planet, put it, “Books in color is where it’s at, especially technical and how-to books. Why would I want to put my Audacity [an excellent, open-source audio editor] book on the Kindle, for one example, when being able to show blue waveforms and green level meters and red clipping bars adds tons of useful information.”

    • Playing with MeeGo 1.0

      Perhaps that is the future of Linux on the desktop – at least, Linux on the relatively small desktop. Like Android, it’s not the sort of Linux experience that we are used to, though MeeGo is far closer to “traditional” Linux than Android is. But perhaps it’s an experience that will bring in a new set of users; once they get used to this environment, the full Linux experience will be there for them to discover. That should be a good thing.

    • Ubuntu Netbook Edition for ARM gets a video demo

      One of the primary differences between the ARM version of Ubuntu Netbook Edition and the version built for x86 processors is that Ubuntu 10.7′s program launcher doesn’t require 3D hardware drivers since the whole thing is designed with 2D graphics. I have to say, the UI looks awfully snappy on the demo unit.

Free Software/Open Source

  • CMS

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • On Annoyance and Free Software

      I can’t name one major Open-Source-not-Free-Software activist that offers up any real criticism to the Free Software messaging coming out of the FSF. That’s not to say it doesn’t exist – I have covered in this blog a few lawyer and professor types that laid out very intelligent and considered issues on the GPL and Free Software in general, but they are so few and far between.

      The overwhelmingly vast majority of criticism against Free Software basically starts with “Freetard” and ends with “Communist/Socialist/Zealot”. Usually there are a lot of lies and distortions in the middle – I wonder what motivates someone to take a position they are not able to rationally defend, one which they must resort to (and repeat) logical fallacies of all flavors?

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Giving it all away

      Increasingly, due to the good offices of Creative Commons, much of the content on the web can be legally repurposed or appropriated for other use. I think this is a good thing. None of us want to waste time re-inventing the proverbial wheel, and we could bear in mind what Pablo Picasso once said: ‘Good artists borrow, great artists steal’. So OK, ‘steal’ is an emotive word, which we probably don’t want to associate with, but I get the sentiments behind the statement. A lot of art and music could be said to be ‘derivative’ – and there have been many court cases and fallings out over this grey area of creativity, but here’s my point: I don’t mind at all if other people borrow my content for their own purposes, as long as they attribute it to me and don’t make any commercial profit at my expense. Many already have – some people have actually translated my content into other languages or used as a part of larger works. I’m an advocate not only of Open Educational Resources, but also the idea of Open Scholarship, which is where academics and scholars not only make their content available for free, they also open up themselves to constructive criticism from their peers. I hope we see more of this in the coming years and I am confident we shall.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • OdfKit Hack Week starts

      OdfKit is a project that reuses WebKit technology in a toolkit for working with ODF office documents. KO GmbH is sponsored by NLnet to work on OdfKit for three months. This week, Chani, who is on her way to Akademy, is working with me on OdfKit and since she’s here an entire week, we’re calling it OdfKit Hack Week.

    • See how you can use lpOD with simple examples and tools!

Leftovers

  • Environment

  • Finance

    • The price of economic posturing

      Many economists, myself included, regard this turn to austerity as a huge mistake. It raises memories of 1937, when FDR’s premature attempt to balance the budget helped plunge a recovering economy back into severe recession. And here in Germany a few scholars see parallels to the policies of Heinrich Brüning, the chancellor from 1930 to 1932, whose devotion to financial orthodoxy ended up sealing the doom of the Weimar Republic.

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

    • WikiLeaks May Be Under Attack

      One of our alleged sources, a young US intelligence analyst, Bradley Manning, has been detained and shipped to a US military prison in Kuwait, where he is being held without trail. Mr. Manning is alleged to have acted according to his conscious and leaked to us the Collateral Murder video and the video of a massacre that took place in Afghanistan last year at Garani.

      The Garani massacre, which we are still working on, killed over 100 people, mostly children.

    • Medical Minute 6-15: Tattletale Pills

      If you forget to do what your doctor tells you, you’re not alone. But now, engineers have created a way to make sure you’re following doctor’s orders.

Clip of the Day

CLUG Talk 10 November 2009 – Upstart (2009)


06.23.10

Links 23/6/2010: Fedora 14 Themes, Btrfs in Ubuntu

Posted in News Roundup at 6:34 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • 2010 Readers’ Choice Awards Survey

    Linux Journal’s Readers’ Choice Awards offer the opportunity for readers to vote for their Linux and Open Source favorites. We compiled nominations and came up with the following list. If your favorite is not listed in any category, we encourage you to write in your vote (it’s also okay to skip voting in categories not applicable to you).

  • When Linux Isn’t Called Linux

    As Steven Vaughan-Nichols notes, Hewlett-Packard, the number one PC seller on the planet is trending toward becoming a significant Linux distributor. In acquiring Palm, HP also acquires the Linux-based WebOS, and if HP is smart, it will pursue a very open strategy with WebOS, possibly on mobile phones, and possible on iPad-like tablet devices. HP also has acquired rights to Phoenix Technologies’ HyperSpace, a lean Linux distro that provides instant-on capabilities.

  • Desktop

    • HP Treating Gnu/Linux Users Unfairly?

      It is unfortunate that HP doesn’t offer Gnu/Linux on these machines. The way HP offers ‘options’ to choose the desired processors and other hardware, it would be a fair business practice to offer choice of operating system as well for those enterprise customers who want to run their own OS but don’t want to pay Microsoft tax.

    • Back When Linux Was Fun

      Minitube is just one example but I could name hundreds off the top of my head. I love these little projects and while most of the attention is on the grown up side of Linux and open source software, I have a special fondness for those projects that are a little less ‘mature’. I love what companies like Canonical have done to polish their Ubuntu Linux distributions into an operating system worthy of powering the computers that make business tick. In fact, I love the fact Ubuntu is a respected and grown up product. We’ve made it. This is the big time.

    • Putting Technology into the Hands of Tomorrow….Today

      Skip Guenter is a Director for The HeliOS Project so one would expect him to put in a little extra effort but Skip passed “a little extra” sometime in early May. Skip worked dozens of his own hours to get equipment running, computers operational and things organized for the technical side of the room. I also want to thank Ron West for his dedication to what we do and the sweat equity he put into Linux Against Poverty. What many people did not see was the pre-activities prior to LAP.

  • Audiocasts

    • Episode 0x2A: Waiting for Bilski

      Karen and Bradley briefly talk about waiting for the Bilski case to be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

      This show was released on Tuesday 22 June 2010; its running time is 08:39.

  • Kernel Space

    • Kernel Log: Linus resolves to apply a strict policy over merging changes

      It would appear that Linus Torvalds has resolved to apply a strict policy of accepting only bug fix changes to the kernel after the merge window has closed. Torvalds has also stuck his oar into the debate over the Android suspend block API and made the situation even more complicated.

      For years, major changes for each new Linux kernel version have been merged into the main development tree during the merge window, which usually lasts about two weeks and concludes with the release of the first pre-release version of the next kernel (2.6.x-rc1). Thereafter, changes are theoretically restricted to patches which fix existing bugs without giving rise to new ones. In practice, RC2 and RC3 have included the odd major change and some clean up work, such as resolving compiler warnings, has found its way in at an even later stage.

    • User Space File Systems

      Examples of FUSE File Systems

      There are many examples of file systems that use FUSE. Sometimes FUSE is used for prototyping or testing file systems or it is used as the file system itself. It is beyond the scope of this article to list all of them or even a good chunk of them, but some that you might recognize (or might not) include:

      * SSHFS This is a file system client that can mount and interact with directories and files on a remote system using sftp. Very handy file system for mounting remote file systems.
      * GmailFS This FUSE based file system was written to use Google’s email storage as a file system. Originally it used the gmail web interface but this kept changing. The previous link takes you to a new version of GmailFS that uses IMAP to use the gmail email space as a file system. One of the interesting aspects of this file system is that it’s written in Python.
      * EncFS This FUSE based file system provides an encrypted file system for Linux. For a discussion about encrypted file systems and Linux please read this.

      [...]

    • Graphics Stack

      • Whoops, X.Org Server 1.9 Gets Another RC Today

        The second X.Org Server 1.9 release candidate was released earlier today after the first RC making it out just last week, but already the third release candidate is available to interested parties.

  • Applications

  • GNOME Desktop

  • Distributions

    • The Reg guide to Linux, part 2: Preparing to dual-boot

      On Monday, we suggested Ubuntu as a good starting point for experimenting with desktop Linux. If you have the option, dedicate a machine to it – by 2010 standards, even a modest-spec PC will run it fine. You’ll be very pleasantly surprised by the transformation from a lumbering old XP box burdened with years of cruft to one with a fresh install of an OS that doesn’t need multiple layers of security software.

    • Reviews

      • [Reviews]: TinyMe 2010 Acorn RC 1 Review

        One of the mini distribution based on Unity Linux, it a great choice for old machines cause it does not take a big amount of RAM and CPU usage, using OpenBox 3.4.11 lightweight window manager, simple LXPanel, and many installed application will mention it later on the review.

    • PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Moving to mandriva?!

        Never thought I would be writing this, but I am actually considering moving my Linux boxes (based mainly in OpenSuSE and Fedoras) to Mandriva! During my hey days we always considered Mandrake (it’s name then) something of a play distribution or a distribution for Linux beginners and should not be used for ‘serious’ work.

        Fast forward about 10 years, after a name change I don’t know why suddenly I felt an urge to pick up the latest version of Mandriva 2010 to give it the proverbial spin. After playing around with the bought version of Mandriva (yes I actually bought a copy!). I really started liking it. Let me just list down a few of the reasons why.

      • Mandriva saved by CEO

        The Linux company, which is based in France and Brazil, had been operating in recent months under the threat of potential bankruptcy, as its finances were reportedly precarious.

        According to the French press Laprévote rallied investors “to return the group to balance and find a good business model.” He said that the community does not need to be concerned about the outfit’s future any longer.

        Laprévote took the CEO job in April. In May a posting in one of the Mandriva forums revealed major cash flow problems and the existence of plans to perhaps sell or merge the company.

        One of the possible buyers named was Lightapp, but that deal apparently fell through, and then Linagora was rumoured to be in talks with Mandriva.

    • Fedora

      • Fedora 14 Theme: concepts feedback

        Design team has kicked off concepts for Laughling release theme quoted: Something that can illustrate the emergence concept, like multiple objects combined to create a new one (more complex).

      • Helping others get Fedora

        When I find an outstanding distro, such as Fedora, I prefer to buy the media from an on-line vendor as a way of showing my support. Most of the time the money goes directly to the vendor, however, I happened upon the Sponsored Media Program today and found a vendor who participates in this program.

      • IT Infrastructure: Red Hat’s Fedora Linux: 13 Releases of Cutting-Edge Open Source
      • Fedora 13 – Xfce spin vs. LXDE spin

        The Fedora 13 Xfce spin has more applications than the LXDE spin. So far the machine crashed on the screensaver (in Xfce, not in LXDE, and the same thing has been happening with Ubuntu Lucid if I don’t choose blanking the screen instead of a random screensaver).

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Why did I choose to use Ubuntu

        Currently I prefer to use Ubuntu, after I felt the ability to provide Ubuntu Graphical on my laptop, especially Ubuntu 10.04. There are a few that made me feel at home using and choosing Ubuntu Linux operating system, which are as follows:

        1. No Virus – because Linux does not recognize the files of his Win32 executables, so the possibility of taxable virus is 0%, it is also felt by fellow users of the Linux operating system in general.
        2. Open Source – Linux distributions are open source and the source code can be edited and modified according to our needs. We can learn how to work the Ubuntu (Linux) Operating System

      • Ubuntu’s vmbuilder Script
      • BTRFS Ready For Testing In Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat

        Colin Watson (Ubuntu Development Manager) just announced on the Ubuntu-Devel mailing list that you can now perform installations with a BTRFS root filesystem using the latest Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat daily ISO. Note: I’ve downloaded the latest ISO and I do not see an option to format a partition as BTRFS when choosing to specify partitions manuallt so probably this will be available starting tomorrow’s daily ISO.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • GUI toolkit adds OpenGL support

      Wind River has rev’d its GUI development suite for embedded devices, adding support for OpenGL 3D graphics. Wind River Tilcon Graphics Suite 5.8 also broadens its embedded target operating system support from Linux and VxWorks to Windows CE and Windows XP, and adds support for more hardware platforms, including the Intel Atom, says the company.

    • 160,000 Android Phones Sold Per Day

      Android cofounder and Google vice president Andy Rubin just announced at the Droid X event that 160,000 Android devices are being sold per day. That’s up sharply from last month when Google announced that 100,000 Android devices were being activated each day.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Events

  • Mozilla

    • Firefox 3.6.4 with Crash Protection Now Available

      Today, Mozilla is happy to release Firefox 3.6.4, the latest security and stability release for Firefox, used by nearly 400 million people around the world to browse the Web. This release provides crash protection for Windows and Linux users by isolating third-party plugins when they crash.

      Results from our beta testing show Firefox 3.6.4 will significantly reduce the number of Firefox crashes experienced by users who are watching online videos or playing games. When a plugin crashes or freezes while using Firefox, users can enjoy uninterrupted browsing by simply refreshing the page.

    • Mozilla designer says Google Chrome uses speed tricks

      An interface designer interning at Mozilla has suggested that the company mimic gimmicks in Google’s Chrome to make users think Firefox starts up faster. In an entry on his personal blog that was reposted to Mozilla’s uber-blog, Planet Mozilla, John Wayne Hill, an Indiana University masters student interning this summer at the open source company, spelled out changes that would give users the feeling that Firefox starts quicker.

    • 3 Amazing Firefox Hacks
    • Top 6 Google Chrome Extensions for a Much Secure Browsing Experience

  • SaaS/Eucalyptus

    • Eucalyptus Partner Day: Can VARs and Open-Source Cloud Connect?

      Back in March 2010, Marten Mickos, best known as the man who built MySQL into an estimated $100 million enterprise, made headlines when he stepped in at Eucalyptus in the role of CEO. But even before that, a partnership with Canonical to provide the platform at the heart of the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud beginning with 2009’s Ubuntu Server Edition 9.10 garnered Eucalyptus a lot of notice.

    • Marten Mickos says open source doesn’t have to be fully open

      The term “open core” essentially means that the heart of a software project is built on, and remains, open source but added features may not be (particularly a commercial version intended for enterprise use).VC-funded software startups love this model.

  • Mixing

    • Open Source vs Proprietary Code: seeking a balanced standard

      This proprietary to open source to public domain source code release Standard will bring to an end the present conflict between proprietary and open code development models. Some companies and individuals will choose to develop their software as open source, to take advantage of the extra and free resources that the open source developing model provides, while others will prefer to develop it as proprietary code, to gain a competitive advantage once it is release. One way or another, within a set number of years the code will become public domain, free for all to use, share and modify.

  • Server

    • ZAAAM DATING Free Debian Project. Geeks also like to date

      The idea behind this project is to test the architecture of a heavy duty web server.

      Although it’s a really nice and graphically appealing PHP website, the major interest is to test hardware and resource usage / op.sys. (ubuntu server 10.04) and basic server modules.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Why Do Open Source Advocates Attack Each Other?

      One interesting explanation offered when I asked on Twitter came from Ars Technica’s Ryan Paul – himself a key Free software developer as author of the great micro-blogging client Gwibber.

      He suggests the situation is precipitated by the influx of new technology strategies such as Software as a Service, mobile, tablet, virtualisation and web services. Since the applicability of software freedom philosophies to these technologies is often unclear, there’s no positive rallying-point for activists and the only remaining alternative is to demonise anyone engaging with them. That happens even if the engagement is aimed at subverting or liberating them.

      The articulation of software freedom arose before today’s massively-connected society, and today requires thinking and experimentation to make it fit the new reality – hence my work at OSI.

    • “Gno” and “Gyes” campaigns – About positive Free Software campaigning

      But also the FSF already had positive campaigns. Here some recent examples from the FSFs:

      * Document Freedom Day: The Document Freedom Day is a day for Document Freedom and for Open Standards. FSFE did most of the work for the central organisation of the DFD in the past years to promote Open Standards. The FSF also has a campaign page for Open Standards.
      * rOgg On: For this years DFD FSFE promoted Ogg Vorbis. The German and the Austrian team encouraged two radio stations which already use Ogg vorbis, by giving them a prize and a tart with the “rOgg On” slogon. Deutschlandradio stated that they Feel more honoured than for the Grimme Prize”. The picutres clearly show how positive that campaign was. During that campaign we translated FSF’s PlayOgg website into German, which also is a positive campaign.
      * I love Free Software For this years Valentine’s Day we started the “I love Free Software” campaign. People can show their love to Free Software.
      * PDFreaders.org FSFE’s Fellows started a campaign for Free Software PDFreaders and also explaining Open Standards in this context.

  • Government

    • D.C. launches test of open-source online voting

      According to Rob Pegoraro at the Faster Forward blog, the District “will let overseas voters cast ballots online using open-source, standards-based software, not the closed, proprietary mechanisms that have dominated electronic voting throughout its troubled history in the United States.”

      A Palo Alto, Calif., developer of election software, Open Source Digital Voting Foundation, will provide the new system. According to company representatives, starting with September’s primary election, D.C. residents serving overseas and others far out of town won’t have to choose between voting by mailed-in paper ballot or a faxed or e-mailed ballot.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Clip Art Library Launches Logo Design Contest!

      The “Free Culture” Movement, instantiated in a 2004 publication by Creative Commons founding member Lawrence Lessig, is a reaction to content ownership in a digital age. Because The Open Clip Art Library is, at it’s core, a platform to freely share and collaborate created content, it will be forever intertwined with the Movement.

  • Open Data

    • Scientists for open data and authors of Panton Principles named SPARC Innovators

      Science is based on building on, reusing, and openly criticizing the published body of scientific knowledge. For science to effectively function, and for society to reap the full benefits from scientific endeavors, it is crucial that science data be made open.

      That’s the belief of four leaders who have put forth a groundbreaking set of recommendations for scientists to more easily share their data – The Panton Principles – and who have been named the latest SPARC Innovators for their work.

    • Announcing the Portability Policy

      We’re proud to announce the release of the Portability Policy, the latest creation from the DataPortability Project. We believe that this will help further the vision of digital freedom that was the founding ideal of our group two years ago.

      The software industry is still figuring out the right balance between open and closed, but we believe that communication is the first step. The DataPortability Project encourages standard, plain language policies describing how data and digital “stuff” can be moved from one product to another.

  • Open Access/Content

    • Open Access to the Scientific Journal Literature: Situation 2009

      The Internet has recently made possible the free global availability of scientific journal articles. Open Access (OA) can occur either via OA scientific journals, or via authors posting manuscripts of articles published in subscription journals in open web repositories. So far there have been few systematic studies showing how big the extent of OA is, in particular studies covering all fields of science.

Leftovers

  • Science

    • Space Weather Signal Buried in X-ray Noise

      Sometimes even noise can produce a gold mine of information. Back in 1964, scientists at Bell Laboratories, listening for faint radio signals they had bounced off of an early communications satellite, detected static that seemed to be emanating in space from all directions. That static turned out to be cosmic background radiation left over from the big bang. In the decades since, studies of that radiation have underpinned much of what we know about the universe.

    • Beyond the petaflop: DARPA wants quintillion-speed computers

  • Environment

    • Judge who overturned drilling bans had shares in the oil industry

      The judge who overturned deepwater drilling bans allowing BP to resume oil extraction in the Gulf of Mexico, had shares in Transocean and other firms in the industry, it was revealed today.

      Yesterday, a Louisiana-based judge Martin Feldman ruled that Barack Obama’s six-month drilling moratorium in the Gulf was unjustified because it assumed that all deepwater drilling was as dangerous as BP’s.

    • EU sees solar power imported from Sahara in 5 years

      Europe will import its first solar-generated electricity from North Africa within the next five years, European Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger said in an interview on Sunday.

    • The Great Gulf Enclosure

      BP is the top dog, arrogating to itself the lion’s share of the wealth from the deepwater oil reserves and displacing the risks onto the rest of us. The oil industry took pains to secure a statutory limit on its liability from offshore oil spills to a paltry $75 million, after which we taxpayers pick up the tab. Efforts to raise that liability cap to $10 billion or eliminate it altogether are in the works, but there is sure to be fierce opposition, and not just from Republicans.

    • Paper Industry is Waking Up to the Size of its Water Footprint

      Knock a glass of water over a page. The fibers will soften, the ink will run, the corners will curl. Wet paper is no good to anyone, but few people realize just how much water goes into producing the dry, white page.

      “You need water to grow the trees, clean the wood, separate out the cellulose from the lignin, turn the pulp into paper, and then steam dry it,” says Gilles L’Hermitte, Sustainability Development Manager at paper manufacturers Arjowiggins Graphic. Which all adds to the argument for recycled paper. “If you start with an ‘urban forest’,” as L’Hermitte calls it, “you’ll need much less water to turn old pulp into new paper than if you start with a tree.” Arjowiggins Graphic estimates that their mills use up to 47% less water for paper from de-inked pulp than from virgin sources. And, they claim, because the recycled pulp has to be cleaned so many times to rid it of all the ink, it comes out even whiter than the virgin page.

  • Finance

    • Four Economic Benchmarks We Need Now

      New measures of national income. GDP is outdated; inaccurate, invalid, and unreliable. Better measures of national income that count real costs (like pollution) and benefits (like health) are what will shape better behavior from organizations and markets.

      Measures of well-being. GDP is a measure of income. What’s missing from that picture? Well-being, of course. More income doesn’t automatically make everyone better off all the time, in the same ways. Without measures of well being to live up to, no better behavior is likely to ever flow from organizations and markets.

      New currencies. A currency is an especially cruel a form of collective punishment, an implicit tax. In the aftermath of inevitable, regular-as-clockwork financial crisis, everyone holding a currency suffers, whether or not they had anything to do with said crisis. When currencies are created that are independent of countries and regions, people will the choice to escape the bone-headed organizations and markets within them. That, in turn, will set incentives for better behavior. Creating “product”? Stop. Create a currency instead.

      New measures of returns. What counts as a “return,” anyways? Increasingly, as we’ve recently discussed, bleeding edge investors are beginning to develop measures of returns to people, communities, and society. They provide a more nuanced, sophisticated picture of the value a firm has actually created — or a market allocated — than mere financial returns (“profit”). Better behavior from organizations and markets is ineluctably tied to better measurements of what is returned from them.

    • Senate cuts to recession relief bill favor special interests

      Leaders target funding for unemployment benefits, Medicare and Medicaid — but neither party has suggested trimming more than 60 tax breaks worth $32 billion to special interests.

    • Public Isn’t Buying Wall Street Reform: AP Poll

      Americans aren’t convinced new Wall Street rules will prevent a future financial crisis.

      An Associated Press-GfK Poll finds that 64 percent of those surveyed aren’t confident that a financial regulation overhaul before Congress will avert another meltdown.

    • Financial Reform Conference: Auto Dealers Beat Obama, Win Exemption From Consumer Protection Agency

      In the end, the political clout of 18,000 auto dealers scattered nationwide was too much even for President Barack Obama.

      House and Senate negotiators putting final shape to a sweeping overhaul of Wall Street regulations all but agreed Tuesday to exclude auto dealers from the oversight of a consumer financial protection bureau.

      “The political reality is that those of us who have fought against an auto dealer carve-out can’t prevail,” Representative Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill.

    • Scott Brown’s key vote gives Massachusetts firms clout in financial overhaul

      State Street isn’t one of the iconic firms of Wall Street. It doesn’t even make the top 10 largest bank holding companies in the country. But on Capitol Hill this week, as lawmakers finalize new rules regulating Wall Street, Boston-based State Street wields enormous influence.

    • Obama administration urges caution on deficit cuts

      President Barack Obama’s top economic advisers are urging America’s major economic allies not to sacrifice economic growth to efforts to trim budget deficits.

    • JPMorgan Sets Sights Overseas

      JPMorgan Chase emerged from the financial crisis as one of the strongest banks on American soil. Now it wants to make up lost ground overseas.

    • Stocks zigzag after Fed says Europe is a risk

      Stocks fluctuated Wednesday after the Federal Reserve indicated that problems in Europe pose a threat to the economy.

      The Dow Jones industrial average rose about 4 points in late afternoon trading while broader indexes fell. Treasury prices rose, pushing down interest rates. The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note fell to its lowest level in more than a year.

    • House drops demand for bank-paid liquidation fund

      House negotiators on legislation providing an overhaul of the financial system have agreed to drop their demand for a $150 billion fund to cover costs of liquidating large, failing institutions.

    • Banks Have Repaid 75% of Bailout, Geithner Says

      The Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, said on Tuesday that taxpayers were recovering their investment from the financial bailouts as the program was wound down. But he acknowledged there would probably be a loss from the rescue of the insurer American International Group.

    • Wall St. vote’s a nail-biter in Senate

      The lead Senate Wall Street reform negotiator acknowledged Tuesday that Democrats are facing a nail-biting vote in the Senate, forcing congressional leaders to lean on Republicans to pass a bill unlikely to gain the support of two Democrats who have been holdouts for weeks.

    • Financial lobbyist irony alert

      The Consumer Federation of America is throwing its 40th annual awards dinner tonight honoring Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) and House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) for their public service. And the consumer advocacy group received interest in the dinner from an unlikely quarter: the financial services industry.

    • The Next Financial Crisis: Coming to Your Neighborhood Soon?

      One of the fiercest debates during the Wall Street Reform conference negotiations has been over Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME)’s amendment to improve the quality of capital used by America’s banks. The amendment would accomplish this by eliminating the designation of “trust-preferred securities” as Tier 1 capital.

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

    • Wikileaks makes contact with US government

      Whistleblower website Wikileaks has made contact with the US government over claims that an American serviceman is one of its sources.

      Soldier Bradley Manning has been held for three weeks without formal charge.

      The US is investigating claims that he passed confidential information to Wikileaks.

      Site editor Julian Assange told BBC News that, so far, the US authorities have not yet been in touch with him.

    • Hail to the whistleblowers

      James Madison (drafter of the US first amendment) once wrote that “government, without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or perhaps both”.

      This is certainly true of Afghanistan, where the US-led coalition has been able to avoid a true audit of the impact of its presence via tight control of the media combined with manipulated patriotism.

    • WikiLeaks founder told to avoid U.S.
    • WikiLeaks founder breaks cover in Brussels

      The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, who is at the centre of a US security scare, has emerged from hiding to say that he is not afraid of the Pentagon but that he has been advised by his lawyers to avoid travelling to the United States.

    • New online games rules restrict content, children’s playing time

      China’s online games companies must take steps to protect children from unwholesome and corrupting content, according to new regulations issued Tuesday by the Ministry of Culture.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

    • Who is attending these “secret” FCC net neutrality meetings?

      Anger and confusion remains high over these private “back door” meetings that the Federal Communications Commission has been holding with various “stakeholders” regarding its proposed open Internet rules. Reform groups are still up in arms over the Tuesday gatherings, which appear to have focused on a legislative solution to the problem. Congress, it should be noted, is exploring rewriting the Communications Act in response to the current FCC logjam on the issue.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • US regulator guns for HP printer cartridge clones

      THE US International Trade Commission (ITC) is investigating a complaint from the maker of very expensive printer ink, HP, that some of its rivals are making the stuff a lot cheaper.

    • Copyrights

      • US Copyright Group Willing To Reveal The Tech It Uses To Identify File Sharers… Sort Of

        US Copyright Group, which is really DC-based law firm Dunlap, Grubb and Weaver, has made a lot of news recently for unleashing thousands of lawsuits on people it accuses of infringing on copyrights, in an effort not to stop infringement, but to send out “pre-settlement letters” to get people to pay up to avoid the lawsuits. Dunlap keeps insisting, despite similar efforts accusing perfectly innocent people of infringement and demanding payment, that its technology is reliable and credible. CCS Labs, a company that does work in the computer crime field, was curious about this and asked US Copyright Group for the right to review its methodology and technology.

      • Canadian Heritage Minister declares war on copyright reformers

        Michael Geist sez, “There was considerable attention yesterday on a media report stating that Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore warned against ‘radical extremists’ opposing C-32. A video of part of his remarks has now been posted online. The comments, which come after the prepared speech, feature a no-holds-barred attack against those arguing for fair copyright. According to Moore, some proposed amendments to C-32 are not genuine but rather part of an attempt to oppose copyright and copyright reform, to drum up fear, and to mislead. Moore encourages confrontation, urging the audience to confront on Facebook, Twitter, talk shows and in the media until ‘they are defeated.’”

      • A Canadian author’s perspective on ‘radical extremism’ and copyright

        As the Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore has declared war on copyright reformers who object to his plan to bring US-style “digital locks” rules to Canada, I think it’s worth spelling out what my objections, as a Canadian author, are to his plan (my books are distributed across Canada by the excellent HB Fenn; last year I won the Ontario White Pine Award for best book; as I write this, my novel For the Win is on the Canadian bestseller lists).

        [...]

        Get that? People who create stuff should have the right to let their audiences move copyrighted works to other platforms.

        I challenge Minister Moore to climb down from his nasty smears about copyright reformers and address this and other legitimate concerns over digital locks rules. Thousands and thousands of Canadians spoke out against this kind of rule in the Canadian copyright proceedings. James Moore has tabled a bill that ignores the results of his own consultation, and then had the bad grace to smear the creators and audiences who, in good faith, came forward to participate in the debate over the future of Canadian copyright.

        He owes us an apology. And an explanation.

      • Will the BPI target Microsoft Bing?

        Will Microsoft soon be targetted by Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music’s BPI (British Phornographic Industry)

        Microsoft’s Bing search engine now offers playable search results”, says CNet News.

        “We have identified the following links that are available via Google’s search engine, and request the following links be removed as soon as possible as they directly link to sound recordings owned by our members”, p2pnet had the BPI saying, quoting Chilling Effects.

        And Gargle is only a facilitator.

      • Hollywood faces new piracy threat

        Movie fans downloading free pirated films are no longer Hollywood’s worst nightmare, but that’s only because of a newer menace: cheap, and equally illegal, subscription services.

      • Video Surfaces of Moore’s “Radical Extremists” Comment

        Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore’s “radical extremists” comment yesterday generated considerable attention, though he privately denied saying it in some correspondence (one DM: “Not what I said. Not even close”). New video has now been posted that confirms the comment and further attacks on those supporting fair copyright. The latest comments:

        With regard to the legislation, we really did try to strike a balance with this legislation. You’ll notice, I think, we’re now three weeks into the public consideration of the legislation that we tabled. There is a lot of commentary out there on this online and I think the response that we’re getting is that that generally is the case. The only people who are opposed to this legislation are really two groups of radical extremists. In the continuum of political ideaology, if you go really extreme to the right or really extreme to the left it actually swings back around. That is sort of where we are.

      • Huge Victory: Court Rules For YouTube Against Viacom

        Well this is a pleasant surprise. Like many others, I had assumed that the court reviewing the Viacom/YouTube lawsuit would not accept either side’s position for summary judgment and the case would go to a full trial. However, as Eric Goldman alerts us, the court has quickly ruled in favor of Google/YouTube, saying that it is, in fact, protected by the DMCA’s safe harbors.

    • ACTA

Clip of the Day

CLUG Talk 8 September 2009 – PAM (2009)


Links 23/6/2010: Mandriva Receives Investments, Red Hat Surges

Posted in News Roundup at 5:36 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • The application of Linux simplification

    Recently, a new client called with a Quickbooks issue. I should probably mention that I do a lot of Quickbooks (POS and Financials) troubleshooting. Most generally this work is done in Windows.

    Sometimes, however, we get a call about a Quickbooks Linux server. That was the case this time. What was going on was the client’s machines were all losing connectivity to the server. So they called me in. I gained remote access to the server and started poking around.

  • Michael Trebilcock wants Sony to pay $800 after PlayStation 3 software change

    The feature allowed PlayStation users to replace the standard PS3 operating system with a different one, such as Linux – a popular free alternative to Windows available for download on the internet – allowing them to use the device as a personal computer as well as a video games console.

  • Tripp Lite launches first power management software solution to offer USB communication protocols for Linux

  • Events

    • LinuxCon 2010: full schedule now announced

      The full schedule for LinuxCon North America 2010 has now been announced. LinuxCon organised by the Linux Foundation will take place from the 10th to the 12th of August at the Renaissance Boston Waterfront Hotel.

    • LinuxCon Preview: Virgin America Runs Massive Workloads on Linux, Shares Best Practices

      Virgin America’s Ravi Simhambhatla is delivering a keynote at this year’s LinuxCon North America. He will be giving us the CIO view on how to sell the value of open source internally when cost isn’t the only driving factor. Mr. Simhambhatla took a few minutes to answer some of our questions as we prepare to see him speak in Boston on August 12, 2010.

  • Desktop

    • Windows XP Linux: Free Download

      While Windows XP coated Ubuntu make users feel familiar with the Gnu/Linux systems, it also takes away many benefits that native Gnu/Linux Desktops environments like Gnome and KDE offer. However, YlmF OS seems to be a good efforts to introduce people to Gnu/Linux and remove their doubts about the system.

    • Computer drive recycles old computers for disadvantaged

      The second annual “Linux Against Poverty” computer drive collected more than 200 used computers from Austin homes and businesses Saturday.

  • Ballnux

  • Applications

  • K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

    • Introducing Your KDE Software Labels

      A while ago, the KDE promo team organized a competition to choose a design for labels that producers of software within our community can use to show that they are part of KDE.

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

      • Scientific Linux Fermi 5.5 is released

        Scientific Linux Fermi 5.5 has been released for both i386 and x86_64 architecture.

      • Fermi 5.5
      • Scientific Linux 5.5 Live CD and DVD (32bit and 64bit)
      • Scientific Linux release 5.5 has been released for i386 and x86_64.
      • GParted 0.6.0-1
      • SystemRescueCd 1.5.6 includes new version of GParted

        The SystemRescueCd developers have issued the sixth update to the 1.5.x branch of their Linux distribution. Based on the Gentoo LiveCD, the SystemRescueCd is configured as a tool kit for administering or repairing an operating system and recovering data after a system crash. Supported file systems include Ext2, Ext3 and Ext4, ReiserFS, XFS, JFS, VFAT, NTFS, ISO9660 and Btrfs.

      • Softpedia Linux Weekly, Issue 102

        · Announced Distro: Parted Magic 4.11
        · Announced Distro: openSUSE 11.3 RC1
        · Announced Distro: Sabayon SpinBase and CoreCDX 5.3
        · Announced Distro: SystemRescueCd 1.5.6

      • Linux-based “Child-Friendly” OS, Kiddix, Being Offered on Pay-What-You-Want Basis

        Kiddix OS, a family-friendly operating system built on Linux, is being offered on a pay-what-you-want basis through the end of this month. According to the Kiddix website, the OS contains “child-friendly” web browser, word processor, calendar, e-mail, paint, multimedia player and calculator applications in addition to educational games, extensive parental controls and two regular games (“Frozen Bubble” and “Planet Penguin Racer”).

      • Zenwalk Core 6.4 is ready !

        Zenwalk Core is a one of a kind complete 300MB base Zenwalk system designed to build high-performance / high-security non-GUI Linux servers, or to be used as the base of your own custom light-speed Desktop System. You’ll be amazed how it can be installed in just 10 minutes using the auto-install setup option on a dedicated disk : then you’re ready to query the Netpkg repository to install your desktop of choice, or any network servers like Apache, Postfix, … in case you’re a network administrator. Feel free to check our repository for availability of any application, you’ll notice it’s fairly complete (you can also use Slackware packages as Zenwalk 6.4 is Slackware compatible).

      • SMS version 1.5.2 Released!

        Superb Mini Server version 1.5.2 released (Linux kernel 2.6.33.5)

      • Greenie 7L Galadriel

    • PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Mandriva Saved By New Investors

        After weeks of concern about the “catastrophic state of it’s finances” and an indefinite delay in the release of version 2010.1, the French website LeMagIT is reporting that Mandriva has been saved by new investors. The article quotes Mandriva Director General Arnaud Laprévote: “Today the company found investors who decided to invest in the company, in order to give balance to the organization and to find a good economic model.” He added that “the community and users no longer need be concerned.” Due to regulations regarding confidentiality the identity of the new investors was not disclosed. Laprévote went on to explain: “we were aware that the existence of Mandriva was threatened, and today that is no longer the case.”

    • Red Hat Family

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Open Season : Maverick

        We’ve noticed that a lot of the Papercut patches are being submitted by new community members! The bugs are trivially fixable and all it takes is for one person to show interest and fix the bug. We’re getting new members involved and willing to help Ubuntu. We were wondering , how can we keep up this energy and momentum?

      • The Unbuntu SEO Experiment
      • Ubuntu Light demoed on a new Dell 14R

        Ubuntu Light was announced a few months back and is intended as a ‘fast boot version’ of Ubuntu for quick access to basic internet features such a a web browser, Skype & Empathy..

        The new ‘Unity’ interface Ubuntu Light is intended to be fast, responsive and quick – in the video below Ubuntu Light goes from off to Yahoo! in less than 20 seconds on one of Dell’s newly announced i-core series of laptops/netbooks.

      • Dell 14R Dual-Boot Ubuntu Light/Windows 7 Laptop Demo

        Many in the Ubuntu community are looking forward to the release of Ubuntu 10.10 this October. One reason, as you’ll see here on a new Dell 14R, is the introduction of Ubuntu Light, which Canonical is working with OEMs to get pre-installed as a dual-boot option on Windows laptops — with the benefit being they can access popular productivity and communication programs like Google Chrome/Chromium, Skype, Totem Media Player, IM, etc. in about 7 seconds.

      • Dell thinking about shipping Google’s Chrome OS on netbooks

        A Dell executive has revealed that the company is in talks with Google and is exploring the possibility of shipping netbooks with Chrome OS, the search giant’s cloud-centric Linux-based mobile operating system. The news reflects Dell’s interest in experimenting with new platforms.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • CodeSourcery to Support Freescale’s Newest QorIQ™ Processors
    • Tilera to stuff 200 cores onto single chip

      The service providers that Tilera and Quanta are hoping to sell the Tile-based servers to are not afraid to recompile a Linux software stack on a new architecture if it gives them an edge, any more than they care about using various Unix and Linux systems for specific jobs today.

    • E-Readers

      • Six Ways of Looking at the Nook

        Firefox was of course an open-source software development project, versus Microsoft’s proprietary IE. The Nook is meant to break two closed systems. One is Amazon’s proprietary Kindle format for e-reading books, versus the Nook’s open ePub format.

      • Amazon and Barnes & Noble slash e-reader prices

        The Android-based Nook is currently 3G only, while Amazon’s Linux platform is based around Wi-Fi. However, Barnes & Noble is to introduce a Wi-Fi Nook priced at $149 (£101), putting more pressure on Amazon.

    • Phones

      • HTC HD2 Linux Port Full Details

        With some minor patches we got the HD2 Linux kernel to boot on different windows mobile qsd8250 based devices like Acer s200 or Toshiba tsunagi tg01. It will be interesting to see if the same problem will be observed on these devices.

      • Nokia/MeeGo

        • Nokia seen making 9-inch tablet with ARM, MeeGo

          Nokia’s rumored tablet had some of its details firmed up today in one analyst note. The device would use MeeGo, the mobile OS designed with Intel, but would use an ARM processor and not the Atom Z600 Intel would prefer. Digitimes Research claimed in the note that it would have either a seven- or nine-inch screen and would be assembled by Foxconn for the fall.

        • Nokia to launch a tablet later this year?

          It’s likely that the new tablet will run MeeGo, a new Linux-based operating system that was formed by the merger of the Maemo and Moblin projects. Maemo was largely a Nokia-backed project, and the company has already released several smartphones and small internet devices running the Linux-based operating system.

      • Android

        • MyTouch 3G Slide Rooted!
        • Google risks OEM wrath for unified Android UI plan

          Citing “multiple sources close to Google”, bloggers at TechCrunch report that the top priority for the next Android update, codenamed Gingerbread, is to homogenize the user experience and address criticisms of fragmentation. This could severely curtail the freedom of licensees to create their own user interface overlays – most famously, Motorola’s Motoblur and HTC’s Sense.

        • Toshiba

        • Chrome OS

          • Google’s Missed Oportunity – Opinion

            Despite all these possibilities it is arguable that Google missed the mark by imposing hardware restrictions which meant that OEM’s could only use more expensive hardware such as SSD’s. Google’s further insistence that Chrome OS devices have to boast HD capable screens and powerful graphics solutions has meant that the price of the envisaged Chrome OS device is sure to shoot through the roof.

Free Software/Open Source

  • IBM plans to open source EGL

    According to a report by InforWorld, IBM is going to open source the EGL language, compiler, generators for Java and JavaScript, as well as tools. By open-sourcing EGL, IBM looks to expand its reach.

    This would also enable development of Eclipse based tools, added the report.

  • Mobile applications lay bare the IT/telephony divide

    Open source telephony solutions are not new. However, for enterprise telephony buyers, the risk of any downtime is too great to consider open source alternatives to Cisco, Avaya, Siemens, and other well-established telephony vendors.

  • Lists

  • Cloudera

  • Databases

    • Meet CUBRID: One of Korea’s Top Open Source Projects

      I participate at the MySQL Conference in Silicon Valley every year and look forward to the diversity of ideas, projects and companies that represent the ever-growing open source database landscape. This year, CUBRID, an open source database project backed by a company from South Korea, caught my eye. What was most impressive to me was the team’s enthusiasm about open source software and its belief that an open source model can work for developing good software and, at the same time, for building a healthy services business in Asia as well as globally.

  • Oracle

  • CMS

    • WordPress 3.0: proof open source kicks butt

      WordPress is one of the most popular open-source content management systems in use on the internet. But despite WordPress’ popularity, one knock against it has been the fact that it’s always been more a ‘blogging engine’ than ‘true’ CMS.

    • WordPress 3 Jazzes Up Open Source Content Management

      WordPress is available as an open source download that anyone can setup and install on their own server as well as on a hosted platform at WordPress.com. According to Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), WordPress.com is the 12th most visited site in the world, with 120 million unique visitors in April.

  • Education

    • Becta money goes to free schools project

      The grant in question was a mechanism of Becta, the government agency that was in charge of IT in education until it was scrapped in May. At the time, the Coalition said it would save £80m by getting rid of Becta and cutting back on other Department for Education quangos.

  • Business

    • ZenCart Helps You Build Your Own Store Online

      The product I’m examining this week, ZenCart, does have basic shopping cart functionality, but through a series of add-on modules, it gives businesspeople many more capabilities. The major thing that sets ZenCart apart from the competition is the fact that it is open-source software. Open source means the source code is made freely available to the user community.

    • Monitoring

      • Zenoss Finds Open Source of $4.8M – cbl

        Zenoss, Inc. raised $4.83 million in convertible preferred stock of a targeted $5.2 million offering, according to an SEC filing.

      • Zenoss nabs $4.83M of $5.2M round for open source IT managment
      • Time to Open Up the Network-Management Stack?

        Hustace: Most OpenNMS users find that our XML-based configuration options give them all the flexibility they need to set up OpenNMS for their monitoring needs. But the fact that we’re an open source project offers a lot of value for enterprises who really require one or more modifications to the product as we ship it. And if the modifications make sense as enhancements for the product, they often find their way into a future release that provides benefit to the entire community, but most importantly, doesn’t leave the implementer’s OpenNMS installation forked — with custom source code that must be maintained separately from the project and re-introduced whenever the project is upgraded.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Nasuni Demonstrates Cloud Storage Security With Bold Challenge

      After 30 days, Nasuni will donate the unwon $5,000 to the Free Software Foundation as a thank-you for the Gnu Project — specifically GnuPG, a Free Software implementation of the OpenPGP standard. Said Rodriguez, “The Gnu Project continues to inspire technical excellence among the best and brightest minds. They are the real heroes.”

  • Project Releases

    • Open source Jspresso serves multi-channel RIA

      After more than a year of development the open source Jspresso project has released version 3.5 which promises to streamline rich Internet application development for Flash, Ajax and Swing interfaces

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Drafting Definitions for Cultural Liberty

      Although I’m still focussed on 1p2U.com, some time later this year I hope to set up the website culturalliberty.org – a site dedicated to the restoration of everyone’s cultural liberty, especially from its constraint by anachronistic privileges such as copyright and patent (which should have been abolished along with slavery).

    • Future of Health: Map Kibera Creates An Infrastructure For Health Care

      Map Kibera is an open-source project started in 2009 in response to the lack of information available for the Kibera district of Nairobi, Kenya – one of the world’s largest slums.

    • A lesson in how to profit from the free for the film industry

      The winners in the new Digital Economy will be those who master the free by offering enough to make you want to pay for more, like the open source software company who got me to pay $80 for some extra binary that I didn’t need really need (and certainly could have avoided paying for).

    • Grant will help UI fund open-source textbook initiative

      The Office of the Vice President for Academic Affairs has been awarded a $150,000 grant to establish an initiative that provides open-source textbook access for Illinois students.

    • Government pushes for open-standard data releases

      Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude has said that public releases of data will use open standards when possible.

      Answering a parliamentary written question from Labour MP Tom Watson, Maude said the government will use open data standards for future releases of public data, based on the advice of the Public Sector Transparency Board. “Where possible we will use recognised open standards including Linked Data standards,” he said.

    • NatureWorks provides open-source access for injection molding bioresin

      To spur innovation and drive biopolymers more widely into injection molding applications, NatureWorks LLC is borrowing a page from the computer industry and making details for its new, high-heat, high-impact bioresin, Ingeo™ 3801X available by providing open source access to both formulation and compounding procedure.

    • Open government data in Russia

      The following guest post is from Ivan Begtin, who is a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Government Data.

      I would like to give a brief overview of a few projects I have been working on related to open government data in Russia.

    • Open Hardware

      • Robot taught to play pool (without cheating!)

        A robot has been trained to play pool to a decent standard in the space of approximately one week by some of the ”open source robot” guys over at Willow Garage. The best part is that this machine plays by the rules.

      • Open Source DIY Tablet Kit Promises Versatility

        Last but not least is the BeagleJuice. As the main source of power, it’s fitting that the power switch is located on this 2600 mAh power pack. It outputs up to 1.5 amps, promising a max battery life of 6.5 hours for the BeagleBoard (no info on how the BeagleTouch’s operation affects this). Charging is accomplished through one or both type-B USB ports.

  • Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

  • Security/Aggression

    • CCTV in tower blocks

      The prospect of CCTV in tower blocks reared its ugly head in the media last week after Harriet Harman raised the issue at Prime Minister’s Question Time.

      Back in 2009 No CCTV commented on proposals to put CCTV in several tower blocks in Oxford following a trial of cameras in one block, ‘Foresters Tower’ in 2008.

    • CCTV cameras weren’t working during Digbeth club shooting

      Security cameras were not working properly when four people were shot at a Birmingham music event, it has emerged.

      An emergency meeting of city licensing chiefs agreed to a police request for an immediate ban on future events at a room in the Custard Factory, Digbeth.

    • £4m spent to protect police

      West Midlands Police has increased its security budget by 25 per cent in the past three years, figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act reveal.

    • Another Marylander Arrested for Recording the Police

      The city of Annapolis, Maryland recently received a Homeland Security grant for 20 new surveillance cameras in the downtown area. The city of Baltimore already has nearly 500. According to the watchdog site PhotoEnforced, the state of Maryland has at least 375 red light cameras and 80 speed cameras. Your government is watching you, Marylanders. But don’t think for a second that it’s going to tolerate you watching back.

      On Saturday, Yvonne Nicole Shaw, 27, was arrested by sheriff’s deputies in Lexington Park, Maryland. According to the Southern Maryland News, Shaw was cuffed and booked for recording deputies who had come to an apartment complex in response to a noise complaint. Sheriff’s Cpl. Patrick Handy’s report explained that Shaw was standing about 12 feet from him, and that Shaw “did admit to recording our encounter on her cell phone for the purpose of trying to show the police are harassing people.”

    • Security co-operation might be a good thing says ICANN

      THINK SAFETY FIRST along with stability for the sake of the Domain Name System (DNS), the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) chief executive has told the organisation’s Brussels meeting.

  • Environment

    • Petition calls for whaling moratorium to remain

      Campaigners have unveiled a petition signed by more than a million people calling for maintenance of the global moratorium on commercial whaling.

      It was presented to Australian minister Peter Garrett outside the International Whaling Commission meeting in Morocco.

    • Oil Eating Bacteria

      In a recent conversation about the safety and ethics of synthetic biology in the wake of the announcement of the synthetic genome, many of the professors I was chatting with commented on how they hoped new synthetic biology technology would lead to bacteria that could eat the oil spilling into the gulf of mexico even as I type this right now. Of course, the “technology” for oil eating bacteria already exists and have already been used for clean up in previous oil spills–many naturally occurring species of bacteria can already break down the hydrocarbons in crude oil. The natural oil eaters end up competing with each other, however, leading to decreased efficiency in an already slow clean-up process (these are bacteria after all, not oil-phiranas). Genetic engineering and directed evolution technology has led to the design of improved strains of oil eating bacteria that can proceed more quickly and more stably than the natural strains, and has already been patented–in 1971.

  • Finance

    • An End to Spending Excess

      One of the reasons the federal budget is chronically in the red is that most people, historically, couldn’t care less. The national debt is an unfathomable abstraction that doesn’t show up on your 1040 or your monthly bills. Over the last few decades, very few people lost sleep worrying if the budget would ever be in balance.

      Keynesian economics, as well as political incentives, argued for ignoring the issue. When times were good, we could afford to indulge. When times were bad, deficit spending was the accepted formula to stimulate the economy.

    • Steele: Don’t “Demagogue,” “Demonize” Wall Street

      RNC chair Michael Steele defended Wall Street as the creators of wealth in a combative interview today while urging the Obama admin not to “demonize” and “demagogue” against a system that plunged the economy into recession.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Major Labels Begin Major Astroturfing Campaign To Get 3 Strikes In The US

      So, it looks like the industry is going to plan B: which is going back to trying to ram through legislation that will require ISPs to take the draconian step of protecting one industry’s broken business model. And to get this going, it looks like the industry has set up a neat little set of astroturfing groups and “consumer” campaigns that try to hide the specifics, but clearly are designed to get similar three strikes legislation (similar to the Digital Economy Act in the UK) put in place in the US.

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

    • Blog libel suit thrown out because potential damage was so small

      A libel suit against a website has been thrown out of court because the potential damage to the reputation of the person making the claim was so small.

      Johanna Kaschke sued blogger David Osler after he published an article about Kaschke’s arrest in Germany in the 1970s in connection with a link to an extremist political group that was never proved.

    • Man Charged With Using Open WiFi To Send Death Threats To VP Biden

      Creative. Apparently, the guy who did this, one Barry Ardolf, was trying to frame his neighbor. Around the same time, he apparently also sent child pornography to his neighbor’s co-workers, using a fake email address pretending to be the neighbor. If the “open WiFi” haters were correct, he would have been able to do this without any way to catch him. But, of course, that’s ridiculous. With a little effort, the FBI was able to trace the origin right back to Ardolf — and he’s now been arrested for threats to the VP and for identity fraud.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

    • Former government officials hired to lobby as Congress looks to rewrite telecom law

      As leaders in Congress announced a series of hearings this June to tackle huge telecommunications issues with a focus on the Internet, the top phone and cable organizations that control the majority of the access to the Internet have hired 276 former government officials to lobby both the Congress and the executive branch.

      According to data obtained from lobbyist disclosure forms and the Center for Responsive Politics, seventy-two percent of the lobbyists hired by AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Verizon, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association and the US Telecom Association have previous government experience. These organizations combined to spend $20.6 million lobbying the federal government in the first quarter of 2010.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Helpless Mainstreamers Grappling with Intellectual Property

      A recent CNET video on “Intellectual property rights vs. journalism” shows a Stanford University’s Innovation Journalism conference on June 7, with a panel discussion by various mainstreamers discussing the quesion “Is intellectual property protection a threat to journalism?” The lack of libertarian principle and sound economics has these commentators floundering as they discuss various cases where IP infringes free speech and freedom of the press.

    • Intellectual Property: Political Excesses – Or: Let Schumpeter’s Creative Destruction Do Its Work

      It is a well-known fact that in particular numerous newspaper publishing companies are currently suffering from an increasing downturn of their classic paper-based business model.Their long-established but obviously now depreciated business model had been centered around the exploitation of the relative scarcity of news contents. Paying buyers of paper copies who can also be fed with advertising material were attracted, creating a handsome stream of revenues both from buyers of paper copies as well as from advertisers.

    • 6 Takeaways from ‘TechDirt Saves Journalism’ Event at Google

      That was one of the few areas of consensus at a gathering convened at Google headquarters Wednesday night. Some 60 business people, coders, journalists, attorneys and others attended the fancifully named Techdirt Saves Journalism, a powwow whose goal was to spark a few ideas that might prove useful to enterprising newcomers, as well as those who write journalists’ paychecks today.

    • NY Times Becomes A Trademark Bully Over A Logo For A Newspaper That Hasn’t Existed In 40+ Years

      It first threatened to sue over the use of the logo, but Neighborhoodies didn’t fold. They, properly, realized that trademarks only cover use in commerce and for products that the mark actually covers. Seeing that the New York Herald Tribune has not operated since 1966 (and the NY Times only owned the brand after that), it’s difficult to see how the NYTimes has a legitimate trademark request.

    • Copyrights

      • Is BPI Trying To Setup Google For Copyright Infringement Lawsuit?

        To expedite DMCA claims, Google specifically requests sufficient information “to permit Google to notify the owner/administrator of the allegedly infringing webpage or other content (email address is preferred).” But BPI does not do that. It only lists out the above webpages.

      • Is it legal to sue thousands of alleged movie pirates in one lawsuit?

        The lawyers targeting thousands of people who allegedly pirated “The Hurt Locker” and other films on BitTorrent are fighting to keep the litigation on track.

      • First RIAA File Sharing Trial Morphs Into Groundhog Day

        In a bid to avoid a third trial — after two mistrials — the Minnesota federal judge presiding over the 4-year-old Jammie Thomas-Rasset case wants the Recording Industry Association of American and the defendant to negotiate a settlement.

      • James Boyle speaking at ORGCon: The Incredible Shrinking Public Domain

        We’re holding the UK’s first ever dedicated digital rights conference on Saturday 24 July.

        Our keynote speaker for ORGCon is Professor James Boyle, the world’s most influential copyright scholar. Boyle will address the question of why we are locking up our cultural heritage when technology offers new and exciting ways to engage with creative works:

        The Incredible Shrinking Public Domain: A Paradox

      • Terrible News: Court Says It’s Okay To Remove Content From The Public Domain And Put It Back Under Copyright

        All in all this is an incredibly frustrating ruling. It feels like the court didn’t actually want to address the admittedly difficult question of how the First Amendment and copyright law come into conflict, so it just punted and said “well Congress knows best, so it’s okay.” The case will almost certainly be appealed, potentially for an en banc (full appeals court review) or directly to the Supreme Court. So this most certainly is not over yet. But after a reasonable ruling last year to this year’s reversal, it’s definitely a step backwards for anyone who believes in the importance and sanctity of the public domain.

      • Biden to file sharers: ‘Piracy is theft’

        Biden spoke to the media alongside Victoria Espinel, the U.S. intellectual property enforcement coordinator, to introduce the government’s strategy on protecting the country’s intellectual property.

        “We used to have a problem in this town saying this,” Biden told reporters Thursday at a press conference in Washington, D.C. “But piracy is theft. Clean and simple. It’s smash and grab. It ain’t no different than smashing a window at Tiffany’s and grabbing [merchandise].”

      • US unveils strategy to fight piracy of intellectual property
      • U.S. Sets Coordinated Response To Intellectual-Property Threats

        Vice President Joe Biden announced the multipronged plan to stem the loss of billions of dollars a year generated from innovation, which he described as “perhaps our greatest export.”

      • DOJ, FBI to Monitor Foreign Web Sites for IP Piracy

        Espinel joined Attorney General Eric Holder, Vice President Joe Biden, and other top administration officials at the White House today to introduce the plan. It is intended to help coordinate the various agencies working on IP as well as ensure the products available on the U.S. market are safe, Espinel wrote in a blog post.

      • White House’s IP Strategic Plan Not Nearly As Bad As Expected; But Not Great Either

        As expected, it looks like Victoria Espinel, the White House’s IP “Czar” has released the official “Joint Strategic Plan to Combat Intellectual Property Theft,” as required by the ProIP Act. Given the history so far, we had expected the report to be quite one-sided in favor of the industry, and the initial announcements about the report suggested that was to be the case. Specifically, in announcing the report, Hollywood’s best friend, Joe Biden, made some typical uninformed comments about how infringement was no different than “theft.”

      • Obama IP czarina to movie, music cartels
      • Obama is the new MAFIAA Don-in-Chief

        The “Imaginary Property Czarina”, Victoria Espinel, is actually a vestige of the Bush years. Her position was created under a law he signed, but Obama got to appoint the first person to her position. Unfortunately, the Obama/Biden team has been given bribes by the Imaginary Property cartels to prop up their ailing business model of artificial scarcity that kept them alive back when media was more defective than it is now and copies were hard to make.

      • IFPI Sends DMCA Notice To Google Demanding It Stop Linking To The Pirate Bay… Entirely

        We just wrote about a DMCA takedown notice from BPI to Google that appeared to be setting Google up for a future lawsuit, and now it looks like the IFPI, of which BPI is a part, is going even further. TorrentFreak, following up on our post about BPI, noticed an even more direct takedown notice from the IFPI demanding that Google block any link to The Pirate Bay.

      • Private copying levy must be linked to copyright use, says top court advisor

        A copyright-compensation levy on blank digital media and devices should only be charged when they are likely to be used to make private copies of copyrighted works, an adviser to the EU’s top court has said.

        Many European countries allow citizens to make private copies of copyrighted works but charge a levy on blank CDs, digital media players and DVDs and use the money generated to compensate copyright holders for the unlicensed use of their work.

Clip of the Day

CLUG Talk 30 June 2009 – Shell Environment Tweaks (2009)


06.22.10

Links 22/6/2010: Dell in GNU/Linux Talks, Loads of Red Hat Press

Posted in News Roundup at 1:58 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • You Want Linux to Run What?

      Someone left a comment on one of my posts similar to, “Linux won’t be popular on the Desktop until it runs Windows applications.” To which I silently responded, “Huh? and, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” We have WINE for running Windows applications and it works reasonably well for those who care to spend the time to work through any problems with it. I don’t think the Linux Community needs to spend time on such an undertaking. Is anyone asking Apple to run Windows applications so that it will gain popularity? No? Then, why should Linux? If you want to run Windows applications, run them on Windows.

    • And now, for something totally different: EveryDesk!

      Now that most of our work for FLOSSMETRICS is ended, I had the opportunity to try and work on something different. As you know, I worked on bringing OSS to companies and public administration for nearly 15 years now, and I had the opportunity to work in many different projects with many different and incredible people. One of the common things that I discovered is that to increase adoption it is necessary to give every user a distinct advantage in using OSS, and to make the exploratory process easy and hassle-free.

  • Dell

    • Dell backtracks on Linux being safer than Windows

      So why did Dell back down from their claims for Ubuntu Linux. I’m not getting any answers from Dell, but I think it’s pretty easy to guess: Microsoft took note of people talking about Dell saying nice things about Linux, and decided to “have a word” with Dell. Microsoft has been pushing the computer vendors around for decades — which is why Windows is so popular, not because Windows is better than the alternatives.

      But, and this is what I find really interesting, Dell didn’t pull the comments about Linux being more secure. They just softened them. I think this speaks volumes. It means that Dell remains committed to Ubuntu Linux on its laptops and netbooks. It also means that Microsoft can’t get away with being the bully it once was to computer manufacturers.

    • Dell and M$, Sitting in a Tree, KISSING

  • Google

    • Dell in talks with Google over Chrome OS

      “We have to have a point of view on the industry and technology direction two years, three years down the road, so we continuously work with Google on this,” Amit Midha, Dell’s president for Greater China and South Asia told Reuters in an interview.

      “There are going to be unique innovations coming up in the marketplace in two, three years, with a new form of computing, we want to be on that forefront … So with Chrome or Android or anything like that we want to be one of the leaders,” Midha said, adding that there were no firm announcements to be made but talks were underway.

    • Toshiba AC100 video demo

      ITS BORING NAME ASIDE, Toshiba’s AC100 “mobile Internet device,” as the company calls it, runs Android 2.1 and has an Nvidia Tegra 250 processor, a 1024 x 600 screen and 512MB of RAM. Boasting 7-day standby with split second bootup, its battery life for “full use”, which includes 3G internet access, can last for 8 hours according to Toshiba. 3G is optional while WiFi comes as standard.

  • Server

    • What Is I.B.M.’s Watson?

      This is the quintessential sort of clue you hear on the TV game show “Jeopardy!” It’s witty (the clue’s category is “Postcards From the Edge”), demands a large store of trivia and requires contestants to make confident, split-second decisions. This particular clue appeared in a mock version of the game in December, held in Hawthorne, N.Y. at one of I.B.M.’s research labs. Two contestants — Dorothy Gilmartin, a health teacher with her hair tied back in a ponytail, and Alison Kolani, a copy editor — furrowed their brows in concentration. Who would be the first to answer?

  • Ballnux

    • Samsung posts firmware source bundle for BD-C5500 Blu Ray player, some wonder if it is real…

      So Samsung finally posted the source code that they were legally obligated to provide me in order to fulfill the contract they entered into with me as a recipient of GPL’d source code that they distributed. Maybe.

      [...]

      If nobody calls companies to account when they have not lived up to their side of the agreement, they’ll get the idea that it’s OK to continue ignoring their obligations, so with all due deference to Mr. Kuhn, I feel it is my right to demand that the contract between myself and Samsung be fulfilled.

      One last thing, and this is for Samsung:

      Quit asking people why they want the code, or what they’re going to do with it. It’s none of your damned business if all the customer does is print it all out and use it for toilet paper, you’re still legally obligated to fork it over.

    • Augmented reality in openSUSE 11.2

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

      • KDE 4.5 2nd Beta: The End of an Era

      • Krita

        • Last Week in Krita — Week 24

          Last week, Krita development really picked up, and if today’s commit rate is anything to go buy, this week will be just as good! We had fifty commits in week 24. Our bug count is now 58, but that’s after Sven Langkamp closed half a dozen bugs today. People seem to like Krita 2.2 and do very nice work with it. If you give 2.2 a try and you experience a problem, please inform us about it. There’s a very cool and handy Report Bug menu option in the Help menu!

        • Week 24: Photoshop brush support in Krita

          Equally easy to overlook are improvements like the drag and drop support for tabs in the Dolphin file manager, the use of the semantic desktop features in creating Konqueror bookmarks, or the support in Kontact for alternate calendars and new holiday listings.

  • Distributions

    • The Reg guide to Linux, part 1: Picking a distro

      Debian is the daddy, the basis for Ubuntu, Mepis and others. It’s intentionally restricted to only open-source components, so it’s a bit more work to get proprietary code such as graphics or wireless network drivers working, or the official versions of Java, Flash and so on. Good for servers if you know what you’re doing, but not a great desktop choice unless you’re already a guru.

    • 8 Linux-based Live CD/DVD and USB Distros For All Occasions

      If you’re new to the Linux or open source community, you might not have heard of live disc or USB distributions yet. They let you run a operating system on PCs without installing anything on the hard drive. It loads directly from the CD/DVD disc or USB flash drive. Many full Linux desktop distros, such as Ubuntu, can be ran in this live mode. However, there are also live distros created for a wide-variety of other specific applications and solutions. Here we’ll review several of these. Let’s get started!

    • Reviews

      • Review – Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Netbook Remix – With Screenshots

        Ubuntu Netbook Remix, or UNR, sports the same purple theme that the Gnome Ubuntu release has. There is only a toolbar at the top, and then the Netbook Interface. Different to Gnome-Shell, which I spent some time with over the past seven days, I have none of that feeling of “where do I go now” that Gnome-Shell leaves me with.

    • Red Hat Family

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • New Post-Release Repository For New Applications Starting With Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat

        But Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat wants to change the game: according to the whiteboard of the “Implementation of delivering apps post-release” blueprint, a new Ubuntu repository “extras.ubuntu.com” will be created and new applications will be uploaded to this repository even for the already released Ubuntu versions. The new applications will have to be approved by the Application Review Board.

      • The Spirit of Ubuntu

        My father-in-law Ron is 88 years old, a member of what Tom Brokaw called The Greatest Generation, those who survived the Great Depression and went on to fight World War II — in Europe, in Ron’s case. Time is taking its toll now on all of those folks: limited mobility, slower reaction times, often reduced vision. It can happen to all of us who live that long.

        [...]

        I sent copies of my articles to Ron from time to time. He had been interested in computer hardware some years ago and had accumulated a good many bits and pieces, but had long since given it away; unfortunately, a lot of his enthusiasm had gone with it. Still, he always read the articles and a few months ago he remarked that Linux sounded interesting. Naturally I jumped at the opening, offered to send him a Live CD, and to my surprise he said he’d love to try it. I sent him Ubuntu 9.04, a short summary of it, and references to the Ubuntu sites on the web.

      • Meet Steve Kowalik
      • Ubuntu on TV: The IT Crowd

        You can clearly see an Ubuntu logo on the the back of one of the characters’ monitor from Channel 4’s geek comedy ‘The IT Crowd’ (which has just started a new series o’er here.)

      • Mint

        • Isadora KDE Development Report

          After using the new Mint Community website for testing, with some new tests too, the last development ISO still had some minor bugs. Two were easy to fix, but the other two KDE ones have been a real pain. Well lets say they are very easy for a user to configure using system settings if you know where to look but to have them enabled by default is…. well… I gave up. KDE 4.4 now has new ways to generate the configs it wants after putting your configs there first.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • E-Readers

      • Kindle vs. Nook: The price war is on; E-reader shipments to surge?

        The price war in e-readers is on and the scrum between Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook may be enough to change the buying calculus for dedicated reading devices.

      • Dedicated E-Readers: They’re History

        Barnes & Noble just launched a new Wi-Fi only version of the Nook for $149 and cut the price of the original, with both Wi-Fi and 3G from $259 to $199. Whoops! And, what’s this? I no sooner finish this blog and Amazon drops the bottom-line Kindle’s price to $189. That’s great, right? Wrong. It’s actually just postponing the end of all dedicated e-readers.

        [...]

        Besides, in the next few months you’re going to see a flood of Linux-powered iPad clones and other tablet devices. I expect these tablets to have prices ranging from $150 to $250 and, thanks to most of them running Google Android, they’ll be able to run many of the same applications that now live on Apple iPads. Besides, when it comes to e-readers, the Nook is an Android Linux device and there’s already a Kindle for Android application.

Free Software/Open Source

  • VLC

  • Mozilla

    • Firefox 4 gets web sockets support

      Recent Firefox 4 nightlies feature new support for Web Sockets, a new technology (an HTML5 spin-off) that enables bi-directional communication between a web browser and a server.

  • SaaS

    • Linux: “The Cloud”, Tablets, Desktop PCs and Control

      On the other hand, the tablet PC systems I see so far are limited to control by some folks other than myself. You see, for now these are closed consumer devices that do not allow me to install or choose my own operating system and only work best when connected to “the cloud”. The tablets by Apple come with all the restrictions that come with any Apple system, only worse in this case. The tablets from Google are at least supposed to use an open source operating system. But still, Google’s dedication to “cloud computing” puts their tablet in a questionable light as far as control over “my stuff” is concerned. At least with a laptop, notebook or netbook PC I can still have a local disk installed with my operating system of choice, a complete set of productivity applications installed and full control over my own data. No access to the ‘net? That is no problem with a device with local storage where I can keep my data and work on it with locally installed applications.

    • Confessions of a cloud skeptic

  • Oracle

    • OpenOffice at the crossroads

      OpenOffice.org is a flagship for free and open source software, released under free software licenses and achieving downloads in the hundreds of millions. OO.o is a success by most measurements, but there have long been murmurings of discontent among developers resulting in complaints of “non-responsiveness and lack of leadership” on the project. The argument is not that the project is a failure, but that OpenOffice.org could be so much more, given a less top down approach to project management and a looser rein on developers’ ability to get involved.

  • Business

    • Can a FOSS Firm Hit the Billion-Dollar Jackpot?

      In any discussion of FOSS’s potential to be profitable, Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) is invariably held up as the poster child for success.

    • The Economics of Open Source: Why the Billion Dollar Barrier is Irrelevant

      The explanation of why zero pure play open source vendors have hit the one billion dollar revenue mark has never seemed, to me, particularly complicated. The economics of open source are, as Glyn notes above, fundamentally differentiated from the closed source models that preceded it. Open source as an application development model enjoys many advantages over proprietary, in-house development; distribution and usage among them. But revenue extraction has not traditionally been a strength, for obvious reasons. When payment is optional, as it is with most open source software, fewer users become commercial buyers. Next up, a study proving that objects further away are harder to see.

    • Opscode, Turning Sysadmins into Superheroes

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Open Data

Leftovers

  • Why engineers don’t like Twitter

    Twitter is one of the most popular social networking tools around today. But of the 50 million+ “Tweets” broadcast daily (according to Twitter), not all that many are being sent or received by engineers, many of whom say they just aren’t buying into the micro-blogging service based on “140-characters or less” text messages.

  • Ex-Massey Miner: Safety Gripes Led To Firing

    A former Massey Energy coal miner has filed a federal whistle-blower complaint, claiming he was fired after complaining about unsafe conditions at two Massey mines in West Virginia, NPR News has learned. One of the coal mines is Upper Big Branch, where an explosion killed 29 workers April 5.

    Ricky Lee Campbell’s complaint says he repeatedly told his supervisors about failing brakes on the coal shuttle cars he drove at the Slip Ridge Cedar Grove mine.

  • New “atomic” server: 512 Atom CPUs take on Xeons

    When Intel first unveiled its “Silverthorne” microarchitecture in 2008, it was clear that the low-power, in-order processors based on it (i.e., Atom) would be at the very bottom of the performance heap. It’s fair to say that none of us in the tech press ever expected to see a server based on the design, much less one that would be aimed directly at Intel’s high-end Xeon line. But we weren’t the only ones watching the Silverthorne announcement.

  • Metro Goes On Making Profits

    According to Steve Auckland, Metro UK’s managing director, the paper made an operating profit even during the worst of the recession in 2009, its seventh successive year of profitability.

  • Why Mobile Innovation Is Blowing Away PCs

    The competitive interplay between Apple and Google will continue to help smartphone software outpace PCs. But iOS and Android also benefit wildly from the structure of the smartphone industry. Apple and Google are pushed not just by each other, but by the symbiotic advancement in chipsets and the system integration work of component vendors that I detailed above. The entire smartphone innovation value-chain just works.

  • BCS

    • BCS trustee threatens rebels with libel action

      Rebel members of the BCS have been threatened with libel action unless they withdraw claims that appear to question the probity of the organisation’s Trustees.

      The BCS is the midst of £5m ‘transformation’ programme that includes re-branding to “BCS: the Chartered Institute for IT”. Such moves have not gone down well with some members.

    • ✍ BCS Members: Vote Now

  • Science

  • Security/Aggression

    • Napolitano: US must balance liberties, security

      Fighting homegrown terrorism by monitoring Internet communications is a civil liberties trade-off the U.S. government must make to beef up national security, the nation’s homeland security chief said Friday.

    • London Borough sees a way of making some easy green

      Mr Mayes story is a perfect example of how our power-hungry society has become one ruled by bureaucratisation and rationalisation. How a council warden can think a few plants could represent flytipping is quite ridiculous and shows how the state is obsessed by the tiny details instead of seeing the bigger picture.

    • Government plans new model for Summary Care Record

      Exclusive: The Government is planning to switch to a scaled back, ‘patient-held’ electronic care record, severing central control over the controversial programme, but stopping short of scrapping it altogether.

    • Budget 2010: Forget being tough, it’s time to get realistic on crime

      Who spends the money? Politicians. Do they always spend as wisely as they know how? Not at all. In many fields politicians of all parties conspire to spend wilfully, knowing full well that they are wasting considerable sums that will do no good to anyone. They hope they are at least buying votes, but there is little evidence that their profligacy even succeeds in this. Law and order and drugs prohibition are just two of many examples where pursuit of populism trumps spending money well.

  • Environment

  • Finance

    • Goldman’s Blankfein Suddenly Looks Good, Thanks to BP’s Hayward

      Watching BP (BP) CEO Tony Hayward mundanely evade responsibility for the historic ecological disaster unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico may have angered members of Congress and television viewers alike. And split screen images of the underwater well continuing to gush vast quantities of oil as Hayward demonstrated little emotion or sense of urgency only heightened the irritation.

    • Goldman Sachs, AIG to Testify at Derivatives Hearing

      Representatives of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and American International Group Inc. will appear before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission as the panel holds a hearing on the role of derivatives in the credit crunch.

    • Gardy & Notis, LLP Files a Class Action Lawsuit on Behalf of All Purchasers of Shares of Common Stock of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. — GS

      The class action seeks to recover damages on behalf of plaintiff and a class of all other individual and institutional investors who purchased or otherwise acquired shares of Goldman Sachs common stock during the class period. The defendants in the case are The Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Lloyd C. Blankfein, David A. Viniar and Gary D. Cohn. The complaint alleges that defendants violated Sections 10(b) and 20(a) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 by issuing a series of materially false and misleading statements concerning Goldman Sachs’ business model and reasons for Goldman Sachs’ business success during the class period.

    • Goldman Sachs, SEC, Agree to Extend Goldman’s Reply

      A judge today in New York signed an order granting Goldman Sachs Group Inc. more time to respond to a April 16 lawsuit accusing the firm of defrauding investors while selling mortgage-linked securities, records say.

    • Weber Defies Trichet Over Europe Bond Bailout as ECB Succession Approaches

      On May 10, just hours after the European Central Bank stepped into government bond markets for the first time, Axel Weber broke ranks with most of his colleagues on the ECB’s Governing Council — including his boss, President Jean-Claude Trichet.

    • Business Rallies to Shape Finance Endgame

      For a year, users have been fighting furiously to fend off changes in how the securities are bought and sold, and have had considerable success in the House. Then, this spring the tide turned against them in the Senate. Now, with a bloc of business-friendly Democrats pressing hard, the issue has exploded into one of the biggest battles as a House-Senate conference crafts the final version of a financial-regulation overhaul.

    • Lawmakers to tackle toughest issues remaining on Wall Street reform
    • Bank Lobbyists Make a Run at Reform Measures

      As Congress rushes this week to complete the most far-reaching financial reform plan in decades, the banking industry is mounting an 11th-hour end run.

    • Wall Street Reform Could Cost Goldman Sachs BILLIONS

      The proposed financial reforms pending before Congress could cost Goldman Sachs nearly a quarter of its annual profits, Citigroup analysts estimate in a new report.

    • Wall Street reform singes, not burns

      New York lawmakers say the changes could cripple an industry that’s the state’s lifeblood.

    • Dead On Arrival: Financial Reform Fails

      There is great deference to power in the United States, and perhaps that is appropriate. But those now calling the shots should remember that they will not be in power for ever and – at some point in the not too distant future – there will be a more balanced assessment of their legacies.

    • The Undeserving Unemployed

      Long-term unemployment, a jobless period of six months or longer, has reached a historic high. In March 2010 more than 44 percent of the unemployed fell into this category.

    • Bank-closure workload leads FDIC to open 3rd satellite office

      The FDIC has closed nearly 250 banks since the beginning of 2008, and the number of failures is expected to peak during the third quarter of this year. Cleaning up such financial wreckage has depleted the agency’s deposit insurance fund, which goes toward putting seized banks into receivership and backstopping individual accounts of up to $250,000.

    • Saudi gold reserves over twice previous estimate

      Saudi Arabia’s central bank holds more than twice the amount of gold previously estimated, a shift that analysts said reflected more of an accounting adjustment than an indication the oil rich nation was veering away from its conservative reserve policy.

    • Former Soviet Republic of Georgia To Become IT Tax Haven

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

    • If Your Brother Was Arrested For A Crime, Does It Violate Your Privacy When They Store His DNA?

      Well, here’s an interesting privacy conundrum. In the US, if you are arrested, the government records your DNA in a giant database. There is already some controversy over the fact that it’s upon arrest, and not conviction, but the privacy issues appear to go much deeper. Slate is running a fascinating article about how there are some serious privacy questions raised by law enforcement using that DNA database to track down relatives of people in the database.

    • WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange breaks cover but will avoid America

      The elusive founder of WikiLeaks, who is at the centre of a potential US national security sensation, has surfaced from almost a month in hiding to tell the Guardian he does not fear for his safety but is on permanent alert.

      Julian Assange, a renowned Australian hacker who founded the electronic whistleblowers’ platform WikiLeaks, vanished when a young US intelligence analyst in Baghdad was arrested.

      The analyst, Bradley Manning, had bragged he had sent 260,000 incendiary US state department cables on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to WikiLeaks.

      The prospect of the cache of classified intelligence on the US conduct of the two wars being put online is a nightmare for Washington. The sensitivity of the information has generated media reports that Assange is the target of a US manhunt.

    • With Rumored Manhunt for Wikileaks Founder and Arrest of Alleged Leaker of Video Showing Iraq Killings, Obama Admin Escalates Crackdown on Whistleblowers of Classified Information
    • IFJ condemns jailing of Venezuela journalist

      The International Federation of Journalists has condemned the jail sentence and fine handed out to Venezuelan columnist Francisco Perez.

      “It is a brutal, unacceptable judgment with very few international precedents,” said the Brussels-based body that represents around 600,000 journalists in more than 100 countries.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

    • BBC Trust Consultation: On-demand Syndication

      As I wrote in my submission using the online survey, it would be far better if the BBC simply released the iPlayer code as open source, and allowed companies and people to support the platforms they are interested in. This would save money and enable a far greater range of devices to be supported. I also recommended allowing the atomisation of content, rather than forcing people to watch pre-defined channels – in other words, in the way we consume content online.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Supreme Court’s ruling on Monsanto’s GM alfalfa

      1.Supreme Court Ruling in Monsanto Case is Victory for Center for Food Safety, Farmers
      2.Supreme Court’s Ruling on Monsanto’s GM Alfalfa: Who Won?

    • Meat

    • Copyrights

      • File-sharing has weakened copyright—and helped society

        Has file-sharing helped society? Looked at from the narrow perspective of existing record labels, the question must seem absurd; profits have dropped sharply in the years since tools like Napster first appeared. But a pair of well-known academics argue peer-to-peer file sharing has weakened copyright in the US… and managed to benefit all of us at the same time.

        “Consumer welfare increased substantially due to new technology,” write Felix Oberholzer-Gee of Harvard and Koleman Strumpf of the University of Kansas. “Weaker copyright protection, it seems, has benefited society.”

      • Copyright Ratchet, Copyright Racket

        An anti-trust exemption that would allow newspaper to operate as a cartel *in the public interest*. George Orwell would have loved it.

      • Director Furious As Lawmakers Watch Pirate Copy of Hit Movie

        A movie director in India is threatening legal action against lawmakers after it was revealed they gathered and watched a pirate copy of his hit movie. The film, titled ‘Raajneeti’ (‘Politics’), was released early this month in theaters but dozens of lawmakers from the Indian Bharatiya Janata Party didn’t visit one. They were caught after their illicit screening was broadcast on TV as part of a news report.

      • Britain’s BPI goes after Google

        The BPI, the RIAA’s UK counterpart, has gone up against the Holiest of Holies, American online advertising conglomerate Google, says Chilling Effects.

        Short for British Phonographic Industry, the BPI contributed to the British government’s Digital Ecomy bill, complete with its ACTA Three Strikes and you’re Off The Net element, with hardly a murmur from the UK lamescream media.

      • Well This Is Funny…

        With that in mind, I had to chuckle to myself when I read the news that the producer of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” has started shooting the project with a mere $5-million budget and a crew that likely ensures a quiet direct-to-video release (if that).

        [...]

        The producer was forced to rush this thing into production now – otherwise he would lose the rights altogether after tying them up for nearly 20 years.

      • Major Labels Begin Major Astroturfing Campaign To Get 3 Strikes In The US

        A friend just forwarded me an email “from” the CEO of Universal Music (really from an email marketing campaign system if you look at the headers) that encourages him to push for new laws in the US to kick people offline for file sharing. To date, the RIAA and others in the recording industry have known better than to seriously push for a three strikes-type legislation in the US, knowing that it is a battle that they very well might lose. They had hoped, quite strongly, that various ISPs would come to simply agree to implement a three strikes plan to kick people offline after three accusations (not convictions) of copyright infringement. But it’s been nearly a year and a half since the RIAA believed those deals were close, and there’s still nothing to show for it. Nothing.

        So, it looks like the industry is going to plan B: which is going back to trying to ram through legislation that will require ISPs to take the draconian step of protecting one industry’s broken business model. And to get this going, it looks like the industry has set up a neat little set of astroturfing groups and “consumer” campaigns that try to hide the specifics, but clearly are designed to get similar three strikes legislation (similar to the Digital Economy Act in the UK) put in place in the US.

    • ACTA

Clip of the Day

CLUG Talk 12 May 2009 – IPTables (2009)


06.21.10

Links 21/6/2010: Debian Community Poll Results

Posted in News Roundup at 11:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Events

  • Mozilla

    • Browser Speed – Perception IS Reality

      It looks as though the people over at Mozilla Foundation are more than a little fed up with the fact that their software, no matter how it changes, has of late been perceived as slow, especially at start up.

  • Oracle

    • Solaris, OpenSolaris, and the Oracle wall of secrecy

      And perhaps it is also telling that in an article posted on the Oracle website and extracted from the July/August 2010 issue of Oracle Magazine, that Ed Screven, who bears the title of chief corporate architect, never once mentioned Solaris or OpenSolaris.

      None of Oracle’s actions (or inaction) could be construed as being proactive about telling the 50,000-strong Solaris customer base – from which Oracle is trying to extract $2bn in profits – what is going on with the platform.

  • WordPress

    • 400,000 WordPress 3.0 Downloads in 2 Days

      WordPress is one of the best blogging platform. Bloggers and Webmasters were waiting for the release of WordPress 3.0 and now it is available for download. Response for WordPress 3.0 is awesome as it is already downloaded 400,000 times in just less than 2 days of its release. Number is still moving in positive direction.

    • Q&A: Founder of WordPress talks tech
    • WordPress 3.0 Released: The Top 7 New Features

      WordPress custom post types are a feature that could turbocharge WordPress as a content management system — and not in the way of the now defunct Turbo mode. While this may not seem much different than a post category at first glance, this gives developers and theme designers the ability to cause certain types of posts to have a different appearance and functionality than the rest of the blog.

  • Business

    • Linux: “Free” Software vs “You Get What You Pay For”

      Some may ask, “What about those stock holders in a company? Won’t their dividends suffer in a switch that is possibly as disruptive as a switch to FOSS and Linux on the corporate desktop?” Sure, in the short term, a corporation may spend less to stay with proprietary, costly, closed source software and keep dividends up for stock holders. But anyone with the ability to think ahead and plan for long term results can see that down the road switching to in-house support using FOSS and Linux will mean significant savings for a corporation in the long term. It could also mean more dividends for stock holders, those people that Microsoft FUD mongers try to point to as blockades for moving off of Microsoft. Any company that I hold stock in should be thinking in the long term and should be switching to FOSS and Linux.

  • Project Releases

    • Getting Blender 2.5 Test Builds

      Blender 2.5 is still live and in development, but the most recent builds are getting really close to a stable version that can take over for 2.49. I’ve been updating my Blender on a semi-regular basis for some time now, and so far it’s actually been a fairly stable platform, with the occasional crash, mostly in the weird corner cases people who animate with textures and physics run into.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • KLISS: Law as source code

      Over the past couple of days I have received some comments – and some pushback – about my assertion that law is basically source code, so I’d like to explain what I mean. As it happens, explaining that is also a good way for me to start to explain the Legislative Enterprise Architecture that underpins KLISS, so here goes.

    • Open Web Challenged By Misuse of the Word “Open”

      At Google I/O, Messina talked with us about several topics related to the open web, including Facebook’s “Open” graph, which has been heavily criticized for not really being that open.

    • Graham Linehan: The genius behind The IT Crowd

      And he also has a faith in web users and filesharers as fundamentally honest, saying: “It’s probably not been the best thing for people to brand themselves as pirates … the image we should be concentrating on is sharing” – a view that informs his opinion that the media, music and film industries need to stop regarding filesharers as thieves, and accept that trying to patch up their current models is pointless.

    • Something in the Air: the Open Source Way

      One of the most vexed questions in climate science is modelling. Much of the time the crucial thing is trying to predict what will happen based on what has happened. But that clearly depends critically on your model. Improving the robustness of that model is an important aspect, and the coding practices employed obviously feed into that.

    • Open Access/Content

      • 21 Years of Open Access Publishing

        In August 1989, I began my scholarly digital publishing efforts, launching one of the first e-journals on the Internet, The Public-Access Computer Systems Review. This journal, if it was published today, would be called a “libre” open access journal since it was freely available, allowed authors to retain their copyrights, and had special copyright provisions for noncommercial use.

Leftovers

  • ICANN

    • ICANN Day 0: A lot of yakking, a little movement
    • Beckstrom: You are not a pipe

      Answering accusations that the organization is ignoring its own accountability processes, that the staff and Board have insufficient checks on their work, and that he himself had overstepped the mark in comments he made to governments at the last meeting in Nairobi, Beckstrom was unapologetic.

      “Much has been made in the media of ICANN’s consideration of the application for a dot-xxx top-level domain, which the board will address this week,” he acknowledged, before repeating the assertion that caused much of the trouble: that the decision, made by an independent panel, was “non-binding” on the Board.

      [...]

      This defiance is a marked departure from the previous CEO – who is at the conference – who always tried to avoid conflict, particularly in public. It is also a risky strategy in an environment that spends much of its time trying to get people to agree with one another.

  • Science

    • Forth Valley Royal Hospital to use robot ‘workers’

      A hospital in Scotland is to become the first in the UK to use a fleet of robots to carry out day-to-day tasks.

      The robots will carry clinical waste, deliver food, clean the operating theatre and dispense drugs.

    • San Francisco will tell the world about mobile phone radiation

      MOBILE PHONE USERS in the UK and EU will soon be able to tell if their mobile gadget is more or less likely to be toasting their brain cells.

      A law passed in San Francisco will require mobile phone companies to post how much radiation they are pouring into your ear everytime you ring someone up to say, “I am on the train”.

  • Security/Aggression

  • Environment

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying/Fake News

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

    • Google to Commies: We’ll make censorship illegal

      Google is working with the US government to try to make it illegal for countries to censor the Internet by using international trade rules.

    • Indonesia flips over internet rock star smut clips

      An online celebrity sex video is giving Indonesia’s authorities an opportunity to try and restrict internet use.

      Two explicit web clips showing Jakarta rock star Ariel in action with two models/television presenters has upset yet proved strangely enticing to the population, which is mainly Muslim.

    • Australia mothballs Internet controls

      WITH ITS PROSPECTS in the next Australian election not looking that well for the party in power, it seems that the Rudd government wants to avoid bringing in its daft Internet filtering plan.

      The Rudd government has plans to censor the Internet to make it safer for children and right wing born again Christians.

    • Spanish Lawsuit Joins Stack Against Google

      Google’s collection of sensitive WiFi data sent over personal networks will cause the company problems for a long time if a group with a long name has its way. The Association for the Prevention and Investigation of Crime, Abuse and Malpractice in Information Technology and Advanced Communications has filed a lawsuit in Spain.

    • DoS attack stuffs Turkey’s internet censors

      Access to the internet in Turkey is becoming increasingly ragged, as growing state censorship collides with retaliation by anti-censorship hackers, leading to difficulties both in viewing sites and applying key online functions.

  • Copyrights

Clip of the Day

CLUG Talk 11 November 2008 – Homebrew Utilities (2008)


06.20.10

Links 20/6/2010: Droid Raves, Compiere Bought

Posted in News Roundup at 1:02 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Be a pal; share Linux with your friends and family

    Are you the local computer boffin in your social circle? Tired of forever having to clean off that annoying fake super anti-virus 2010 trojan? Well, friends shouldn’t let friends run Windows. Be a friend to your friends.

  • Why everyone should use Linux

    Yes, everyone. Even the most hardcore Linux hater should run Linux. While this sounds absolutely contrary to simple logic, it aligns perfectly well with cunning logic, as I’m going to elaborate here. We’re not talking politics, ideology, zeal, Borg-like assimilation, or anything of that sort. We’re not talking cutting your costs in dire situation caused by some would-be financial crisis. We’re not talking freedom, free software or replacing existing business models with one that revolves around open-source.

    We’re talking money.

    Oh, you won’t get any money from running Linux, not in most cases, anyway. But you will save money. And not by spending less on Linux. You will spend less on Windows. Sounds tricky? It’s not. Follow me.

  • Applications

    • Turpial 1.3.3 – A native Twitter client for Linux

      The whole package is put together very well. The menu is inuitive and easy to to understand, which (once you have logged in) will be easy to navigate and tailor to your needs. Turpial 1.3.3 appears a stable product and even during busy periods it has not yet offered up any problems.

  • Distributions

    • Fedora

      • I am Fedora

        Back in 1999, my employer, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center put a Red Hat Linux system running an Alpha processor on my desk. From there I was supposed to do write parallel code for a Red Hat Linux beowulf cluster. It was tricky without some basic desktop tools.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Droid/Motorola

      • Improvements to Be Seen in the Wish List of Motorola Droid

        The Motorola Droid has never been an “iPhone killer,” but still one can regard it as a good alternative to the iPhone for Verizon customers.

        But one should admit that the Droid was never a perfect handset. As Motorola is going to offer a Droid sequel this month, I think it would be right to go over the areas that are hoped to be found on board of the new handset.

      • The iPhone 4 faces stiff competition

        The Droid Incredible ($200) is also in great demand. This high-end phone runs Android. It features 8GB of internal storage. You can add up to 16GB of additional storage with a microSD card.

        The Incredible has a brilliant 800×480 OLED screen. This type of screen offers better, brighter colors than other screens. However, it can be a problem outdoors in bright sunlight. An optical joystick button is placed on the front of the phone to help you position the cursor precisely.

      • Smartphone Upgrades: Keeping up with the Droids and iPhones

        A whole seven months ago, back in November of 2009, I bought myself a Motorola Droid. At the time, the phone was considered to be absolutely state-of-the-art, with a high-resolution display, advanced Android 2.0 software, voice recognition, integrated GPS, 600Mhz OMAP processor, and a nifty slide-out keyboard design.

        In those seven months Google’s Android OS has advanced at a pace equivalent to bacterial gestation in a petri dish.

        Seemingly overnight, the platform has exploded, spawning many new phones from all the major carriers and TWO major OS upgrades, “Eclair” (2.1) which debuted on the Nexus One and now “Froyo” (2.2), which was announced at the recent Google I/O conference.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Business

    • Open source not immune to ERP vendor consolidation trend

      In a sense, it doesn’t matter as much as it would if Compiere’s original code base was proprietary. One of the tenents of open source is that no matter what the owner of the code does, the users of the code continue in their rights to use, extend, enhance, and distribute the code. The Adempiere fork of Compiere is evidence of this.

      To my knowledge, this is the first instance of an open source ERP/CRM developer being acquired by a vendor of proprietary software. It will be interesting to see whether Compiere’s users are helped or hindered by this acquisition.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Open Access/Content

    • Open Access Science ?= Open Source Software

      As a software engineer who works on open source scientific applications and frameworks, when I look at this, I scratch my head and wonder “why don’t they just do the equivalent of a code review”? And that’s really, where the germ of the idea behind this blog posting started. What if the scientific publishing process were more like an open source project? How would the need for peer-review be balanced with the need to publish? Who should bear the costs? Can a publishing model be created that minimizes bias and allows good ideas to emerge in the face of scientific groupthink?

Leftovers

  • Your Browser in Five Years

    What will your Web browser look like in 2015? Five years doesn’t always bring dramatic change to some technologies–today’s desktop PC, for instance, isn’t that different from its 2005 predecessor–but browsers are undergoing major changes that will alter our day-to-day computing lives.

  • The internet: Everything you ever need to know

    In spite of all the answers the internet has given us, its full potential to transform our lives remains the great unknown. Here are the nine key steps to understanding the most powerful tool of our age – and where it’s taking us

  • B.C. school yearbooks to be reprinted after teacher cut out student’s photo

    A Vancouver Island board of education has decided to reprint a middle-school’s yearbooks after a teacher took scissors to 150 copies last week and clipped out the photo of a Grade 10 student because of comments he made about the school principal.

  • Security/Aggression

    • Airport security: Intent to deceive?
    • Hot Dog! Stand Back 200 Feet!

      Last week, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a statement calling for large-type warning labels on the foods that kids most commonly choke on — grapes, nuts, carrots, candy and public enemy No. 1: the frank. Then the lead author of the report, pediatric emergency room doctor Gary Smith, went one step further.

    • Homeland Security cracks down on canoeists

      As someone who believes that our nation has a right to enforce its borders, I should have been gratified when the Immigrations official at the border saw the canoe on our car and informed us that anyone who crossed the nearby international waterway illegally would be arrested and fined as much as $5,000.

      Trouble is, the river wasn’t the Rio Grande, but the St. Croix, which defines the border between Maine and New Brunswick, Canada. And the threat of arrest wasn’t aimed at illegal immigrants or terrorists but at canoeists like myself.

      The St. Croix is a wild river that flows through unpopulated country. Primitive campsites are maintained on both shores, some accessible by logging roads, but most reached only by water or by bushwhacking for miles through thick forest and marsh. There are easier ways to sneak into the U.S. from Canada. According to Homeland Security regulations, however, canoeists who begin their trip in Canada cannot step foot on American soil, thus putting half the campsites off limits. It is not an idle threat; the U.S. Border Patrol makes regular helicopter flights down the river.

  • Environment

    • Will the post-oil future be bicycle-free?

      U. S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood may soon be nominated for heresy-of-the-year award for an impromptu speech at the 2010 National Bike Summit in March. In that speech he said federal transportation policy will no longer favor automobiles over bicyclists and walkers.

    • OneBusAway: An Open Source Tool for Finding a Bus Fast
    • Steve the Narc
    • BP Oil Spill Crisis Reveals Past/Present ‘Short-Termism’ and Future Opportunities

      To blame or not blame BP is really not the point. BP must take its share of responsibility along with other US private companies involved. But the deeper lessons of the oil spill concern the future of our energy supplies, of regulation, and the shape of our society and economy.

    • Seeing Past the BP Spill

      And oil spills are far from the worst environmental disasters we’ve unleashed and are in the process of unleashing through the routine operation of our economy as currently designed. Climate change will over the next century almost certainly prove far more destructive to the natural systems and human communities of the Gulf than any oil spill ever could, and that’s a problem the Deepwater rig would have worsened if it had worked perfectly, as part of its successful operation.

    • Barriers to news coverage of Gulf of Mexico oil spill remain despite promises

      Journalists covering the Gulf of Mexico oil spill have been yelled at, kicked off public beaches and islands and threatened with arrest in the nearly three weeks since the government promised improved media access.

    • BP’s plan: Raise $50 billion, sue business partners

      BP is trying to raise 50 billion dollars to cover the cost of the Gulf of Mexico spill and is preparing to sue its partners in the oil field, British newspapers said on Sunday.

    • Mesocosms set up and running in Svalbard

      Whilst the mesocosms were being set up, more than 30 scientists arrived here from all over Europe, including the Netherlands, UK, Norway, France and Germany. Over the next few weeks, they’ll be working hard, collecting scientific data that will be carefully examined and statistically analyzed during the following months, perhaps for even a year. Eventually, the results from the mesocosm experiments will be published in scientific journals. Only then can we begin to understand in more detail what the effects of ocean acidification from increased CO2 in the atmosphere might be in Arctic waters.

    • A New, Bold Plan for a Carbon-Neutral UK by 2030

      Carbon neutrality by 2030 is the new standard for climate policies, and again the UK is leading North America in the climate debate with a bold national-level proposal about how to get there. The Centre for Alternative Technology just launched zerocarbonbritain2030 (ZCB2030), a collaborative project showing one possible scenario for making the entire UK carbon-neutral by 2030.

    • Group: Climate bill could mean 540,000 new jobs per year

      New rules to cap US carbon emissions and promote clean energy could create as many as 540,000 US jobs a year, a green group claimed Tuesday, as the BP oil spill fueled debate over reform.

  • Finance

    • Financial Reform Bill Will Allow SEC to Fund Itself

      As financial regulatory reform takes its final shape in a conference committee led by Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., and Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., members of the committee have voted to allow the Securities and Exchange Commission to fund itself, according to FOXBusiness.com. The SEChas asked to be self-funded for quite some time because it would allow the agency to step up its enforcement and investigative efforts.

    • Trade war? Bill would ban government from buying Chinese

      The US government would be barred from buying any Chinese goods or services under legislation unveiled Friday by US senators angry at Beijing’s policy of buying only from domestic sources.

    • Bailed-out banker praises capitalism, attacks parasites

      Matt Ridley’s book The Rational Optimist is about mankind’s long-term ability to make things better, not worse. Sounds great!

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Is Copyright Bill C-32 Being Astroturfed?

      Early last week, we wrote a post that offered both some information and perspective about Bill C-32, which, if passed, is slated to revamp Canada’s copyright law.

      As with any contentious issue, the post generated a good number of comments. Yet, as the days went on, it became apparent that some of the pro–Bill C-32 comments were unusually uniform and very…(how do we put this?) “on message.”

      Now, we have learned, it seems possible that the comments were a result of an astroturfing campaign.

      On his blog, law professor Michael Geist points to a site that bills itself as Balanced Copyright Reform. The gist, according to Geist:

      The heart of the site (which requires full registration) is a daily action item page that encourages users to “make a difference, everyday.” [Each] list of ten items is a mix of suggested tweets, blog comments, and newspaper article feedback. Each item includes instructions for what should be done and quick links to the target site.

      As of June 17, the last of the daily action items was “Comment on Torontoist article on Bill C-32.”

    • Copyright astroturfers target Torontoist

      The popular Torontoist blog found that all the comments on its coverage of the new Canadian copyright law were a little…similar. Turns out that Torontoist has been targetted by the astroturf website that the US record-labels started, pretending to be just a group of Canadian citizens worried about copyright.

    • Canadian copyright astroturf site gives marching orders to its users

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

  • Intellectual Monopolies

Clip of the Day

CLUG Talk – 10 June 2008 – Net Booting (2008)


06.19.10

Links 19/6/2010: Alien Invasion 2.3, Debian 6.0 Squeeze Date, Thunderbird 3.0.5

Posted in News Roundup at 6:55 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Linux distribution migration: Planning for efficiency

    Migrating Linux is mostly about migrating services. To do this properly, there are two approaches. You can find out yourself what needs to be done, or you can use tools that analyze this for you. Apart from the services involved, migrating Linux is also about smoothly transitioning from one environment to another environment, without involving double work for your IT environment. If you have the appropriate system management tools in place, they can be very helpful. Finally, depending on the Linux distributions that you were using and that you are going to use, these might be a financial chapter as well. Check this with the new vendor of your choice. This vendor is going to earn your money and may be more than willing to help.

  • When It Comes to Security, Openness Isn’t Always a Virtue – Rebuttals

    So what does it all mean? The transparency of free and open source software is increasingly recognized as an important benefit — even by experts studying software security, and even when they uncover occasional vulnerabilities.

    The “security through obscurity” argument may still be frequently uttered by those on the pro-proprietary side, but — at least, based on this debate — it lacks substance. Indeed, given the financial stakes for those on the proprietary side, one could easily make the case that a certain amount of FUD is to be expected.

    The growing ranks of FOSS proponents, then, should be heartened. When it comes to security, free and open source software has been held up, scrutinized, and declared superior.

  • Server

  • Ballnux

  • Graphics Stack

  • Applications

  • K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

    • Report from Successful Multimedia and Edu Sprint in Randa

      43 persons (including organizers, designer, bugsquashers, and others) from 17 different countries gathered in Randa from Thursday 20 May to Tuesday 25 May. Why Randa? It is a marvelous place in the mountains of Switzerland where Mario Fux knew a house that would be perfect for KDE developers. Several groups that work on different parts of KDE had a chance to meet and mix in one house. Present were KDE-Education, Amarok, various multimedia people (Phonon, KMix, vlc) and Gluon developers.

    • KDE: you are welcome to contribute!
    • KDE: Week 23

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

      • SystemRescueCd 1.5.6 Features Linux Kernel 2.6.34

        François Dupoux announced on June 18th the new SystemRescueCd 1.5.6 Linux-based operating system. Being powered by the alternative Linux kernel 2.6.34, and the standard 2.6.32.15 Linux kernel, SystemRescueCd 1.5.6 includes now the popular GParted 0.6.0 application for partitioning tasks with support for drives with sectors larger than 512 bytes. Moreover, the FSArchiver and Memtest86+ apps were also updated. Without further introduction, let’s take a closer look at the changes brought by SystemRescueCd 1.5.4…

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

  • Devices/Embedded

    • LinuxCertified Announces its next Linux Device Driver Development Course

      LinuxCertified Inc, a leading provider of Linux training and services, today announced its next Linux Device Driver Development Course class to be held in South Bay, CA from June 28th – 30th, 2010.

    • Remote device servers hardened for industrial work

      Opengear announced three new UCLinux-based remote management device servers, focusing on industrial applications. In addition to the general-purpose, $475 ACM5004-2-I server, there’s a telecom-oriented ACM5004-2-I-SDC version with a 48V DC power supply, plus an extended-temperature ACM5004-2-T aimed at utility networks, the company says.

    • ARM11 dev kit supports Linux, Android
    • Tiny embedded device server offloads Ethernet networking chores

      Lantronix is also known for its XPort Pro embedded networking module, which it touts as the “world’s smallest Linux networking server.” The XPort Pro (pictured at right) measures 1.33 x 0.64 x 0.53 inches, and offers 8MB of SDRAM, 16MB of flash, RJ45 Ethernet and serial ports, a web server, SSH and SSL security, and IPv6 support.

    • Phones

      • Palm confirms new devices, webOS upgrade
      • Fujitsu and Toshiba to Merge Mobile Phone Units

        Toshiba, whose cellphone business has lost money for the last two years, accounted for about 4 percent of the Japanese market.

      • Nokia/MeeGo

      • Android

        • Half of Android users are stuck on old versions

          The good news for developers is that out of the six versions of Android only three, 1.5, 1.6 and 2.1 have widespread use. The figures also show that almost all Motorola Milestone and Droid users have now upgraded to Android 2.1.

        • Google: 50% Android devices now running 2.1
        • Google works on Gingerbread UI, preps Google Music

          Google’s Android team will focus on user interface issues in the upcoming “Gingerbread” release of Android in an attempt to dissuade handset vendors from adding their own UI layers, writes Michael Arrington in TechCrunch.

        • Browser privacy issue with DROID Incredible and HTC Sense UI widget?

          An astute reader stumbled upon an interesting bug with the HTC Incredible. The Incredible, with Sense UI, will periodically store screenshots of the contents of your web browser. The screen captures are a function of the HTC Sense UI bookmark widget

        • Droid X Is Coming To Beat The iPhone 4

          The super-phone war is about to start. The war was triggered back in 2007 when Apple announced its revolutionary iPhone. The market back then was scattered, primarily dragged by stagnated mobile operating systems. Times have changed with the arrival of Gnu/Linux ‘avatar’ in form of Android.

        • New Droid on the Way to Kick Some iPhone 4 Aspirations

          Verizon is elbowing its way into the Apple-dominated tech spotlight with the announcement that it’s going to make a big announcement next week, and it’s a very safe bet that it’s going to take the wraps off a new Droid smartphone. How will the newcomer compare to its popular brother? Bigger and faster, with a belt packed with fancier tools, no doubt.

        • KT brings the Nexus One to South Korea, complete with Froyo

          The Nexus One may have taken a little while to reach South Korea, but it looks like KT is doing its best to make up for lost time — the carrier has just announced that it will not only be offering the Nexus One, but that it will come complete with Android 2.2 (a.k.a. Froyo).

        • Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and LG spin Android phones

          Motorola is prepping two high-end Android phones for summer release on Verizon — the 4.3-inch Droid X and a keyboard-enabled Droid 2 — say reports. Meanwhile, LG will ship 20 Android phones this year, and Sony Ericsson is readying a mid-range Xperia X8 Android model, say other reports.

        • Which Android? Sony Ericsson May Mix It Up With Xperia X8

          It appears that Sony Ericsson may deliver its Xperia X8 smartphone with Android version 1.6 in some parts of Europe and version 2.1 in others. The older version lacks some speed and performance enhancements, live wallpaper, built-in pinch-to-zoom capability and 3-D photo galleries. Still, many consumers are likely to find it adequate for their needs, according to Gartner analyst Carolina Milanesi.

    • Sub-notebooks

      • XO Laptops Revamped for Secondary School Pupils

        Uruguay has already ordered 90,000 of the new XO-HS notebooks, having previously taken receipt of almost 400,000 XO laptops for primary school children. The Uruguayan government is clearly eager to distribute computers among the young generation, and has also ordered 10,000 of the Intel Classmate PC laptops. With 230,000 high school students in total in Uruguay, there is scope for further orders, with delivery of the new PCs scheduled to begin in September this year.

    • Tablets

Free Software/Open Source

  • Zarafa unveils new framework

    On the second day of its 2010 Summercamp in Brussels, messaging and collaboration specialist Zarafa has announced the launch of a new integration framework. The new groupware integration framework is based on SWIG and allows open source and commercial solutions to integrate with Zarafa’s Collaboration Platform, connecting calendars, mail, contacts and tasks to virtually any developer language. The new Python language Messaging API (MAPI) binding provides full MAPI access from Python – documentation is provided.

  • Events

  • Mozilla

  • Healthcare

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD 8.1-RC1 Available…

      The first Release Candidate for the FreeBSD 8.1 release cycle is now available for amd64, i386, ia64, powerpc, and sparc64 architectures. Files suitable for creating installation media or doing FTP based installs through the network should be available on most of the FreeBSD mirror sites. Checksums for the images are at the bottom of this message.

  • Project Releases

    • Parrot 2.5.0 “Cheops” Released

      On behalf of the Parrot team, I’m proud to announce Parrot 2.5.0 “Cheops”. Parrot (http://parrot.org/) is a virtual machine aimed at running all dynamic languages.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Source: A Question of Evolution

      I met Matt Ridley once, when he was at The Economist, and I wrote a piece for him (I didn’t repeat the experience because their fees at the time were extraordinarily ungenerous). He was certainly a pleasant chap in person, but I have rather mixed feelings about his work.

      His early book “Genome” is brilliant – a clever promenade through our chromosomes, using the DNA and its features as a framework on which to hang various fascinating facts and figures. His latest work, alas, seems to have gone completely off the rails, as this take-down by George Monbiot indicates.

    • Open Public Data are so good that it’s hard to start explaining why

      Today I have participated to an international meeting in Madrid on the reuse of Public Sector Information. I came to gather as much information and food for thought as possible for my new research on Open Data for an Open Society and wasn’t deluded.

    • Flickr, stock photography and Creative Commons

      This is where the ethical and practical implications take place. I am not really too concerned about the Getty collection, I really thing that this is a good development. However, I am concerned about the potential negative impact on the take-up of CC licences in Flickr. By stating clearly that any CC licensed picture will be only eligible for the cheaper royalty-free licensing option, Getty has created a disincentive to licence under Creative Commons. While I give the Flickr community enough credit not to answer the siren’s call en masse, this could be a concern on the long run. We could have a two-tier Flickerverse of low-quality CC-licensed images, and high-quality content available only by paying fees to Getty.

  • Programming

    • Managing Subversion repositories in the web browser

      CollabNet, an Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) specialist and provider of distributed software development solutions, has introduced Subversion Edge, a distribution of the Subversion SCM (Software Configuration Management) tool. In addition to Subversion, which was initially developed by CollabNet and has since been donated to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the distribution includes the Apache web server and the ViewVC repository viewer, a browser-based directory management system.

    • NetBeans IDE 6.9 Release Adds JavaFX Composer and PHP Tools

      NetBeans is a competitive environment to the open source Eclipse IDE, which Oracle also backs. A new version of Eclipse is due out later this month.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Scribd’s Decision To Dump Flash Pays Off, User Engagement Triples

      Over the last few months, user engagement on Scribd has surged, according to CEO Trip Adler, thanks to its transition to HTML5, the introduction of the iPad, and Scribd’s Facebook integration. Of these three factors, Adler says the conversion from Flash to HTML5 was by far the greatest driver for his document sharing company. According to Scribd’s numbers, time on the site has tripled in the last three months.

Leftovers

  • Oracle

    • DOJ sues Oracle for alleged overcharging

      The U.S. Justice Department has joined a whistleblower suit against Oracle that accuses it of defrauding the U.S. government.

      Filed back in May 2007 under the False Claims Act, the suit claims Oracle overcharged the federal government tens of millions of dollars by failing to offer it the same deep discounts the company offers commercial customers. That’s a real problem, because Oracle was obligated to do just that under the terms of the General Services Administration contract by which it was bound.

    • Oracle spikes HP’s Solaris OEM contract

      HP then went on for a few hundred words talking about how it would be happy to port ProLiant/Solaris customers to Windows or Linux – not just Red Hat and SUSE Linux, but Debian too – and reminding everyone that its Integrity HP-UX boxes exist. (Pity HP-UX doesn’t run on x64 iron, though.)

  • Science

    • Danger, Stem Cell Tourists: Patient in Thailand Dies From Treatment

      A woman with kidney disease has died after receiving an experimental stem cell treatment at a private clinic in Thailand, and a postmortem examination of her kidneys revealed that the treatment was almost certainly responsible for her death. Last week we reported that Costa Rica’s health ministry had closed a stem cell clinic that catered to foreigners, which sparked lively debates around the Internet about whether patients should be able to willingly take on risks associated with experimental treatments. This new case offers a sobering reminder of what can happen when patients travel abroad looking for a miracle cure.

  • Security/Aggression

    • FEMA, DHS Back Disaster Hero Game

      Legacy Interactive has announced plans to create a web-based game designed to teach kids how to prepare for hazards and emergencies.

      [...]

      FEMA claimed to have research which showed that “despite imminent threats and increased media attention, Americans today are no better prepared for a natural disaster or terrorist attack than they were in 2003.”

    • The strange and consequential case of Bradley Manning, Adrian Lamo and WikiLeaks

      On June 6, Kevin Poulsen and Kim Zetter of Wired reported that a 22-year-old U.S. Army Private in Iraq, Bradley Manning, had been detained after he “boasted” in an Internet chat — with convicted computer hacker Adrian Lamo — of leaking to WikiLeaks the now famous Apache Helicopter attack video, a yet-to-be-published video of a civilian-killing air attack in Afghanistan, and “hundreds of thousands of classified State Department records.” Lamo, who holds himself out as a “journalist” and told Manning he was one, acted instead as government informant, notifying federal authorities of what Manning allegedly told him, and then proceeded to question Manning for days as he met with federal agents, leading to Manning’s detention.

    • Obama internet ‘kill switch’ proposed

      US President Barack Obama would be granted powers to seize control of and even shut down the internet under a new bill that describes the global internet as a US “national asset”.

  • Environment

    • The oily operators behind the religious climate change disinformation front group, Cornwall Alliance

      Defenders of the dirty energy status quo, particularly the lobbyists and politicians associated with the oil and coal industry, have repeatedly trotted out a group of evangelical leaders known as the Cornwall Alliance to counter the growing sentiment in the evangelical community that anthropogenic climate change is a threat to God’s creation. Cornwall declares that true Christians believe “there is no convincing scientific evidence that human contribution to greenhouse gases is causing dangerous global warming.” In this repost, Wonk Room exposes the Big Oil funding behind the Cornwall Alliance

    • As oil spews in Gulf, BP chief at UK yacht race

      BP chief executive Tony Hayward, often criticized for being tone-deaf to U.S. concerns about the worst oil spill in American history, took time off Saturday to attend a glitzy yacht race off England’s Isle of Wight.

  • Finance

    • China indicates it will allow yuan to strengthen

      China has indicated it will allow the yuan to rise against the dollar and other Western currencies.

      The Chinese central bank announced it would make its exchange rate mechanism “more flexible”, but it gave no details about the timing or extent of changes.

      The yuan has been effectively pegged to the dollar, drawing criticism that China was protecting its exporters.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

    • Internet Freedom under pressure in Denmark

      On 27 May the Danish Supreme Court upheld a lower court decision which obliges internet service providers (ISPs) to block access to websites that may contain – or link to other sites which contain – material which infringes copyrights (the Pirate Bay in this instance).

      The decision has rightly been criticized as a setback for internet freedom in Denmark. The decision attaches undue weight to the interests of copyright holders while ignoring obvious dangers of abuse, restrictions on internet freedom and access to information and the lack of any due process. The decision may lead to the blocking of websites that mainly includes content that does not infringe copyright and thus restrict the free flow of information. Moreover, by forcing ISP’s to police the Internet without due process the decision marks a dangerous precedent that is likely to include other ‘illegal’ or ‘offensive’ material in the future.

    • Does science really still have a problem with libel?

      Are there really still problems being caused for scientists and science writers caused by the English law of libel?

      On the face of it, that seems an odd question to be asked on this of all blogs.

      But it is an entirely serious question, and it is not one which is intended to be unduly provocative.

      Indeed, unless those of us who contend there is such a problem can answer this question in a calm, informed, reasoned, and ultimately persuasive manner, then our influence may be minimal in the upcoming debate on the legislative reform of libel.

    • Technical details of the Street View WiFi payload controversy

      The latest privacy controversy with Google is that while scanning for WiFi access-points in their Street View cars, they may have inadvertently captured data payloads containing private information (URLs, fragments of e-mails, and so on).

      Although some people are suspicious of their explanation, Google is almost certainly telling the truth when it claims it was an accident. The technology for WiFi scanning means it’s easy to inadvertently capture too much information, and be unaware of it.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • ‘No Bullshit’? Have we gone mad? ['No Bullshit' trademarked]
    • Britain’s BPI goes after Google

      The BPI, the RIAA’s UK counterpart, has gone up against the Holiest of Holies, American online advertising conglomerate Google, says Chilling Effects.

      Short for British Phonographic Industry, the BPI contributed to the British government’s Digital Ecomy bill, complete with its ACTA Three Strikes and you’re Off The Net element, with hardly a murmur from the UK lamescream media.

Clip of the Day

CLUG Talk – 08 Jul 2008 – Unicode and Character Sets (2008)


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